One of the games from my New Year’s Resolutions from last year that I finished up early this year was 428 Shibuya Scramble. However, I haven’t reviewed that on the blog yet, so it’s time to rectify that.

428 Shibuya Scramble is, structurally, what you get when the concepts of “Hyperlink Cinema” are applied to a Visual Novel. The story follows a group of about 5 or so people, each with their own individual stories which all end up intersecting in one day in Shibuya. The Visual Novel takes a branching structure for the game’s story, with decisions made with one character having repercussions that impact other characters, often with impacts that are not immediately apparent.

This also comes with a variety of tones. One of the perspective characters is a tabloid reporter with a bit of a caustic perspective, and his story is frequently on the more comedic side, but it also frequently intersects with other major plots, like the more serious plot thread around a police detective investigating a kidnapping and ransom handoff, or a more comedic thread about a character attempting to recover some missing weight loss drugs for a demonstration. It would be very easy for there to be some tonal whiplash, particularly since the player could encounter these plots in different orders. Fortunately the game makes this work fairly well. When the plot for a particular segment gets more wacky, the tone for the more serious threads mellows. The game also puts some blocks in at certain points on plot threads that require other characters to release the block. That keeps one plot thread from getting too far ahead, and helps moderate the tone of the story.

There are still some stumbling blocks. For starters, the game uses photographs of characters instead of art of the characters. This, on its own, is fine. However, the structure and presentation leads to those characters taking on some exaggerated mannerisms that look stilted and unnatural on human actors. I was able to roll with that, but it’s definitely something that other players could bounce off of hard.

Additionally, while the game manages tone well, the subject matter of these plots during the early episodes of the game are all over the map. It’s at a point where I spent the early aspects of the game wondering how a couple threads in particular were going to intersect.

I did like this game a lot, and I do think that it’s a good introductory visual novel.

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