Shuten Order Review
It truly is a big year for Kazutaka Kodaka and his company Too Kyo games. The Hundred Line will likely remain my favorite game of the year, and I’m still chipping away at the massive web of endings. Imagine my surprise to learn that Too Kyo collaborated with DMM games to release a second genre-bending adventure game, Shuten Order. Given that it’s written partly by Kodaka, I was pretty intrigued by the prospects of another project of his that was being worked on alongside a behemoth like Hundred Line. I don’t think Shuten is on the same level as that, but any game that gets playful with the genre it exists in is always something I’m keenly interested in.
Rei Shimobe finds herself waking up in a strange hotel room with amnesia, in the city of the cult Shuten Order. Two Angels greet her and explain that she was actually the cult’s Founder, who had recently been gruesomely murdered. The remains of her corpse are in the hands of the five ministers, and she has been tasked by the Angels to undertake God’s Trial. She has to find which of the five ministers killed her and what their motive was, so she can take her soul back to be fully revived.
Shuten Order’s main gimmick is that this investigation is split into a route for each minister, each housing a small adventure game with a unique gameplay style spanning three days in-game. The Minister of Justice has you go through a Mystery Adventure. The Minister of Health finds you in an escape game. The Minister of Science will see you bouncing between multiple characters in a traditional VN. The Minister of Education will see you try to romance three women in a Dating Sim. Lastly, the Minister of Security will have you play a 3D stalker horror game.
Each of these mini-games will take you about 5-10 hours to beat, and my total playtime clocked in at about 40 hours. They weren’t kidding either; you really do get five adventure games crammed into one package. Shuten Order is a VN Adventure game at the end of the day, but each route has a different set of mechanics on how you advance their linear stories. If you’ve ever played one of those plug-in play consoles with “10-games-in-1!” (mine was a SpongeBob one, if you were curious), then that’s about what you can expect out of the general experience here. There’s definitely a lot more care put into making the gimmick work, but this is really more of a sampler set of the many kinds of games housed under the Adventure Game genre.
The Mystery Adventure game is probably the closest to the main point-and-click style of gameplay you’ll find outside of the core routes. You find yourself with Kishiru Inugami as he handles a will dispute on an isolated island at the outskirts of the city. People start dying, and it’s up to you to gather evidence and solve the case. During investigations, you’ll utilize a Snapping mechanic to find odd statements or observations, but I found the logic of what is Snap-worthy to be a bit inconsistent. Unlike finding contradictions in a game like Ace Attorney, there were a couple of logic leaps that made Snapping feel awkward. The core mystery here does go off the rails in an enjoyable way, though, and picks up a lot near the end.
After that, I decided to check out the route promising the biggest diversion from a normal VN: the Stealth Action Horror. A serial killer named Nephilim is going around killing members of Shuten Order, and you team up with Manji Fushicho to investigate. Across your three days, you’ll find yourself in a variety of abandoned buildings, running around in a top-down 3D horror game vaguely reminiscent of the Clock Tower series. You cannot fight back, but are relentlessly stalked by Nephilim who can kill you in one shot. In each stage, you’ll have a series of puzzles to solve as you avoid his line of sight. I found this pretty easy to do, but it was still fun despite the simplicity. There isn’t a core cast to engage with like the other routes, so most of your time will be spent with just Manji. I’m thankful that she’s probably my favorite character in the game, so I didn’t mind too much.
As someone whose introduction to this genre started with Zero Escape, I figured I’d give the Ministry of Health route a shot. I was initially excited to see that the game turned into a first-person dungeon crawler. You and twenty other characters are trapped in a facility and forced to play a death game, but this really just involves walking through similar-looking hallways and solving the same three kinds of puzzles. The story and characters here are where it really shines, making the gameplay feel like an afterthought. This has probably some of the most emotional moments across all of the routes, with particularly good side characters. I wish they had focused more on escape room gameplay than just walking through corridors, but the reveals here were worth the time spent.
Next, I decided to play the Ministry of Education route, since I didn’t really care too much about the idea of a romance VN in a story with stakes like this. Rei finds herself poisoned by minister Honoka Kokushikan, and she is tasked with finding her hidden amongst the three Kokushikan sisters in a school. You have access to a school map with multiple locations to go to, and each day you do romance events to try and get closer to a specific sister. After the first day, you’re also responsible for defusing the Tokimeki Memorial-inspired “bombs” of other sisters since you’re technically three-timing the girls. Your only goal is not to die of poison, so it makes sense and almost feels like a commentary on how shallow dating sims can feel for completionists. This route hurts the most by only being a small-scale game, as there really is no challenge in managing your time on each day. I liked the characters, and the ending goes in a direction I really liked, but this has some of the weakest gameplay of Shuten Order.
