When The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy launched, Kazutaka Kodaka joked that his studio Tookyo Games might go bankrupt if the game didn’t do well. Thankfully, the massive visual novel experience ended up doing so well he later clarified that the team no longer felt that bankruptcy was a possibility. Despite that, it felt like it might take a miracle for the team to be able to put out another game if they were so close to shuttering after completing this one. As it turns out, Kazutaka Kodaka treated us like the victims in his own infamous twist-filled mystery thriller games. He quickly announced the development of a new game alongside DMM Games and Spike Chunsoft where the gimmick is that it is actually five different games in one – and that smorgasbord title is called Shuten Order.
While I loved The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy a lot, it felt all too familiar as a fan of the Danganronpa series. Perhaps that’s because it shares so much of a visual and auditory identity with those games. Perhaps it’s because the game kicks off with all-too-familiar mysteries of locked classrooms and quirky teens that it drags it’s feet expanding into truly original ideas. None of it was bad, just familiar. Shuten Order, by comparison, is a revelation.
It finally feels like Kazutaka Kodaka is doing something fresh and new with this game, and there’s a lot of reasons for that. For one, the entire plot setup is refreshingly unique – our protagonist wakes up in a mysterious hotel room with no memory of their identity or their past. Two self-proclaimed angels tell her that she has been murdered, but they placed her in a new temporary body and have given her the alias of Rei with the goal of completing “God’s trial”. The task? Interrogate five key members from a mysterious organization known as Shuten Order, discover which of them is our killer, then get them to confess. Oh, and kill them too.
In the opening hours of Shuten Order, layers of dubious explanations and hauntingly under-explained world details are stacked on top of each other at a staggering rate. Before you can even question who these angels are if they’re real, you’re also grappling with learning that you live in a city-state founded by a religious cult – then, before the dubiousness of that can even sink in, it’s hinted that the world outside of this mini-country is a literal apocalypse. Despite the ominous circumstances of the game’s world, the streets are lined with confetti and festival banners celebrating the heroes of the Shuten Order. A cutscene shows you the celebrations playing out, but the cacophony quickly goes from just loud to overbearingly chaotic – voices and cheers and sounds overlap in an overwhelming, barely decipherable mess.
There’s a really hauntingly beautiful sort of cluttered chaos to the entire aesthetic of the game that is unlike anything else I’ve seen. Stylish title cards outlining the day and time explode onto the screen regularly, and when your protagonist uses the mysterious “power of God” to make unexpected miracles or coincidences occur, a terrifying animatic of inhuman language and shapes and sounds pops onto screen that seems to represent some kind of representation of whatever god is helping you. Most of the game is represented by talking character portraits and subtly stylised text boxes that look like a regular video game, but when these alarming animatics pop in, it really adds to this sense of urgency and strangeness that elevates the game so much.
Your guardian angels prompt you to pick one of the five leaders of the Shuten Order to identify as your killer – the implication is that your choice is guided by divine will, and whoever you pick is the killer. Whoever you pick also dictates an entirely different gameplay experience you’ll be going through as you investigate their secrets and hunt their confession. Kishiru Inugami makes you play an Ace Attorney-style investigation game. Yugen Ushitora has you playing an all-too-familiar death game escape adventure. Teko Ion’s route takes the form of a flowchart-exploring non-linear visual novel. Honoka Kokushikan’s route is a high-stress twist on a dating sim visual novel. Most striking of all, though is Manji Fushicho’s story – which isn’t a 2D visual novel genre-spin at all, but instead a fully 3D top-down stealth horror game.
I started off with Honoka Kokushikan’s route, intrigued by the idea of a romantic adventure, but I was initially disappointed by how it felt identical to the base game. Characters joke about how “different” the world looks once you step into her route, but all that’s really changed is that your text boxes are a slightly different shape. Thankfully, over the course of her 6-ish hour route, a lot of unique gameplay ideas start to crop up and you’re given a satisfying amount of freedom to explore the weirdness of the route. Each of the five routes clocks in at a similar length of time, and they all do a surprisingly good job of fully committing to their bits and giving you a full-games worth of mechanical depth and mix-ups. About half the routes feel whole enough in terms of narrative to come across as their own intriguing little mystery games, but the other half are so clearly part of a larger puzzle and don’t fully stand up on their own. Special shout-out to Yugen Ushitora’s escape-room route, because it’s inexplicably formatted like a vtuber livestream with a 3D anime girl reacting to everything in the corner while her chat pops off above her head.
As a complete experience, Shuten Order does unfortunately fall into a very similar trap as a lot of other works by Kazutaka Kodaka – there are really fascinating ideas and twists presented in the game, but character dialogue is so overbearing in repeatedly explaining and clarifying every interaction that it feels like this sometimes-exhausting 50 hour experience could have been a much swifter, snappier, and more satisfying 30-35 hour adventure. Like his other games though, the sheer creativity and one-of-a-kind aesthetic in this game ends up making the sometimes mind-numbing dialogue worth digging through. Shuten Order blends quiet tension with loud and anxiety-inducing frights perfectly without ever even acting like it’s a horror game. It isn’t, except for that one route where it is. It’s just an amalgamation of overwhelming sights and sounds that’s equal parts beautiful and confusing. It’s an uncompromising experience, and one I won’t forget for a long time.
#SHUTEN #ORDER #Review #TheSixthAxis