#portopia

[bowloflentils]

Picture of Yuji Horii in 1984 holding a PC-88 copy of The Portopia Serial Murder Case. The text mentions that the game was a huge hit, selling 17,000 copies. For comparison, the 1985 Famicom port sold 700,000 copies. Just goes to show how small Japan's PC market was at the time.

[wirewitchviolet]

Grifters Gonna Grift, “AI” Edition

Can I just start off here with a quick expectations vs. reality comparison we can chuckle at? Here’s a quote from a director I’ll be cool and not embarrass about where “AI” will be in a couple years:

And here’s a couple choice bits from when I was watching someone make a valiant effort at streaming the new “AI driven” Portopia remake Square-Enix is pushing:

My favorite though is this wonderful stretch of the streamer desperately repeating “ask about Hirata” and the increasingly amazing guesses popping in the chat log.

More serious talk under the fold, like I do...

So... the very first thing I, much like anyone else with both a conscience and a clue, need to say when getting into this is that the reason you see so much talk these days about “AI” and how amazing it is have absolutely nothing to do with any new developments in AI research, and absolutely everything to do with a whole bunch of techbros being stuck holding the bag after the pile of naked pyramid schemes that were the NFT grift well and truly fell completely apart, and they need a new grift to move on to, ideally one where they can use the giant server farms they all set up for crypto crap to still be usable for something. And of course the second thing I’m morally obligated to say is that “AI,” as these con artists talk about it, flat out does not exist. We’re not “almost there,” it’s not “around the corner,” there haven’t been “exciting breakthroughs.” It is a complete outright lie a whole lot of people are telling to a whole lot of other people to con them into investing heavily into some combination of vaporware and parlor tricks, and also to throw off people who might otherwise look at the things they are actually doing and see all the really blatantly illegal stuff they’re doing.

Having gotten that out of the way, it’s also worth explaining that what people are actually talking about when they talk about “AI” is really search engines, for the most part. Like, if I want to read maybe 5 paragraphs about oh, I don’t know, Big Slammu from Street Sharks, I can just open up literally any search engine, type really probably any string of words that contains word “slammu” really, and get a sloppily written wiki page with maybe 5 paragraphs of random facts like his pre-gene slamming name being Coop Bolton, early revisions having his name be the far less memorable Boomer, and him having a friend called Moby Lick. Which... OK I wasn’t expecting my randomly chosen example to go down that sort of road.

Anyway, I could also have one of these overhyped “AI” things tell me about Big Slammu, and most likely get literally this same exact wiki entry. Because yeah, that’s all that’s happening there. It’s grabbing keywords from my input string, looking them up in a database, finding an entry that best fits my string in terms of my terms showing up in it a lot, and printing it out at me. The only difference really is the latter is put together by someone trying to con me into thinking I’m talking to some sort of Real Life Computer Guy who just knows all this naturally as someone who watched the show and has well-articulated thoughts to share on it, and we’re maybe going to play up that fiction by stripping out any headers in the webpage we’re just grabbing and other bits that aren’t the core article content.

None of this is hard to do or novel. If you’re old enough to remember card catalog terminals in libraries, those were doing the exact same thing, except they just pointed you at a book rather than print the contents because storage on computers was at a premium back when they were made. Oh and when you see people talk about giving “AIs” more “training data” that’s literally just adding more to the database it’s searching, or more likely, widening the list of websites it’s searching with preexisting search tools.

“AI art” to be clear is the same thing. Get every art site you can get your hands on that has a tagging system, scrape every image and the tags on it, and then when someone asks for like, “brown hair anime girl hot giant boobs huge boobs enormous boobs” you just rifle through the pile of stolen art for something that comes as close as possible to covering all that text with tags and ideally not having any other tags, and forking it over. Which again, also works if you just do that with a search engine, and always has. But again, since we’re trying to sell people on the lie that some little magical computer boy like Data from Star Trek speed painted you a painting on the spot, we make some effort to hide the fact that we’re just stealing somebody’s art by stealing art from several different people, pasting bits over onto the main image we’re stealing, and wiping over the seams with like the photoshop blend tool or whatever a little to hopefully make it less obvious.

