428: Shibuya Scramble Review: A Beautifully Messy Web

In 2008, the visual novel 428: Fuusasareta Shibuya de (or 428: Shibuya Scramble in English) was released on the Wii. Featuring a tightly-plotted story which revolves around the fates of five different playable characters, it was well-received by multiple outlets, being one of only thirty games at the time of this review to ever receive a perfect score of 40 out of 40 by the popular gaming magazine Famitsu (at the time, it was the ninth-ever such game).

Naturally, when I found out about this prestigious game, and that it had been re-released on Steam with an English translation, my interest was piqued. What makes this story so good as to garner a score even higher than my favourite visual novel, Virtue’s Last Reward? Will it hold up as well nearly twenty years later? Or is it going to be another shitshow that I don’t enjoy, like Baldr Sky? All of these questions and more were going through my head, and I’ll admit that I was a little hesitant to purchase the game.

Thankfully, my fears wound up being unfounded. While it hasn’t managed to dethrone Virtue’s Last Reward from being my favourite visual novel, it’s nevertheless a well-crafted experience which more than earns its perfect score from Famitsu, and which I found highly engaging and enjoyable to play. Let’s get into why in this review of 428: Shibuya Scramble.

Story

The game’s story begins with an engaging hook: a young woman named Maria Osawa has been kidnapped, and her fraternal twin Hitomi has been sent out with a briefcase full of ransom money. You begin the game as the detective Shinya Kano, one of many police officers assigned to watch over the scene and stop whoever arrives to pick up the briefcase. Naturally things soon go awry, and the second protagonist, former street punk Achi Endo, is introduced. Before you know it, Achi’s run off with Hitomi, Kano’s been sent to follow the briefcase, now in the hands of a syndicate, and we haven’t even been introduced to the other three main characters yet.

Before I get further into describing the story, let me ask you a question: do you like, or did you like in the past, The Simpsons? I loved watching it as a kid, and one of my favourite episodes was Trilogy of Error. For those of you who don’t remember what it was about, it was an episode which showed a single day from the differing perspectives of Homer, Bart, and Lisa. Although all three have their own individual goals and stories, their paths continually intertwine and affect each other. Oftentimes, a plot element or mystery is introduced in one scene, with the reason for its presence or its resolution not being revealed until we see another character’s perspective.

Keeping that in mind, 428: Shibuya Scramble is basically Trilogy of Error on crack. We’ve got not three, but five differing perspectives, all weaving in and out of each other, just to start with. Sometimes we’ll have a character briefly cross paths with another character, and the tease at what’s happening for them concurrently always leads to a temptation to jump over to the other character’s path. Sometimes another character’s path will have them appear to be in an incredibly dangerous or dramatic situation, but when we eventually jump over, we find that it’s nowhere near as important as it seemed, leading to a hilarious punchline.

A punchline? In this game that begins with a tense ransom exchange? Yeah, that’s one of the things about the game that surprised me - for as serious as its story gets, it also never forgets to sprinkle in some light-hearted and comedic moments to keep things from getting too heavy. Multiple points of this visual novel had me bursting out loud laughing, and I never felt that any of them spoiled a scene in any way - they were consistently executed to perfection.

In fact, it’s not just comedy that the game does well - each different playable character’s story is essentially in a different genre, and each is executed very well. Aside from the aforementioned Kano and Achi, we’ll also follow…

• Freelance reporter Minoru Minorikawa, who strives to investigate and write enough articles to fill out a new issue of a magazine, so that he can save its editor from financial debt

• Hitomi and Maria’s father, Kenji Osawa, a virologist who bounces between helping the detectives assigned to the hostage case, investigating a mysterious information leak regarding the deadly Ua virus, and rediscovering what exactly his family means to him

• Tama, a young woman in a mascot costume who’s assisting in a get-rich-quick scheme in the hopes that she’ll get the money necessary to purchase a mysterious pendant which has caught her attention

Naturally, the plots eventually converge in on one another, but how and why is something that I won’t be spoiling in this review. What I will say is that the overall genre of the game ends up being a thriller, with a mastermind pulling multiple strings, a deadly threat against the district of Shibuya, and multiple races against time. When the game isn’t being hilarious or heartwarming, it’s generally either setting up a mystery which you’ll be itching to have solved, or dropping a bombshell which will have you reeling from the implications.

