If you had told us in January that an FMV murder mystery title would be one of our most memorable experiences on Switch this year, we would have looked at you as if you were one of The Centennial Case: A Shijima Stories main murder suspect. Directed by Koichiro Ito (Scenario Designer for Metal Gear Solid V) and produced by Junichi Ehara (NieR: Automata) on Square Enix, it somehow caught our attention for a while as a clever killer lurking around at night, but we are ecstatic to finally have caught this culprit.
Centennial Case revolves around Haruka Kagami, a mysterious novelist, and Eiji Shijima, a scientist studying the cellular aging process. After a skeleton has been unearthed in the home of Eiji’s ancestors, he asks Haruka to travel with him to investigate the mysteries surrounding his family, while he himself searches for an inherited fruit in his family that may stop the aging process.
Things quickly go awry on the Shijima property, pushing Haruka (and by extension the player) into the role of murder detective. These murders do not only happen in the present; through creative plot devices – such as Haruka reading about a murder that took place a century before – cases from different decades unfold as episodes from a Netflix drama with above-average production values. The revelations of these historical crimes provide context to the main story with a beautiful, blood-stained bow.
We will not spoil more than that. All the excitement here comes from revealing the mysteries and solving the murders for yourself – trust us.
The Centennial Case features a small cast of Japanese actors and actresses taking on several different roles. For example, Nanami Sakuraba plays both the 28-year-old Haruka Kagami in the present and the 17-year-old Yoshino Shijima from another time period. An actor playing the victim for a decade may well be the culprit in another, and that goes for the entire cast. All cast performs admirable performances in each of their different roles. Not once did we find ourselves in doubt about who was who.
[Author’s note: my wife is Japanese and knew the whole cast quite well. Square Enix surprised her at the impressive amount of talent they had wrangled together here.]
The gameplay loop in The Centennial Case consists of three phases. Incident Phase shows the events surrounding a murder. In this phase, dialogue choices emerged that allowed us to choose Haruka’s answers, but this had no noticeable effect other than keeping us engaged in the narrative. Often there were also calls to collect clues – by pressing the ‘X’ button – but these distracted us more than anything else from the story. Lots of more notable clues passed by without a prompt, which rewarded us for being captivated attention. Luckily, we could pause, rewind, or skip forward at any time.
And be aware, we did because the murders committed are wild. An early case shows a monster that would not be misplaced in an episode of Scooby-Doo. Resourceful deadly objects and red herring abound to distract you from revealing the real culprit. It’s all a bit campy in the best possible way, especially because the cast plays it straight, even though we found out – quite ironically given the detective work at hand – that a small suspension of infidels was required to prevent some questionable leaps in logic.
The next stage, however, is where our main criticism arose. After the incident has taken place, it is up to Sakuraba’s character – whether it’s Haruka or someone from another decade – to put together the clues in the hypothesis phase. This unfolds as a simple matching mini-game where we have to draw notable tracks from the right side of the screen and drop them on a hexagonal grid. Symbols adorn each piece to make this easier and we could revisit all the scenes in our spare time, but the process had all the charm of a boring puzzle. We usually had an idea of what happened and who the suspect was, but we still had to pull and drop tiles for 20 minutes before we could move on to the conclusion.
After this we went into our favorite phase – the solution phase. Here, a dramatic musical score builds suspense as Sakuraba’s character speaks to the overall suspects and reveals clues before declaring the killer. It was up to us to choose from the hypotheses that were formed to deduce what had happened. We sometimes found the description of the hypotheses too vague, with several choices almost indistinguishable from the others, which made us make a frustrating mistake.
When a mistake was made, humorous or exhorting scenes ensued before the game started us back to the hypothesis phase. Luckily we were able to rewind back where we screwed up. There are no alternative conclusions or divergent paths here – we had to uncover the unique reasoning to advance the plot. This added a bit of excitement to our choice, so when we made the right choice, we felt like absolute geniuses.
Our reward, which we adored, was when the villain (there is only one per case) stole the spotlight that was once revealed, to give an overdramatic explanation of their motives, which dripped us with several mysteries that we longed for answers on. After each solution phase, we could not wait to move on to the next event in the same way that we can not help but see just one more episode of a hit TV series, despite the boredom that awaited us in the hypothesis phase.
Conclusion
The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story is more like watching a murder mystery drama than playing a video game, and what gameplay there is often kills the pace of the story. While we enjoyed our time right away, you will have to ask yourself how interested you are in watching what is equivalent to a decent Japanese TV series with mediocre interactivity. For us, we will not let another FMV murder mystery developed by Square Enix escape our attention again, though we certainly hope they rework how we reveal the culprits.