428: Shibuya Scramble

多个主角之间互相影响的设定还没在同类型的游戏里见过，剧本真的太牛了，像严丝合缝的齿轮，又很温暖细腻，每个角色都有闪闪发光的可爱之处，泪目了好几次 感觉终章的这句话可以完美诠释游戏的内核：The destinies of several people had collided, gathering momentum until coincidence became inevitability—and Shibuya was saved. btw加纳的像女明星一样漂亮的女朋友到底长啥样啊？还以为会给看一眼呢xs

Very happy (and slightly guilt-stricken) to finally get around to playing the legendary visual novel/adventure game hybrid that famously earned a perfect score in Famitsu, and then proceeded to remain in Japan for a decade due to a complete lack of a Western market for this type of thing. (Now there's BARELY one.) So does it live up to the hype? Almost entirely. I stepped into the world of Chunsoft adventure games after Uchikoshi decided to get a little nutty with it via the Zero Escape series, so I'm used to the very limited gameplay being a little less limited. Even so, 428 completely won me over with its extremely wholesome cast of completely driven goofballs who all find themselves caught up in a vast conspiracy likely inspired by the Tokyo subway sarin attacks of 1995. As you watch their stories play out via text and photos of real actors—with the rare video clip—you're asked to make decisions that will affect their fate down the line, or the fates of people they haven't yet met. Seeing the end of the story involves working through one hour at a time and gently nudging the various story choices until each character makes it through each 60-minute period unscathed. It's a somewhat unintuitive system, and one that'll take you a few chapters to fully comprehend. Thankfully, you're presented with a comprehensive chart that exhaustively maps out each character's activities across time, and you can use this feature to bounce around between the cast members at will. After investing just five hours into the game, it's easy to see how the effects of certain choices—no matter how small—can ripple out to interfere with someone else's story. Of course, a lot of the fun comes in finding all of the bad endings, because there's no punishment for working yourself into a sometimes-fatal dead end. (In fact, you're rewarded for finding as many as possible.) It's a shame a lot of people aren't going to have the patience to sit and read for 25 hours, because 428 really is the capstone for this very Japanese style of adventure game. And with its complete dependence on photos of real actors—all taken illegally throughout Shibuya—there's a level of ambition here that the genre hasn't matched since the game's original 2008 release date. I'm kicking myself for not playing my still-sealed PS4 copy back in 2018—but on the other hand this means I can sell this extremely rare release and probably buy a small boat.