Japan, samurai or Tokyo is the equivalent of boobs, beer or free when it comes to headlines or titles for yours truly, so when scouting through the games on the eShop a while ago, Tokyo Dark Remembrance, by Cherrymochi, came up. Having played it on and off for a few weeks, here is the verdict.
Tokyo Dark Remembrance is an unusual game. In some instances, it comes across as a reasonably big game with decent graphics and production values, but something like the UI makes it feel like an indie game with a low budget. This is not a bad thing; it’s just a little inconsistency.
Taking on the role of Ayami Itō, a detective working in the wards of Tokyo, you begin the game trying to locate your partner, Hazuki Tanaka. He’s gone missing, and you have a clue as to where he went. Ayami gets implicated in a hostage situation which results in a girl’s death and Ayami is accountable for it.
You Mean I Can’t Drink On Duty?
You find yourself coming undone, or if you’re an outright irresponsible arsehole, that also adds to the mix on your evaluation. That’s right, rather than build stats of strength and dexterity, Tokyo Dark Remembrance monitors your psychological profile so if you decide to have a shot in the bar while on duty, the public will pick up on it.
The game has a variety of genre styles, and this applies to the appearance, too. The character designs are clear, but there’s a part of them that looks like a different team handled the cutscenes compared to the interactive portion of the game. This is common in larger titles, but the look and feel seemed to be better in different segments.
Visual novel games aren’t my thing, but the dialogue sequences are good and make up the bulk of the game. There aren’t any hentai cliches or a shift in artistic style; just the classic manga style, with a mature tone throughout, both in theme and also application. Due to the volume of text, I would have liked the font to have been bigger and that it made more use of space. There’s a lot of reading to do in the game and the choice of font, a serif, is a bit crap when playing in handheld mode.
Get Out Of My Head!
On the topic of the user interface, when in the point and click parts of the game, a white box will appear every time you are nearby a point of interest. There aren’t any cursors, you stand over the box and interact with it. It’s a bit of an ugly interface, to be honest, but don’t expect a tirade of comments to follow on how this ruined my experience, and ultimately, my life.
There’s a significant focus on Ayami’s mental health, and we’re introduced to a method called SPIN that evaluates how she is performing. S = Sanity, P = Professionalism, I = Investigation and N = Neurosis. Based on your actions, the attributes for each of these will go up or down.
On one playthrough, getting a little frustrated and wanting to speed things up, I hammered the action button when talking to a bartender. She repeated the same thing each time, but without noting how many times we went through the same dialogue, a notification popped up +1 Neurosis.
Not bad for a detective who only recently downed some spirits, shot off a lock with a police firearm then proceeded to harass the public with the same questions. I even begged for information. Underneath your SPIN status, there is a further scale on how you’re doing. It will show each attribute as positive or negative. My lowest point at this time was -14 for professionalism and +21 for investigation. Ayami may be on her way to a disciplinary, but by golly, she gets the job done!
For The Tokyo Tourist…
For fans of the Tokyo scene, there are a decent amount of games where you can explore the scenery and get involved with the locals; the Yakuza series, Jet Set Radio, plus many more. Tokyo used to be portrayed in games as a city of vibrancy; a finger on the pulse for fashion, trends and all things new, but there is a bit of a Mobius Strip as underneath all this world of lumination, is a seedy, dark and twisted place (every city then).
Tokyo Dark Remembrance, while not just literal, is a dark and somewhat mysterious place. In the early part of the game, you get to experience that with the sleazy saxophone playing faintly in the background, or when you touch upon the more supernatural elements, that uneasy and eerie ambience where you’re thinking “something’s not right”.
After seeing the trailer, I was looking forward to getting hold of Tokyo Dark Remembrance. By all means, it isn’t a Nintendo Switch exclusive as it’s been in circulation for three years now, plus it doesn’t have any specific features that stand out solely for Nintendo’s favourite rectangle.
The highlights for me were the consequences of your actions and the dialogue sections – this is very much narrative-driven as if you were to rely on the segments with Ayami running back and forth looking for squares to interact with, then it would be a bit of a disappointment.
