Massacre on the Amaterasu Express
Thoughts on the Mystery Labyrinth after having played the prologue (aka looking at an anime girl's swimsuit to solve a murder)
So far, the idea of the mystery labyrinth is very compelling. I love how the place is almost personified, with it both obscuring the truth to reflect the efforts of the culprit whilst also having to play fair . Whilst I did see the twist of having to return to a branch of the mystery labyrinth coming, it's still a compelling concept, allowing the mystery to unravel and come back onto itself in a way that is interesting to see in a linear story. In this way, the mystery labyrinth is an excellent expression of how it feels to try and solve a puzzle, and the ways you get stuck and have to backtrack your thoughts, similarly to how Danganronpa's trials capture the feeling of being in a chaotic discussion, and picking out possible weak points to break apart an opponent's reasoning.
It's even more interesting from a meta level; usually, when you solve a puzzle in a game, you expect the story to progress linearly, but once the mystery labyrinth implants the idea that you might return to branching paths later, the player has the understanding that progression does not always guarantee your thinking is on the right track, and therefore is encouraged to think more critically about the information the game presents to them.
However, this interesting game structure is sadly juxtaposed by the baffling return of Hangman's Gambit: No-one's Favourite Danganronpa Minigame, This Time With Boobs!, featuring the digital equivalent of one of those posters where you scratch off a woman's clothing to reveal her unmentionables underneath, except this time you're doing basic primary school level spelling by shooting letters off a rotating barrel to reveal the swimsuit-clad anime girl inside. Whilst these two share a common voyeuristic concept, the key difference is one is a hundred times more mortifying to have to explain to your parents than the other.
To parrot ProZD, "Indeed!" the game cries, "the fifth body was a red herring. BUT CAN YOU SPELL THE WORD RED??!?!??" I understand that this is a fanservice segment, but I would hope that the pseudo-sentient death maze's attempt to obscure twisted truths would take a more compelling form than the world's most bizarre spelling bee
Another gripe I'd like to express is that the twist that the labyrinth kills the culprit behind the mystery has not been explored anywhere near as much as I would have liked, and I can only hope we see the resurfacing of this idea in later chapters.
At the moment, the mystery labyrinth is plenty interesting, but seems to serve no real practical function aside from allowing Yuma essentially infinite time to solve a mystery, as well as unearth certain clues that he missed the first time around. However, I do have faith that this is something that the game will explore later, if only to ask why pre-amnesia Yuma was eager to sacrifice so much to gain access to the mystery labyrinth, and what kind of person he was to want such a thing in lieu (or perhaps because?) of the deaths it would lead to. 'What is worth sacrificing in pursuit of the truth?' is a concept quite commonly explored in detective video games, and time will tell whether Raincode will have something valuable to contribute to the discussion.
