The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story review of Square Enix’s timeless project

Everything has a period. History tends to tell us this and constantly remind us. Courses and appeals, someone said, even though you sometimes try to guess too hard or maybe risk arriving late. Centennial Case: A Shijima Story has this dual feeling. While it is very difficult to say that it is automatically an old and unimportant title, we can undoubtedly say that in its current form it is out of time.

This Review of The Centennial Case It’s harder than expected exactly because it puts us in front of a particular experience, is very attached to its inspirations, and in some ways is willing to come back to combine live-action games with interaction. Now trying to win back the desire to try to surprise without using pennies frankly, as well done before you can fool the imagination with the crazy technical values ​​​​obtained by the industry, but also as any Super Seducer does.

The case of the century

The story of Centennial Case: A Shijima Story published by Square Enix puts us in the shoes of mystery writer Haruka Kagami, who finds us in the middle of an investigation into the past of the Shijima family, of which Eiji Shijima is now in some ways an important member. Everything seems to remind of the existence of a being. Japanese mythological fruit which should contain the secret of eternal youth and brought so much pain and mystery to the family for generations.

With this assumption, research begins that will allow us to go back to 1922, the beginning of the last century, 1922, the year of the first crime that will bring its end to the present day. A story that builds its foundations on stylistic features. related to yellow a la Agatha Christie and that turns our hero into a truly oriental and less eccentric version of Hercule Poirot.

Don’t expect superfine pencil solutions, let alone the plot of the century, but when it comes to judging the Centennial Case, what really creates the big question in the “player” is this: TV series shot in live action They really have excellent craftsmanship. It’s well-directed and well-played – not forgetting that Asian overkill, obviously – which makes it a travel-worthy experience. From this point of view, we have not seen many such productions. For its remarkable brevity, only Her Story struck us for the bill, perhaps giving some false hope to such projects.

Square Enix continues to do so. trial run This gave us great tips like the Quiet Man, but given what was achieved in this case, he’s clearly someone who knows where to fish.

Gameplay, so to speak

We come to the structure of experience, which follows very special traces and collapses under the weight of life, even if we try. lack of real interactionThe real cross of such products. Seeing the use of the same actors for different periods, in parallel with what the Wachowski brothers did for the adaptation of a masterpiece of modern literature such as Cloud Atlas, All The Centennial Case is actually three different and separate parts of the “play”. Everything is repeated for all cases that we will investigate later.

Therefore, the first part of the experience is absolutelyvisual and narrative aspect. There are tens of minutes of videos that you can run as you see fit as you progress, also where you can make decisions about some aspects to be taken by the discussion, go back and forth naturally and therefore try to steal all the different information. aspects of events.

After seeing everything considered basic, it’s time to come. interruption phase. In this episode we find ourselves putting together various clues we’ve gathered on a kind of hexagonal grid. Juxtaposing clues and choosing the right deductions, right or wrong, will lead to clearly formulating a thesis. We’re running into a kind of short circuit here. Actually the game is very frustrating and to avoid being overly frustrating trial and error (however, the danger of being touched a few times) already presents the actor with all the clues found in that particular sequence, regardless of whether they actually watched it during the scenes.

final degree of difficulty therefore, even if the goal of the game is certainly not to put a lever behind the player’s steering wheel, it is largely lost.

Once you’ve formulated your hypothesis, you move on to the final stage, which seems to really imitate the work of Agatha Christie and sees that we have to do it. show our results to existing onesaccusing and acquitting the incumbents.

If the building itself is well thought out, I’m in. repetitiveness and lack of clarity in some situations it often misleads the player, putting together clues and inferences at the end that sometimes seem a little ludicrous, and which attract little attention in the various twists and turns of the story put together by the team of writers. There is nothing that will change the fate of the project, but it is a detail that does not do justice to a title that makes the article its main source of income.

In short, The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story isn’t revolutionary in the genre, although we’d have a hard time denying that it’s one of the most interesting and well-kept experiments for titles like this.