I ended my experience across the five main routes with the Ministry of Science. This felt truly representative of all of Shuten’s peaks and valleys. Rei is trapped in an underground facility and has to work with minister Teko Ion to survive and protect one of Shuten Order’s greatest secrets on the bottom floor. You’ll be switching between multiple characters with flowcharts and branching paths that intertwine with one another. It was about twice the length of every other route, but it probably reveals the most about how the main setting works. You get deep into the weeds of the city’s history in ways I didn’t really get from the other routes. However, it’s far too long for its own good, bloated by exposition and spelling things out that didn’t really need it. Shuten has this problem with frequently flashing back to a scene that might have literally just happened minutes before, taking a large amount of the script and reminding the audience of things they already know about. I’m not against the idea of reminding the audience of information, but it’s egregious here. Despite my qualms, this was a good choice to pick for my final route since all of the main threads started piecing themselves together.
I think each of these routes feels bloated at times, but they all feel additive to the larger picture. By the end of each of them, there’s a seriously large reveal that changes your perception of the entire setting, making a lot of the tedium just barely worth it. The gameplay of each route wasn't the most fun, but they’re at least varied and interesting. I just wish they tried to innovate with the gameplay more, as it lets down a lot of the fun ideas the story gets into. I don’t think they were trying to reinvent the wheel, so I can see this being a great way for newcomers into the genre to see what this is capable of. Overall, these work well enough, but are carried by their endings.
What truly hampers all of this from being as effective as it could be is a really poor localization. I can’t speak to the accuracy of the translation, but it's apparent just by playing through it how messy the English script was handled. Outside of more exact issues, my immediate thoughts were that the prose came off as stilted. The real issues propped up as I dove into the routes. Typos and punctuation issues are abundant, and more than a few times, I saw whole texts bleed right out of their boxes. Sometimes a whole textbox will awkwardly start to the left outside of the frame. Words would blend together without spaces, or a line might awkwardly restate what a previous line stated.
There’s also a really strange issue that pops up on occasion, where the pronoun a character addresses another as can be wildly inconsistent. Some of this is justified by Rei being purposely androgynous. Characters not knowing her gender or the gender of the Founder is a plot point. Other times, it is very clear that the localization team had clearly missed some context or just made a mistake. How a character is referred to can change back and forth in a single scene, and it really didn’t seem intentional. Even outside of gender, sometimes possessive pronouns would be completely wrong. For example: In the Ministry of Education route, you visit the spot where the Founder's body was discovered with one of the girls. She (not Rei) says that “My body was discovered”. Or how in the Ministry of Health route, Rei comments that “I saw the corpse of my ex-boyfriend, and I’m perfectly fine” when referring to another character. Rei is not really a sassy or ironic character, so this line is obviously just wrong.
You will be able to play Shuten Order from start to finish and have an understanding of the plot, but it’s undeniable how much my immersion was shattered frequently just because of how awkward the English script is written and implemented into the game. Oftentimes, I was left confused at what a line was trying to convey, or why a character was speaking as if they stole a line from someone else in a play. The text formatting issues also make me wonder if this was properly playtested. The exact problems with Shuten Order tell me it really needed another editing pass. I sincerely hope it gets one in a future patch, but I’m not sure that will happen.
With only five occasionally enjoyable routes and a really poor localization, I did not have high expectations for Shuten Order’s finale. To my complete surprise, this game comes together brilliantly. It is genuinely masterful how each of the threads managed to piece together in the end, backed up with fascinating lore to justify the existence of the setting. There are some pacing issues, with parts that seem to go on a bit long, but ultimately, I ended up emotionally exhausted by how Shuten decided to conclude. I was shocked at just how much I loved the ending, and I have started to reflect positively on the whole story as a result. The themes are thought-provoking, the story is heartbreaking, and I was left with a lot of heavy feelings to process after the credits. It’s also far from a safe ending that you typically find in most modern games. It’s so good that it retroactively made me appreciate the previous 30 hours of game I was lukewarm on.
It’s also worth highlighting how superb the game is stylistically. The character art looks gorgeous, with a nice thick outline style and an abundance of bright colors. A lot of the story is presented in a comic-panel style with unique art to fit specific scenes. They made a lot of backgrounds for the main VN scenes as well, and if nothing else, the game was always a treat to the eyes. It is worth noting that there is an issue with the sprites not scaling properly when playing the game undocked on a Switch 2. Matching the outlandish art style is an equally fantastic Masafumi Takada soundtrack, sounding distinctly in the realm of his recent work but having a really unique sound.
Shuten Order is a frustrating game to enjoy. The writing team at Too Kyo Games clearly has a lot of ambition, and I respect the kind of game Shuten wants to be. Every route felt hampered by something, held back by execution that didn’t match the full potential. Despite everything, it lands with such a tremendous note that I think it’s worth experiencing this at some point. Your mileage may vary on whether you find the core routes to be predictable, depending on how invested you are in ADV games, but I do respect what they were going for. What it lacks in cohesion, it makes up for in spirit. If you can get past the blemishes, and there are a lot to look past, I can see a certain kind of person really getting a lot out of Shuten Order.