LogFAQs > #939328786

The Silver Case (PS4)

Between "older" and "newer" (I consider No More Heroes to be the start of "newer") Suda51, I vastly prefer his older version. He may not have had the budget to do what he wanted to do during the earlier years of Grasshopper Manufacture, but he had a lot more to offer than the shallow, anime-esque crap that are among his more famous recent works.

Killer7 is one of my favorite games, and I hold Flower, Sun, and Rain in high regard as well. At its best, The Silver Case sits among those. The overarching story is interesting, the audio and visual presentation (in the remaster at any rate) is sublime, and even though the cast of characters is pretty huge, I found most of them to be interesting.

It is unfortunate much is holding it back. The big thing is that it is so boring. The opening case made it seem like it was going to be a rough-around-the-edges adventure game with puzzles and VN-style dialog presentation (such as Cinq games like Hotel Dusk/Last Window and Trace Memory), but it ended up being 90+% VN and the rest a "walking" simulator as there were barely any puzzles outside of the first case. Without doing research, I have doubts if this was the original design that Suda51 wanted, but as this was the debut game of the company he founded, he probably had to make it into this format for financial reasons. Even so, it could have been designed better in light of any financial constraints, such as the aforementioned Cinq games.

There are two perspectives in the game, broken down by case categories Transmitter and Placebo. Transmitter is the bulk of the game, while each Placebo case is based on Transmitter cases. You have to complete them both to finish the game, and the Placebo cases are mind-numbingly tedious. You do the same thing over and over just to get small scraps of info that you didn't get in the Transmitter cases that they revolve around. I can count the amount of enjoyable segments in all six of the Placebo cases on one hand.

While Killer7 and Flower, Sun, and Rain were quirky and endearingly inscrutable, they were able to achieve that in part by good efforts at worldbuilding. Here, I felt like the world-building wasn't adequately executed. Being essentially a VN, it was pure exposition-based, so without the use of the environment and how much ground they needed to cover, it was an exercise in futility from the start.

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KCF can't actually be a real person but he is - greengravy
If you smell what the rock is cooking he's cooking crap - ertyu