Here, for example, are some of the excellent cliffhangers which several chapters end on:

• A character discovers that an ally of theirs has a bugged accessory, all but saying that said ally isn’t on their side

• The player finds out that one character isn’t who they’ve been presented as being

• One character discovers that a close relative of theirs has been working with a character who has been a persistent threat throughout the story

• A character has to watch their friend be stabbed, with it remaining unclear as to whether or not they’ll survive

• Minoru Minorikawa’s laptop runs out of power, right when he was about to get some writing done

While all of these moments, and the story overall, is very engaging and well-written, I do have one notable complaint about it: its pacing. For the most part the game flows well, but there are several times in the story when a chapter will end on a dramatic cliffhanger, and upon starting the next chapter, the cliffhanger will be resolved quickly. There’s nothing wrong with that, but what’s less forgivable is that the end of the subsequent chapter will end with a similar or identical cliffhanger to the previous one, and so it feels as though most of that character’s storyline for the chapter has been killing time. 

There are also times when you can tell that the writers weren’t sure how to stretch the content out sufficiently. Each chapter of the game takes place over an in-universe hour, and there are several instances where we’ll be told that a sequence of a character thinking or talking went for as long as fifteen or even thirty minutes. I noticed that several times a character would have their particular story for a chapter end around thirty or forty minutes into it, and yet when the new chapter began we were already at the start of the next hour. This is ultimately a bit of a nitpick - off the top of my head all scenarios justified why we would be in the same place at the beginning of the next hour, and I’d rather solutions like these than cramming unnecessary content into the scene - but it did nevertheless stick out to me once I noticed it.

If you can forgive these issues, however - and you should; they don’t negatively impact the stories that much - you’ll find a highly engaging story within 428: Shibuya Scramble. Some parts of it might slow down a little, some of the comedy might not be to everybody’s liking, and you might not like the use of photos of actors and full-motion video to present its scenes, but that doesn’t change the fact that the stories of the characters all weave together expertly, and culminate in a highly satisfactory and engaging ending.

So, how’s the gameplay, by contrast?

Gameplay

You’d be forgiven for assuming that 428: Shibuya Scramble has no gameplay, given the heavy emphasis on the story and the time period in which it came out, but you would ultimately be wrong. Players are able to affect the story of the game and where things end up, although there’s ultimately only one true route, with all other paths eventually leading to a game over for one reason or another.

The primary gameplay method for the game is choices: at multiple points in the story, the player will be presented with at least two choices for the current character to take. While some of these will lead directly into a bad end for that character, where the choices really shine is how they’re integrated into the way that the different routes all twist together: namely, that sometimes a choice won’t affect your current character in any way, but will affect the route of another character. For example, at one point Kano is asked whether the police should release the name of a person who was killed earlier that day. His story will continue regardless of what he chooses, but another character’s route will end badly depending upon whether or not they discover that person was killed.

As a result of this, you’ll frequently be second-guessing what choice you should make, wondering what the ripple effect of it will be. At multiple times in the game you’ll make a choice and not discover for over an hour that it’s ended the story for another character, meaning that the story as a whole can’t progress forwards. This sounds as though it should be frustrating, but for the most part it’s fine - almost all bad ends give a heavy hint as to what choice should have been made instead, and the game’s time chart makes jumping between different characters and points in the story a very quick and easy process. Plenty of the bad ends lean towards a comedic direction, too, so they’re still entertaining in their own right. As a result, bad ends feel more like a well-thought out part of the game, as opposed to a difficult wall to overcome.

No, if you’re looking for a difficult wall to overcome, the game provides them in the form of the Keep Out points. At several points in the story, you’ll be unable to progress through the current character’s story, represented with a large banner with the words KEEP OUT. How do you get past this, you ask? It’s simple: you just need to go to another character’s route, look out for some red text which refers to the character with the KEEP OUT and the time that it refers to, and then interact with that text. This will jump you back to that character’s route, now able to proceed past the barrier.

As a mechanic, I have mixed feelings about this. The intended idea of it seems to be to prevent players from finding out certain information in a route before reading related information elsewhere, which is probably for the best. Most Keep Out points also create a cliffhanger when they appear, which does create anticipation and tension, and it can be incredibly exciting to find the jump point to clear one. In addition, most jump points are fairly obvious, and they’re marked in the time chart, making it easy to jump back to one should you find the jump point before the related Keep Out.

The issues that I have with Keep Out points are twofold: firstly, there’s no in-universe reason for why the story is temporarily halted. We simply get a giant banner slapped in front of us, and when we eventually resume the story, there’s no recognition of what’s just happened. The result is that more than a few of them feel a bit artificial, as though they’re present just to build anticipation and keep us from sticking with one character for too long.

The other issue with Keep Outs relates to the jump points. Did you notice that earlier I said that most jump points are fairly obvious? Towards the end of the game several jump points are difficult to find, leading to a lot of trial-and-error on the player’s part. One requires players to give an intentionally wrong answer to a simple question, with there being no in-universe reason for why the current character would provide that answer. 

