Madrid
Updated:02/06/2022 03: 10h
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How many times have you dreamed while watching a police television series of becoming the protagonist and taking “the controls” of the investigation? put yourself in the shoes of Sherlock Holmes or even in the skin of Gill Grissom y Catherine Willows, from the mythical ‘CSI Las Vegas’. This is exactly what the new Square Enix enables, ‘The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story‘, a video game that could well be a television miniseries in which there is hardly any first-person action, but there is a lot of deduction and combination of clues until you find the murderer (there are many here) and unravel the secret of the Shijima family, who seems to know how to live forever young. A story with real actors that, once caught the rhythm, hooks; Although it may be too slow for those uninitiated in manga, anime and Japanese cinema, always so careful and slow in detail.
It all begins with the book signing of the new work of Haruka Kagami, a very promising crime novelist. There she goes to visit her friend (and also her scientific advisor) Eiji Shijima, who, in addition to keeping a signed copy, arrives to make a proposal: an unidentified skeleton has been found in his parents’ house, where a very important family ceremony will ‘coincidentally’ take place soon. Could Haruka accompany them and unravel the mystery given her good resolution skills? Of course, the protagonist -and the player’s eyes- will agree to the proposal.
As soon as she sets foot on the Shijima lands, Haruka realizes that the skeleton is almost the least of the family’s problems: the tension is cut with the same katanas that slice necks, poisonings follow one another, and the enigmas grow in different ways. planes of time: novels serve to transport us to the past, specifically between 1922 y 1972where crimes related to the name of the Shijima and their secret, the ‘tokijiku‘, a very strange fruit capable of granting eternal youth.
Although it may seem complicated at first, the game’s outline is quite simple; So much so that at times it becomes repetitive. At the beginning of each chapter, ‘the incident’ is presented, a succession of cinematics (which can last up to half an hour, so it is recommended to stock up on popcorn) in which the protagonists (they can be Haruka and Eiji from 2022 or their ‘reincarnations’ in the past, with different names but played by the same actors) coincide with a whole series of archetypal characters: the haughty diva, the despotic boss, the jilted wife, the loving father. One of them dies under mysterious circumstances, and Haruka has to figure it out. Once the cinematic ends, in which we hardly have any interaction, except to mark the clues that appear and decide on secondary texts without weight in the plot, the ordering of the tests or ‘the reasoning’ begins: through a board with hexagonal tiles , the hypotheses are literally fitting together (apart from the logic of putting the pieces together, which is not always obvious, the game gives clues by having symbols on the sides of each hexagon).
Once the board is complete, the hypotheses begin to be built in a game of questions and answers between Haruka and Eiji (or their reincarnations) which, although it may be useful to reveal the murder, is also tedious after the previous challenge. Next, the ‘solution’ stage begins: Haruka, in front of all the suspects (and the murderer) begins to bring out all his artillery of arguments and hypotheses, although the player may be confused, since in the end, after fit so many pieces and make us 80,000 possible crime scenes, at the time of deduction we will hardly have to answer less than a dozen questions. Our score will depend on our mistakes in this part, although the development of the game will not be affected even if we do not give a single one, Inspector Gadget-style, but without pots and with a lot of cherry blossoms around.
In general, the performances of the actors stand the type very well (although the intensity of both squeaks a bit at the moment of reasoning), although it is highly recommended to listen to the original Japanese version instead of the English one (there is not in Spanish) , since fitting the language of Shakespeare on the lips of speakers in the land of the rising sun is complicated. As for the scenes, they are very careful, with very beautiful and cinematographic shots. However, the pace may seem a bit slow to those uninitiated in the Japanese audiovisual field. However, lovers of manga, anime or Japanese cinema will enjoy a convoluted but logical plot in which any tiny detail can make a difference.
Whether you’re looking for a decision-making game of action and scares, at the ‘The Dark Pictures Anthology‘, or a brainy game from the line of Quantic Dream (creators of ‘Heavy Rain’, ‘Beyond: Two Souls’ o ‘Detroit: Become Human‘), in ‘The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story’ you won’t find it. You can remember in some cases the saga ‘Life is Strange‘ (not surprisingly, it also belongs to Square Enix), although the player’s actions and options are much more constrained, perhaps because of the saying that ‘the truth only has one path’. In any case, it is a very entertaining game that, like the novels of its protagonist, manages to keep the player in suspense until the end.
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