Now to me the part of that that’s basically computer magic is how we just have software tools to blend two images together to make them look like it was originally just one image, but, that part’s been a thing for several decades. Mostly it impresses me because art programs are prohibitively expensive to the point that I personally am to this day using something with all the functionality of Aldus Super Paint on the Apple ][. There IS some actual sophisticated code involved in instructing the program how to identify a hand so that it can paste the hand from one stolen image over the hand from another (and the iffy results from that are why you so routinely get extra fingers with this stuff- some of those were part of the original image, before we pasted another over that wasn’t in quite the same pose). We don’t have an actual Little Gear-Filled Brain Chum who lives in the computer we can explain these things to, so people just have to work out how like if you look at the raw image data and see darker RGB values in a line of pixels or in a circular pattern or some such, that’s probably the outline of a finger, so cut around that.

The best visual aid I can give to explain how this works is this spectacular failure of “AI art” that... I’m not sure I can just paste in under Tumblr’s current rules? Here’s a discussion of it on another site. Anyway if you just open that up, and use your hand or a piece of paper to block out everything from the belly button up, then again from just below the belly button down, you can kinda get a handle on what actually happens here. Presumably the rule this particular “AI” was using to paste pictures together was “find darker pixels than their surroundings in a pattern where one line branches off another at a 30 degree angle or so” which yeah, if you’re looking exclusively at a pile of stolen images of big boob anime waifus is most likely only going to appear in the cleavage. Here though, whoopsie, one of the images we grabbed out of the pile has lines intersecting like that in the crotch. So, that became the paste guide, and we get our wonderful little game of Exquisite Corpse. A human couldn’t make this error. Some sort of actual AI capable of comprehending a request to draw something and using its astounding reasoning to paint an original work (which, again, is straight up not a thing to exist) would also never do this, it’d be starting from a basic anatomical understanding as that’d be the easiest starting point. This only happens because we’re stitching stolen works together based on whatever small part of them matches up well enough to hide with the smear tool.

All that out of the way, if I might cycle back to that failure of a Portopia remake, because everyone in the “AI” scene is either a hustler or a mark, everyone ends up convinced that these “AI” projects can only be improved by giving them more “training” data. If you know it’s a scam, widening the pool of sources you’re stealing from makes it harder for people to notice (especially if you can grab files that aren’t publicly searchable, something people openly admit they’re working on), and if you buy into the hype, then yeah every trashy work of science fiction agrees the more books the amazing computer man speed reads, the more he comprehends our language and customs. In practice though, it just kinda... clutters things up with useless garbage.

Portopia is a very very old, very very simple adventure game. You have like, six or so each of verbs, locations, named NPCs, and something like four items. If you wanted to make a remake that went off speech to text to parser commands, you could probably get it to behave pretty well if it was designed only to listen for and distinguish that handful of relevant terms. But no, this sucker was given the widest possible corpus of “training data,” so even standing in an interview room where there’s literally no valid options to the player than leaving or asking an NPC questions about a very short list of subjects, like say, this other NPC named Kawamura, it’s considering that we might be making plans to get together the next day, or see what people have to say about California.

Probably bloats the game and the processor load by a ton too, or has it communicating with a fully unnecessary server. I’m told at launch, this was way more ambitious, and the idea was to include “AI” primarily so you could just use natural language to pick your assistant’s brain on whatever subject came to mind, not as an explicit hint system, but getting opinions or fun facts about anything you were unclear on from a neutral source. Which... yeah, that kind of “AI” does not exist. You ask “where does Hirata live?” and you’re going to find out about an MMA fighter’s gym or maybe learn some fun facts about the game Sekiro. So they just kinda dummied out everything that’d actually make the game novel for reasons of embarrassment and legality, and we’re just left with this speech to text program that doesn’t recognize the names of the characters, attached to a text parser that... can’t handle the fact it has more than one port as a location. You know what didn’t have this sort of problem? Zork. In 1981.

It also has problems with context. Like, ask a character something they don’t have a response to, and they can just be suddenly replaced by whichever character does have a response to that, because hey, that’s in the list of legal responses, right?

Anyway, when everyone gets on the same page on the emperor having no clothes here, can we please all promise to keep our eyes on the grifters as they look for the next scam and remember these were the same people breathlessly trying to convince people that slight palette swaps of a badly drawn monkey were all unique irreplicable works of special art worth millions of dollars, and just skip to the part where the new obvious scam gets called out?

[gracie-bird]

PRINCESS GRACE PLANTS A COMMEMORATIVE TREE AT PORTOPIA, JAPAN (APRIL 6, 1981).

