Welcome to a new series of articles I am taking on for the Spring and Summer of 2017. We’re going to deep-dive into my staggering backlog of games and see if there is any buried treasure, or discover if there is a reason why these games have been collecting dust on the shelf through multiple moves and life stages.
Most hardcore gamers have a backlog. Some are proud of it, others ashamed. I am most definitely in the “ashamed” category. I’ve spent the GDP of a small country on these games. The backlog traverses multiple generations of consoles, all the way from my very first console, a NES. I literally have hundreds of games I have never played, or started but didn’t finish. I consider myself a collector, but only of games that I like or think I will like – I don’t pick up rare games just because they are rare. But because I don’t read reviews most of the time, sometimes I get a dud.
How did things get this way? Probably for the same reasons you’ll hear a lot of people in similar situations say: Life got too busy, too many good games have been coming out, etc. It’s a great problem to have, but after a long, mentally-draining winter, I’m ready to spend more time on my hobbies again, and that means figuring out if I even want to own some of these games anymore.
So let’s start with an odd DS title from 2009 that was a port of a 2001 Playstation 2 game, Flower, Sun, and Rain.
The only reason this game popped up on my radar recently was because The Silver Case, the “prequel” to Flower, Sun, and Rain (FSR) has been remastered and re-released in America (for the first time ever). I originally picked FSR up without knowing anything about it, including that it was a Suda51 game. It looked a lot like other mystery games I had been enjoying, like Ace Attorney and 999, so between that and the cheap price tag, I was intrigued. Since The Silver Case was coming out, I thought I had better finally play FSR and use it to gauge whether or not I should get The Silver Case.
But it turns out that a Suda51 mystery game is not like a “normal” Japanese mystery game, and knowing what I know now about Suda51 games, I probably would not have bothered picking this up way back when.
Suda51, for the uninitiated, is a really interesting guy, and has a lot of die-hard followers. You can tell that he has a lot of fun developing his games and doesn’t take them too seriously, because most of them are batshit crazy. I have never actually played one of his games, but I’ve watched Jack play quite a few (No More Heroes, Lollipop Chainsaw and Shadows of the Damned, for starters), and they play out like B-movies (in a less serious way than say, Resident Evil). There’s too much chaos on the screen at any given time for me to really enjoy the experience – it would stress me out too much to actually play through a game (which is why I wouldn’t pick up a Suda51 game on purpose), but they can be fun to watch if you catch a particularly ridiculous moment.
FSR never came to America the first time around on Playstation 2, so I’m not sure why a localization company decided to pick up the DS version – maybe there was some sort of cult popularity thanks to it being a Suda51 game. But the game was not all that hard to find like a niche Japanese title normally would be, so either there was little demand, or something else was going on.
I think it was the “something else”…
I only made it through 10 minutes of FSR before I had to shut my 3DS down, take a deep, cleansing breath, and toss the game on the “sell” pile of DVDs we have growing in our dining room. I know what you are thinking…how could I possibly judge the game that fast and not really give it a shot? Well, for one thing, I am really too old for this shit. I used to feel guilt about not finishing a book or game I bought, but not anymore – you eventually realize that your time is not worth the money you spent.
But also, the game threw everything it had at me in those first 10 minutes, and I was all “No ma’am”.
The graphics were horrible – and I want it to be known for the record that I do NOT care about graphics. I played through Undertale and didn’t bat an eye. But the opening video for the game was half real-life and half-CGI, and it just came through as a blurry, pixelated mess. I don’t think they actually enhanced anything from the PS2 version – I think they just ripped some low-quality video and slapped it down on the DS card. You know what it reminded me of? A really bad movie clip from a Sega CD game.
After the opening video, you go through several lines of stilted dialogue that is in true hipster fashion trying to be ironic, but failing miserably. You are treated to a long walk in a huge parking lot looking for another character, and then you encounter the game’s first puzzle.
The “puzzle” consists of picking a jack (like an AV jack) that matches a hole that person has somewhere on their body (giggity) so you can “hack” into them and get more information for your investigation. Then, you need to enter a code. The jack part is not difficult as long as you can discern shapes – the code is where some investigation of your surroundings comes in. The first guy you meet wants you to hack into him so he can verify your identity – the code ends up being one that you, the player, make up (a birthday). The game does something that I hate – it tells you to look in the instruction booklet to see what the code is. I know you end up making up the code (the booklet just says to make it up and write it down so you don’t forget it), but what if you didn’t have the original instructions? And yes, you could just look it up on the internet, but I’m always a little sensitive to the still very-realistic scenario of people not having access to the internet everywhere they go. (I’m also still scarred by Final Fantasy IX’s PlayOnline guide…oh my god.)
So yeah, the opening gimmick did not intrigue me.
As I was running around in the parking lot, I came across a note that described a convoluted lost and found system for a hotel (oh yeah, you’re investigating a hotel…I never discovered why in-game) and I realized that this was going to be the basis for puzzles going forward – find one of these notes and crack it to get the prize. I tried to solve the puzzle to claim the lost and found item by counting how many cars were in the parking lot, as the hint indicated, but kept getting a FAIL after I plugged in the correct jack. So I eventually abandoned that, went to the next puzzle that opened the gate to the hotel…and suddenly decided after solving it (the birthday you chose, backwards) that I didn’t want to walk through. I officially had zero interest in learning what was wrong at the hotel and didn’t care about why my player avatar was the guy who just HAD to solve it.
So that’s when I shut off my 3DS and wrote this one off.
Excruciating.
I won’t go into the spoilers I found for the game after the fact (I found them while looking up reviews to see if I was alone in my initial reaction to this game – turns out I wasn’t), but from what I understand, the big reveal of what the problem is at the hotel and how it eventually gets resolved would not have been satisfactory to a player who spent hours upon hours backtracking between locations, solving tons of hacking puzzles and having not played The Silver Case (which let’s face it, most American gamers will not have done that until yesterday, when it finally came out in the US). It’s twisted and weird – which you would expect from Suda51 – but not in a way where most Japanese games can get away with it even if it doesn’t make sense. This is just weird to be weird, from what I’ve read.
I’m super glad to have not invested a ton of time in this one – but in my research, I learned I have yet another Suda51 DS game (Contact), that was a really early DS title…so I may need to try that one next and see if it fares any better.
The Damage:
- Wallet: $ (According to the receipt tucked inside, I only paid $15.)
- Time: 10 minutes of play time, and I spent no time searching for it – bought it on a whim during my once-weekly Gamestop jaunts.
- Shelf Space: While a small DS game, I am bitter that my buying this in 2011 meant that I packed it for at least 3 moves.
- Still available? You can pick it up for a pittance on Amazon – probably a little harder to find any DS games in stores these days, unless you have a really good used game store nearby. Mine is going to the local Half-Price Books to wait for the next sucker.
By Moonlight 