Back with another review, having finished 428: Shibuya Scramble!
This one’s pretty unique. Visually, as you can see, it’s all real images (and occasional short videos) of actors. It’s a fun style imo, makes me wish there were more VNs that tried this. Part of its strength is they really went all out; you’re getting a new image every few pages of text usually. On the flipside, there’s no voicing at all.
I briefly tried text hooking this half out of curiosity to share with you all, and at least with the amount of effort I was willing to go to, trying hooks and the search for text briefly, I couldn’t get it to work. Personally just did manual lookups. So that makes it more tough. The writing is mostly not that hard, with some spikes here and there when it gets in the weeds of science, cop divisions, etc. It has a lot of “tips,” the pages where it defines things mentioned in the text for you, and those get a little dense. Taking the above stuff into account, it’s a little hard to recommend if you can’t semi comfortably read already.
Quality-wise it’s fun though! It opens with a kidnapping ransom handoff about to happen from the perspective of a cop, then rambles through a ton of characters intersecting in one day in Shibuya. This shows up on best VN lists a lot but I think that’s a bit of an overstatement for my tastes. A lot of how you feel will depend on how Japanese, slightly slapstick humor works for you, but I loved most of that. It was more the serious sides of the story that didn’t quite totally hook me, though it does have some interesting twists up its sleeve, especially in ways it weaves its many many stories together.
The structure is cool and fun until it isn’t… basically you switch between multiple characters, and their choices will often impact each other, or you’ll hit a point where you can’t progress until that character is in some way referenced in another story. You inevitably hit a lot of bad endings along the way and I thought it was pretty nice playing without a guide because the impacts mostly make sense, plus you get hints, but in the late game I think the constant character switches wear out their welcome, there are a few randomly hard to find character switches, and if you aren’t picking just what the game wants you to you’ll dead end. And just when they make all that way harder, the hints disappear. I absolutely looked a little up near the end.
Oh also I wanted to mention, it stands out a bit how much so much of this is a story about men doing things – the female characters are a little sidelined and in the sort of roles of being protected and more acted upon that you might expect from that. I wouldn’t say there are no exceptions but it’s still a noticeable trend imo. I think 428 could be more cool if that didn’t happen that way but I wouldn’t call it like grossly sexist or something, just, some people might be more offput by that sort of thing so I think it’s worth mentioning in case that’s you.
Still, overall it was a fun read – I’d give it 4/5 all the same for the novelty, the great images, and what a joy it can be while meandering through a bit of silliness.