On April 4, 1981, Princess Grace and Prince Rainier of Monaco visited Portopia '81 in Kobe with their 16 years old daughter, Princess Stephanie. They came to Japan on an Air France plane, arriving at Osaka International Airport and stayed for 10 days, visiting Portopia, attending the Monaco Art Exhibition, visiting famous places in Kyoto and Toba, and then going to Tokyo on the 11th. Headed to Hawaii from the airport. Princess Grace planted a commemorative tree at the Portopia venue in Port Island, Kobe City, Hyogo Prefecture on April 6, 1981. 

[zerochanges]

Chunsoft and Sound Novels

I remember when visual novels weren't quite known as well as they are today. By no means are visual novels a mainstream genre of video games--in fact you won’t be hard pressed to find some “expert” try to argue with you over how they are not games at all--but their notoriety is far more than that of even just ten years prior. For the longest time visual novels were seen as just an anime fandom “thing” that mainstream gamers paid no mind to. Very few titles were discussed outside those that had animes be it a TV series or an erotic OVA, and even some of the earliest visual novels localized into English were done so by anime and manga translation companies and not actual video game publishers.

If I had to pinpoint a time in my own memory where the genre started to get noticed more it would be when the Nintendo DS took off. With the DS there was an increase amount of western releases for visual novels thanks in large part to its touch screen interface working well with adventure style games. This wasn't just noticed by Japanese developers either as a fair share of American and European made adventure style games were developed for the console as well. It seems everybody was anxious to utilize the system’s unique features when the DS started soaring in popularity. The point ‘n click and visual novel genres really had a home on the DS, and because of that a lot of people outside of just the anime community got a taste of these kinds of games with beginner friendly titles such as Ace Attorney, Trauma Center, and Hotel Dusk.

However, despite the Nintendo DS (and later to a lesser extent the PSP and PS Vita) giving gamers a finely curated and easily digestible dose of the genre I’d say the sad thing is the push was pretty small and died out quickly. Instead what seems to be the biggest reason why most video game outlets nowadays talk about visual novels are because of the parody dating sims that started to grow in popularity. Hey, do you want to date some monster? Is your girlfriend a llama? Maybe all you need in your life is to date a pigeon. Don’t try to hide it, we all know you secretly wish you could go out with a YouTuber. Not into dorky millennials, well no problem, we got a game for you--that is if dating other people’s dads is a you thing. Yes, this is the era of the wacky, silly dating sims taking over in the English market. It wasn't always like this however, and yes Japan has had a long history of doujin dating sim parodies themselves, but lately it feels like all people know are the parodies that make good YouTube videos to react to instead of what a large amount of the games in the genre can offer.

Don’t get me wrong however, I’m by no means saying parodies do not have a place nor should they stay out of the limelight, and I definitely love that this fad has ushered in a wave of indie made English titles--but simply put this wave lacks so much variety and has been stretched so thin by this point. For every one creative title that pushes boundaries and gets new people interested in visual novels there are ten bland titles spilled all over Steam that feel like they were made by people with barley a grasp on what a visual novel can be outside of either parody dating or “boobies are pretty awesome”. Some of these bland games are even really well made and have a lot of care and attention added to their interfaces and artwork, but when push comes to shove, they are still just a basic joke stretched to its thinnest level. Visual novels don’t have to be that however, and while most mainstream gaming outlets may still be joking about how great it is to date your kitchen appliances, you don’t have to (unless you want to, in which case I recommend dating the toaster for he is the bravest of all kitchen dwellers).

A lot of this misunderstanding can be tied into the nebulous relationship between visual novel and dating sim, two “genres” that many people debate are separate things entirely yet due to the overlapping nature of the two they are often confused for each other. There’s a great article by Brian Crimmins online that actually goes into heavy detail about how visual novels came to be as a genre and how over time both visual novels and dating sims affected and evolved each other. It’s a wonderful read that I really recommend it for anyone curious about games such as these, but either way, whether or not you think visual novels and dating sims are the same thing or should be counted as separate but similar genres of games; it certainly doesn't seem to stop most western gaming outlets reporting solely on gag dating sims as visual novels and taking away a majority of people’s attention from so much more that these games can offer.