Another requires the player to infer that a certain action, which both seemingly has no consequences and has no particular emphasis placed on it, needs to be taken. When reaching a related bad end further down the time chart, it’s difficult to infer where things went wrong, and consequently I’m not too proud to admit that I needed to use a guide for both this jump point and the aforementioned incorrect answer one. These were some of the only times that I felt the game was being a bit too obtuse for its own good, and that it was making me jump through hoops unnecessarily.

Speaking of frustrating mechanics, there’s a surprising lack of quality-of-life features for the game. This is likely due to its age - I’m unsure how common the features were in visual novels back in 2008 - but I see little reason why they couldn’t have been added when the game was re-released. I’ve mentioned several features before which visual novels should be sure to include, and unfortunately 428: Shibuya Scramble is lacking both text speed controls and fast forward functionality.

Consequently, for as much as I enjoyed the characters and the story of the game, I did groan a little whenever I reached a bad end, knowing that even once I’d gone to an earlier point and made a different decision, I’d potentially have to re-read most of the scene leading up to the bad end up until the point that things changed. This would have been much more tolerable with a fast forward option, or even just an option to have the text appear faster. Thankfully, there is a fan-made patch which helps with some of this, but there’s no way to adjust the speed to your liking, and the instant speed option apparently has issues.

Post-game Content

The following section isn’t going to apply to some people, as they’ll be happy to finish the game and then move onto whatever’s next on their list, but given my feelings about it, I’d be remiss to not mention it. 428: Shibuya Scramble offers a good amount of content that’s unlocked once you’ve beaten the main story, but unfortunately, very little of it matched the quality of the main game for me.

Firstly, the player will unlock one of two different side stories, depending upon whether they merely reached the end of the game or achieved the true end of the game. How do you reach the true end, you ask? It’s mostly the same as reaching the normal ending of the game, but you need to have several characters make decisions which give no overt indication that they’ll affect anything. Oh, and you need to see all eighty-five different bad ends. While the player has already probably seen a good chunk of them - I think that I was somewhere in the high forties at the end of the game - that’s still a lot of reading to be doing, and you’ll need to make sure to go back and make the right choices in the time chart after viewing each one, so that you can continue to jump around at your leisure.

The two side stories are fine, I guess. One of them follows Achi’s sister, and is mostly satisfactory albeit really hoping that players will find its ending to be incredibly sad. The other story follows Canaan, a friend of Maria’s, and serves as a sort of prequel to the game. This was apparently popular enough to generate an anime spin-off of the game, and while I didn’t mind this story either, it felt a bit overly verbose and could have been a bit snappier in its pacing.

But wait, there’s more! Beyond the two side stories, the game also offers a quiz. Answering questions correctly unlocks more side stories, each one taking a few minutes to read through and focusing on a different side character from the main game. I found that the quality of these varied quite a bit, with some being incredibly funny or insightful, and others feeling like a waste of time. Padding things out further is that to unlock some of these character side stories, you need to play through to very specific parts of the main game and then enter codes which slowly appear on-screen. It feels like an unnecessarily complex extra step, and I don’t see a reason why the stories couldn’t have just been added to a menu as the quiz questions are correctly answered.

Finally, there are two more pieces of post-game content. One is another side story, this one focusing on…an in-universe fictional character who only appears on Achi’s shirt? It’s exactly as odd as it sounds, and is another piece of content that requires players to jump to very specific parts of the story to see everything for it. The other piece of post-game content is two hidden messages from the developer, labelled “Conspiracy” and “True Conspiracy” respectively. These feel more like in-jokes between developers than anything truly rewarding, and yet again feel like they’re more effort to unlock than they’re worth.

With all of the above taken into account, I can’t say that I felt the post-game content is really all that worth it. If it was all unlocked and available in a menu after completion of the game then that would help soften the blow significantly, but so much of it requires reading and re-reading portions of the game that we’ve already finished hours ago, with very little justification for why. It’s a real pity, too, as it leads to the game ending with more of a whimper than a bang.

Conclusion

At the beginning of this review, I mentioned that 428: Shibuya Scramble more than earns its perfect 40 score, and that’s a statement that I’d gladly stand by. At its worst points - trying to find the necessary jump points in the late game, rereading a section to see whether you’ve avoided a bad ending - it can feel like a bit of a slog, but it’s a testament to how strong its story and characters are that you’ll be willing to keep trying and to see what happens next. 

While the game could do with some improvements - some quality-of-life features added, and less tedious methods of unlocking all of the post-game content - the core of it is nevertheless incredibly strong, and maintains a compelling momentum throughout the entirety of the story. Provided that thrillers aren’t a complete anathema to you, there’s little reason not to play it - I’d find it hard to believe that even the least engaged player wouldn’t at least crack a smile at some of the jokes, or find at least one character that entertains them. 428: Shibuya Scramble is not a perfect game, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a damn good one, and that it’s not worth your time.