Otogirisou

 

Spike Chunsoft is a developer that you will be quite familiar with if you're into games like 999 or Danganrompa but I became familiar a few years back when I picked up a copy of Kamaitachi no Yoru in a used book store for about 100 yen.  After being quite impressed by that I took it upon myself to seek out their other games and came across their first foray into the sound novel genre with Otogirisou.

For those unfamiliar, a Sound Novel is basically a choose your own adventure book that you play on a console.  The difference between a sound novel and the much more popular visual novel genres is that while a visual novel will have elaborate art and CGs, a sound novel is basically just text with a couple of crap background pictures but tries to create more of an atmosphere using sound and writing.  While you may want to put Sound Novels in the same boat as something like walking simulators, they differ in the fact that a lot of them still have fail states and puzzles to solve.  For example in Kamaitachi no Yoru it's pretty easy to make a string of incorrect decisions and either blunder into death or pin the who-dun-it murder on the wrong guy.  There's a mystery to get the the bottom of and a killer to avoid in that game so while it is just text on a screen there's still a fair amount to think about.

Otogirisou on the other hand is a bit less like that, there aren't really any fail states and you essentially are just playing a Goosebumps choose your own adventure book but on a Super Nintendo Cartridge.  It feels more like a proof of concept for later games in the genre rather than an actually fully developed thing but it's story is still interesting enough to make it fun to play.

The game follows two characters, which you can name, as they are involved in a car crash and end up stranded in the middle of nowhere on a dark and stormy night.  The two of them make their way to a mansion and then shit starts to get spooky.  In my playthrough the two of them explored the mansion for a while before accidentally triggering a bunch of memories in the female lead where she remembered that she actually used to live here and severely injured her long lost sister in a boiler fire many years ago.  The twin sister stalks the house trying to kill the both of you for a while before you set the house on fire (again, lol) and make your escape.  There's more to it than that but I'm not spoiling the whole damn plot line in the blog post in case you want to play it yourself.

But even if I DID spoil the whole plot line in this post it wouldn't matter because the very story being told in Otogirisou changes with the decisions that you make.  The car crash on a dark stormy night will remain constant every playthrough but what happens after that is up to the selections you make.  Other examples of plots that I haven't played through yet include an ancient curse, a mystery regarding the history of the houses construction and being chased by a giant fish monster.  The game doesn't have a chapter select feature so while that's kind of annoying for repeat playthroughs but the game is short so skipping through the repeat bits is more of a mild annoyance rather than a huge time sink

I played the SNES version but there does also exist a PS1 version and if that's anything like the PS1 version of Kamaitachi then it probably has chapter select and section skipping as well as a nice tree so you can see how many of the story lines you've finished.  I'm not sure if that's ACTUALLY the case, I'm just making assumptions based on how the other games are.

I don't think an English version of this game has ever been released or an English patch made available by fans so it's sort of hard to play unless you know Japanese or are willing to learn a boat load of Kanji to get through it, which is a shame really.  There's also a movie based on this game that is available through through Hulu and Amazon Prime if you wanted to watch a version of it rather than play it but I don't have those services so I'm unsure if they are subtitled in English either.  IF you can play Otogirisou though, I recommend it because the genre has come a long way since the SNES days and it's nice to see where it all started.

An Outsiders View on Bandersnatch

I just can't seem to escape people talking about this thing.  I've not seen it so I wasn't going to make any comment on it but the way people are ranting and raving like it's the second coming of Jesus Christ I feel like, as someone who enjoys the genre this interactive show is clearly based on, want to throw in my two cents.

As a warning, if you haven't experienced it yet and want to do so completely for yourself then warning for maybe some spoilers. 

So if you somehow haven't heard of Black Mirror, it's a show on Netflix that is written by one of my favorite people ever, Charlie Brooker and is a sort of science fiction anthology show that likes to show a sort of potential dark future of technology.  My personal experience with it is limited to clips and snippets of different episodes but what little I have seen of it seems really good and it is on my list of things to watch fully once I find some time to do so.  Black Mirror Bandersnatch is special because it's sort of a choose your own adventure type deal.  Instead of the episode just playing and you just watching, there are certain points in the show where you must pick an option and the events of the episode will change based on the choices that you make.

Now I've not seen what official publications are saying about it but my Twitter and Facebook are going crazy frothing at the mouth about how cool it is because of its interactivity.  This is all well and good and given the shows pedigree I'm sure it's very good but going crazy over it because it's some kind of "new thing" makes you look just a little bit stupid.

You see, games have been doing this for forever.  For example one of my favorite titles on the Super Nintendo, Kamaitachi no Yoru is essentially the same concept as Bandersnatch but its mainly just text and still images.  It's a pretty famous series in Japan and has a whole bunch of sequels on PS2 and other systems

But Kamaitachi 2 is mainly just text with very limited movement and all the characters are just blue silhouettes, you might say, it's NOTHING like Bandersnatch.  Well I have two points to counter you there, imaginary reader.  First, not only is the interactive aspect exactly the same but Bandersnatch's story flow is actually rather limited and looking at nothing but a flow chart of events, it seems a bit shit

There are A LOT of choices on that chart that mean exactly fuck all of nothing, which isn't really good when you're making an interactive experience like this.  Kamaitachi on the other hand, will not only change events but will even change what kind of story your playing.  The base path for that game is a murder mystery but certain choices might turn it into a zombie survival story, an occult horror story, a raunchy comedy or even a sci fi alien invasion. Sure you can't make EVERY choice wildly change events but Bandersnatchs flow chart seems incredibly limited and easy to work out how to reach each ending.

"But that's not fair! This silly Japanese game is just text! this is TELEVISION!"  Well here come point number two because once again, games have been doing this way before Netflix decided to rip it off

Now I'm not a huge fan of Heavy Rain, I think the writing is a bit shit, another blog post for another day, but this is, once again, essentially the same thing.  Not only do you have to make choices that affect the plot but, because it's being delivered as a game, there's even added interactivity in how the scenes themselves go down.  Take the famous scene where the protagonist must cut off his own finger, if it was Bandersnatch you'd have two choices to cut or not cut and the character would do whatever you pick.  In Heavy Rain you not only decide if he does it or not, but you decide HOW he does it.  Saw? Hot poker? Hammer it off? Are you gonna get drunk before hand to try and dull the pain? It's all up to YOU

Now again, I know I'm being mean but I'm not hating on it really.  I don't have a Netflix account and Bandersnatch has legitimately got me trying to force time in my schedule to sign up and experience it, it looks awesome, but praising it as this "new original thing omg so cool!" is just a bit stupid.  Praise it for it's acting, praise it for its writing, praise it for the originality of the plot if it has it, of course, but do keep in mind that games have been doing this for decades before this came along.

And before any smart ass wants to comment, I know Choose your Own Adventure books did it first but if you google "Bandersnatch" all the news is about how they are being sued for ripping them off so I didn't feel like I needed to talk about it.

Anyway I'm off to sign up for netflix, I'll make a post about what I think of the show itself at a later date