I take back all my complaints

I somewhat lost focus and started rambling today, so let’s move on now and finally discuss what I wanted to talk about--that being, despite there being well known visual novel developers to the tight knit community that follows games such as these--examples including but not limited to: Mages, Type Moon, or Nitroplus--my favorite developer often seems forgotten in the conversation. What company is that you ask? Well, it’s Chunsoft. So today I want to talk about why Chunsoft really should be talked about more in the western fandom and all their contributions to the genre.

Chunsoft is one of the many long standing Japanese developers that have been around for every major home console since the Famicom. Nowadays they are known as Spike Chunsoft after their merger with Spike Co. in April of 2012. For the sake of this blog post however I am mostly going to refer to them as Chunsoft still given everything I really want to talk about predates the merger. Chunsoft’s involvement with Japanese style adventure games and visual novels more or less are tied to the very beginning of the genre. There isn't quite a de facto known “first” visual novel per se, but most fans put the starting line at around 1982 or ‘83 depending on which game they may be talking about and which source they want to use for the release date (remember release dates were not entirely clear back in these early days).

One of the earliest contenders for this honor is Yuji Horii’s adventure game The Portopia Serial Murder Case (Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken), a game that was based around Horii’s interest in western style adventure titles, much like Horii’s later known legendary game Dragon Quest was based around his fascination with Wizzardy and Ultima and how to replicate those games in an easier to understand interface for his home nation. It’s here we can see “visual novel” wasn't even a blip on the radar yet, and there was no definitive understanding of what genres for games really were at the time. Portopia proved to be a major hit during its release however and lives on even to this day as a fondly remembered game (and also a Japanese internet meme). Chunsoft handled the porting of the title to the Famicom and this was the beginning of a long business relationship between Chunsoft president Koichi Nakamura and Enix’s own Yuji Horii as in the years to follow Chunsoft would develop the first five entries in the hit Dragon Quest franchise for Enix.

With the birth of the Super Famicom things began to change between both Enix and Chunsoft. Having developed games primarily for the publisher Enix Chunsoft felt they should move into their own publishing, and soon got certification from Nintendo to do so. After slaving away on four Dragon Quest titles on the Famicom, and also working on the fifth title for the Super Famicom, most of the employees at Chunsoft were burned out so they decided their first self published title should be a simple game. Koichi Nakamura wanted to help make gaming more accessible at the time and took both the team’s exhaustion and his desire for a more casual audience into consideration when they moved forward. 

The title Nakamura needed to make had to be simple; a game that anyone could be able to figure out to navigate--even those intimidated by a controller, but despite that also needed to take advantage of the more powerful hardware of the Super Famicom by using Kanji scripts which again would make the experience easier on casual players who had trouble getting into video games because game consoles prior could only display text entirely in Hiragana or Katakana making the reading experience poor and hard to enjoy for Japanese players (see Japanese writing systems for more details). To all these ends the team at Chunsoft decided to create a game entirely around reading to tackle this Hiragana issue and show off the hardware (or at least the hardware’s Kanji capabilities) while also being something anyone of any gaming skill level could enjoy. The game would mostly be text for the player to navigate through and present choices at key moments in the story to advance, cutting out any complicated aspects from western adventure style games that might intimidate the unfamiliar such as solving puzzles or finding hidden items. This is how Otogirisō was born.

Otogirisō (Japanese for St John Wort) was Chunsoft’s very first sound novel, a nomenclature which has since confused the hell out of everyone. But what exactly is a sound novel you may ask? Well, people get kind of convoluted about it. Looking at the definition currently found on Giant Bomb a sound novel can be defined by its heavy reliance on sound effects and music to create a game's atmosphere. Usually sound novels will use minimalist visuals and choose to emphasize the text over the artwork presented on screen--most commonly covering the entire screen in said text instead of keeping text only contained in a dialogue box. Something among these lines is the definition usually seen online when you look into it. It’s not entirely wrong either, but it’s also missing something to it. The term sound novel is a creation of Chunsoft themselves, and something they own a copyright on, this is also often brought up when you search sound novel, but at the time of its creation sound novel was meant to be something really easily understood and not this tangled mess of “a certain kind of visual novel”. 

