The murder mystery game genre is one of those weird things that has been incredibly prolific in Japan starting with early PC games and the NES (even launching the creator of Dragon Quest's career), but ended up a virtually unknown, untranslated phenomenon in the west (though we certainly had our own equivalent PC adventure games involving murder). It's a tradition that persists to this day and finally came overseas with less serious, more anime flavored stuff like Danganronpa and Phoenix Wright. But those original games, introduced to me by watching Game Center CX (it's.. a Japanese let's play television show that's been running for 20 years...uh, just watch it, it rules), were deathly serious in nature. And it's that tradition that The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story, a full motion video murder mystery released in 2022, comes from. You play as a mystery writer tasked with figuring out why an unknown skeleton was buried in the Shijima family's estate, quickly spiraling into solving multiple murders spanning one hundred years- including the present day.
My main expectation for this game was mostly just to see some goofy low budget FMV game shenanigans, possibly with a good mystery jammed in there too. That's really most people's expectations for the genre, which exists in the beautifully awkward space of having game developers deal with a low-budget film production (which likely only some of the team has any experience with) while also having to slice things apart to make sense inside a game where dynamic things normally happen like objects moving around. Sometimes you hit a goldmine with games like Contradiction - Spot The Liar!, where the goofiness just enhances an enjoyable little adventure game. Most of the time you just get the goofs. The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story is light on goofs, but surprisingly gave me an actual appreciation for the advantages of the FMV format inside a game for the first time (more on that later).
The game is roughly split into 3 phases for each chapter/mystery. First you watch a lengthy video of the case, leading up to and the immediate aftermath of a murder (occasionally pressing a button to collect clues). The second phase is the hypothesis phase where you place those clues into matching edges on a straight line hex grid. Once matched, the game plays a short 3d scene outlining a possible piece of logic (ie, the murderer had to be a man because of x, the murder weapon had to be y, the motive had to be z, etc). Since the game uses image patterns to match where these go, this phase is more about mulling over the clues and doing a matching minigame than anything else. Some of the pieces are so out of left field that it often adds more noise to solving the case than anything else, but I kind of enjoyed how stupid it was willing to go. The final phase goes back to playing video, but this time interrupted by having to pick the right answer to numerous questions about the mystery. Pick the wrong answer and you get a short scene explaining why you're wrong and also very dumb and get whisked back to the question to try again. A minor stroke of brilliance is that the game also gives you a rating at the end of the case, incentivizing the player to actually think about choices rather than bumbling your way through (though the ratings are purely fluff and easily cheated by replaying, they did end up making me care).
If you've ever watched a mystery show or movie, odds are you've found yourself commenting on who done it with those around you (something so common that tons of shows actively stop and prompt the viewers to pick). The brilliant part of The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story, which I don't know how to feel about since I'm not sure the developers even intended it, is that it taps into that same energy. The majority of mystery games just aren't great for playing with other people, since they're heavily text based and varying reading speeds makes that all kinds of awkward. Even newer stuff with heavy voice acting and cutscenes still tend to be structured as classic inventory puzzles (yeah you can throw around "uhh try using the bone on the dog", but it's kind of weak), roaming between rooms, and conversation trees that are optimized for immersing a single person. But this game is perfectly made for playing with other people: everyone can watch a movie together, and the questions are streamlined so you can debate among yourselves, arguing for specific lines of logic as to which one is correct. You see I didn't actually play this game myself, I just watched it with a group of friends. Even so, arguing and coming to agreement about each piece of evidence basically made me feel like I was playing it. I don't feel like I missed anything, and I think the game was actually a far better experience for it.
The mysteries vary in quality (with one of the early ones going too hard on goofy lateral thinking), but are overall pretty good. Some feature so many gaps in knowledge that solving them tends to feel like taking the test without ever having went to class, but this ends up paying off in the epilogue chapter that hits you with a barrage of reveals, recontextualizations, and fills in every question we had in a satisfying manner. Yeah, there was no way you could have pieced together most of those clues, but they were present just enough to make you feel like you should have.
There's only really two big negatives with the game. One chapter features a hard genre shift into playing more like an adventure game with dopey traditional puzzles. It's awful. And the other issue is that some of the wrong answers have really unsatisfying explanations for why they're wrong (the worst being a character just flat out telling you "no I already checked, there aren't any." despite the hypothesis phase presenting 4 possibilities, some of them plausible, it doesn't go to the effort of explaining why they're wrong). And I suppose a bonus complaint is that I think mystery narratives should generally be entertaining to watch even outside of the mystery, but this thing is so dry that it was primarily just the mystery that I was there for (though some chapters have investigations prior to the main mystery of the chapter that lean into making this work, and the late game has enough stuff layered together that it also works).
So should you play The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story? If you have at least one other person to play it with, can get into murder mysteries, and are a giant weeb then yes absolutely. I would highly recommend it so long as you know what you're getting into. (I'm deathly serious about playing it with someone else. I'm.. not sure it works otherwise.)
