Review of 428: Shibuya Scramble

Contains spoilers for plot pacing, otherwise none

I finished 428: Shibuya Scramble a few weeks ago¹. I had started it about a year ago, but played only about 1/3 of it then before taking a break. It's a visual novel that follows five people in Shibuya on the same day as their lives intertwine with each other. There's a mystery to solve, and you make choices that affect the plot while jumping between character perspectives. Although it is fairly linear (most bad options quickly result in a BAD END), figuring out the right combinations and jumps gets quite challenging toward the end. I thought it was quite reminscient of Virtue's Last Reward and Zero Time Dilemma, and enjoyed the mechanics.

Unfortunately, having played a decent collection of visual novels like Danganronpa, the Zero Escape series, and STEINS;GATE, I feel like this story was not quite strong enough to justify the slow introduction. VNs have a trend of gradually building up to a turning point, and this can be worth it if the character development and hidden connections makes the climax more powerful. I felt like 428 didn't get really good until about 2/3 into the story, which wasn't enough to satisfy the slog up to that point (even though the last 1/3 was excellent). The game itself is a bit longer than S;G: I needed 19 hours to get the main ending of 428, while I managed to get multiple endings of S;G in 22 hours. S;G also had its turning point earlier in the story: in my opinion, it happens near the end of Chapter 4, which is just before the halfway mark. Even then, I think a lot of people can get turned off by Okabe's behaviour and not even make it to that point, so 428's length is not that great in that regard.

One unique feature of 428 is that all the characters are real people. There are even a few live-action sequences, but even during the still-background scenes, the background is of real Shibuya and real actors. I think this was quite neat, but it didn't have a huge impact on my enjoyment of the game. I've visited Shibuya myself a few times, and it was cool to recognize a lot of locations in the game. I hear there's going to be a sequel though with the same concept, which I'm excited for!

One annoying aspect was that the text couldn't be fast-forwarded or skipped, even if you had watched the scene before. Due to the jumping nature of the game, I often needed to revisit previous scenes, and it was frustrating to see slow-motion text for a dramatic moment that I had already seen. Thankfully, the game has scene markers at regular intervals, so at most I only needed to rewatch a minute or two, but it was still annoying. I thought the controls were great otherwise. You can easily jump from any point in a scene, and you can tell if modifying a previous choice had any impact by viewing the timeline immediately after to see if the future becomes unknown. The game autosaves at every scene and the UI is fairly intuitive and similar to other VNs.

The localization was pretty good. I started noticing a few grammar errors toward the end, mostly around having an extra word or the incorrect conjugation, but it didn't have a significant impact on my enjoyment. There's a lot of text in visual novels, and I've caught the rare mistake in a published book too.

I liked the music. I think the main theme (世界はそれでも変わりはしない) is quite iconic, and the music during dramatic and emotional scenes was always fitting. I'm actually surprised the theme doesn't play every time you open the game! I think this is pretty common for VNs and a good way to make that melody even more familiar to the player.

Overall, I'm happy I continued to play the game to the end. I got the game on sale so it was only a few bucks, and this story is definitely worth that price. If you're new to visual novels, I think this is a pretty good introduction. It has much more explicit controls than STEINS;GATE, has very few "annoying"/fanservice characters and hardly covers any explicit topics.

4/5