When Chunsoft first created Otogirisō the brand sound novel was added to its box in order to help potential customers understand what kind of game it was. At the time it was just a way to let people unfamiliar with adventure style games (more commonly found in the west) to understand that this title will largely feature reading. In fact when Otogirisō was originally shown to the press in a 1991 Nintendo Space World show the game looked radically different from its finished project. Otogirisō was presented mostly as a book that the player would read, pretty much just like modern e-readers are now, with the exception that it included some sound effects and music. The press at the time was underwhelmed by this so Chunsoft took the game back to the drawing board and created unique visual backgrounds to give the game more flair and in doing so set a certain precedence for future visual novels to follow in. 

An important factor to remember here is there was no clear cut way to define games such as these yet. The term visual novel had not yet been coined, and even gamers themselves were not very well aware of genres. As Nakamura admits in a Famitsu interview when asked about the creation of sound novels, “if you look back at the very beginning of video games, for me, the conception of “genre” didn’t exist. Take action games, for example: within that label you had shooting games [note: Shoot ‘em Ups], you had stuff like Pac Man and Dig Dug, and you had more puzzle-y games too. It was very diverse. On the same note, with adventure games, there were Ascii Magazine’s games like Ometesandou Adventure and Minamiseizan Adventure, which were pure text adventures… but you also had things like Mystery House, which had a few pictures, or war simulation games like Fleet Commander. I played all those, and while I recognized there were many different types of games, I never thought about it in terms of genres.” So basically, at the time sound novel was conceived it was just meant to be the most straightforward way to define this Japanese style of adventure gaming that Chunsoft was trying out on the Super Famicom.

But does it end there? Well no. That’s only the part of the answer. Otogirisō ended up being a modest sleeper hit upon its release and this lead to Chunsoft to making more sound novels, with their next title being a legendary game that has since eclipsed Otogirisō as the de facto sound novel; Kamaitachi no Yoru (Night of the Sickle Weasels). This game was a hit, there’s no easy way for me to describe just how big it really was back during its release--out of the pantheon of legendary Japanese games that people in the US and Europe know jack about Kamaitachi no Yoru is one of the highest. Kamaitachi no Yoru is a fantastic game and I talked about it ad nauseum a few years ago when I payed the localized version called Banshee’s Last Cry, check that out if you’d like to know more, and if you’re still somehow able to play it then you’re definitely in for a darn good time.

With the a string of successes in the visual novel marketplace after both Otogirisō and Kamaitachi no Yoru, Chunsoft kept churning out games over the years, many of which are highly respected by the fandom still such as Machi and 428: Shibuya Scramble. All these releases of theirs had a certain tone and atmosphere, not to mention a distinct presentation that didn’t change much over the years and because of that did not look like what visual novels typically look like now. There’s a certain charm and narrative style between all of Chunsoft’s sound novels that is a really strong defining link in their catalogue despite a lot of these games being stand alone--and because of that people come to expect certain things upon seeing the term sound novel. Many titles would eventually come out not made by Chunsoft that shared similarities to their brand--these games followed in the footsteps of Chunsoft’s tone, structure, style, and presentation--and people began to notice, the most famous of which being 07th Expansion’s Higurashi doujin series. This is where we begin to see that murky kind of convoluted aspect of sound novels, as they start to transcend a basic label put on a box almost three decades ago and turn into their own little sub genre or maybe better described as their own style of visual novel. 

So what the heck is a sound novel then? The simplest answer is a sound novel is a dated term that Chunsoft used regularly and has since fallen out of use for visual novel; the more complicated answer is that sound novels are both a term used by Chunsoft for their brand of visual novels back before the term visual novel existed and also a certain style of visual novel that is mostly inspired by the early Chunsoft games’ presentation and ambiance.

Top Left to Right: Otogirisō - Chunsoft '92, Kamaitachi no Yoru - Chunsoft '94, and Machi - Chunsoft '98 Bottom Left to Right: Higurashi When They Cry - 07Expansion 2002, Tsukihime - Type Moon 2000, and GeGeGe no Kitaro Maboroshi Fuyu Kaikitan - Bandai '96 

Over the years Chunsoft has expanded, changed, and moved beyond their sound novel brand. Despite this however, they have never really stopped putting out solid titles in the visual novel market, and it seems like each new generation of gaming is blessed with at least one visual novel of theirs. My personal favorite title out of all their work from this era would definitely have to be 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors on the Nintendo DS. It was because of this game in particular that my love of visual novels in general really started, and Kotaro Uchikoshi’s sharp writing--especially the incredible dialogue and thorough thought narration in protagonist's Junpei’s head still stands at the peak in my mind. Throw in beautiful sprite work based around art from legendary Capcom (and now freelance) artist Kinu Nishimura, and a fantastic soundtrack from the man himself, Shinji Hosoe and you got yourself a meeting of some fantastic minds. I've written about 999 in the past, and you can read about it here, but I still want to write more about it in the future, especially tackling the latest release it got in 2017’s Zero Escape: The Nonary Games. 

Recent years have seen Spike Chunsoft make it big with their Dangan ronpa franchise, admittedly however the first Dangan ronpa title should be more attributed to Spike, as the game was released in 2010 two years before their merger. However the two companies together as one have since released three more Dangan ronpa games, and two (or is it three?) Dangan ronpa anime titles, and many, many rereleases and compilations. My own interest in the franchise isn't nearly as strong as everyone else’s seem to be but I did however absolutely adore the last game, Dangan ronpa V3, with how many times it managed to jump the shark, upping the game, and constant plot twist after more ludicrous plot twist. If there was ever a way to end something like Dangan ronpa it was what that game did, and oh boy did I get a kick out of that. 

Finally moving past Dangan ronpa, 2019 will see Spike Chunsoft develop and publish Kotaro Uchikoshi’s newest game, AI: The Somnium Files, for the Nintendo Switch, PS4, and Steam which just got its newest trailer and release date announced earlier this week. I am very excited for it personally and love the intricate and complex alternate reality game type marketing the team has been using to build up to its release! This is some next level stuff, and has been tons of fun all on its own.

Then there’s of course one more game I simply cannot pass up mentioning, 428: Shibuya Scramble. Now I briefly spoke this title earlier mentioning later sound novels that have been highly acclaimed, and trust me 428 is definitely beloved; its perfect score in Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu really meant something back in 2008 on the Wii. But why mention this with recent Spike Chunsoft games? Well the answer is easy, 2018 saw the much beloved, super Japanese game finally get an American and European release! And much celebration was had! If anything in this whole blog post remotely sounded interesting to you I really implore you all to go check it out either on the PS4 or Steam, and see what a Chunsoft sound novel is all about. And for the impatient, I will be writing about it next on blog! 

Despite Chunsoft changing over time and no longer using their sound novel brand, they have still put out many classic and fantastic games in the visual novel genre. Their later work may take a radically different presentation from their prior titles, but despite their moving away from that set style there are still other developers out there that keep up that mantle. Overall I think the effect Chunsoft has had on the genre is undeniable and anyone missing out on their catalogue of fantastic titles are really missing on some of the best titles visual novels have to offer. That’s why I really wanted to write this blog post about them and put into words my thoughts about this developer’s library that just seems so often overlooked by many others in the fandom, at least in my experience. I hope through all my grumbling, and “kids today” rant I was able to at least get somebody interested in trying out one of their games.

[mendelpalace]

Portopia by Legowelt (aka “He Of Way Too Many Aliases”).

He released this under the name Satomi Taniyama, who was supposedly a garbage man from Oda who made an album inspired by the Portopia Serial Murder Case adventure game, using instruments he’d found discarded on the job. 

[bowloflentils]

The Portopia Serial Murder Case (ポートピア連続殺人事件) - Enix - Famicom - 1985

[bowloflentils]

This is the 1982 edition of the annual April Fools issue of Monthly ASCII magazine, called “Yearly Ah-SKI!”. Within the pages of this issue is the very first Japanese text adventure game, which was written out in BASIC in the magazine, called Omotesando Adventure. The title was created by two editors at the magazine that were fans of western text adventures, Suguho Takahashi and Hideki Akiyama, and even though the game was developed in Japan it is actually written in English. Omotesando Adventure would help introduce the adventure genre to many people in Japan including Koichi Nakamura, future president of Chunsoft who would go on to create the Famicom port of Portopia, direct the first entry in Chunsoft’s seminal Sound Novel franchise and served as the main programmer/director on the first four Dragon Quest games.

[arvannaimannas]

also i didnt really like portopia. i mean it was interesting and i think the twist was played pretty well considering the game's structure but the game as a whole is kinda tedious and not really rewarding for mystery solvers so much as for text adventure players. which i mean also softens the twist and makes it feel fairer but as a piece of detective fiction i wouldve liked to feel more involved in getting information rather than trying to trigger events to get hotline tips or wait for yasu to randomly say he "asked locals" and found out crucial information without any prompting. Also fuck that maze