#backblog

The story of the game is very simple for a visual novel and I’m assuming there has to be some more context given in the manual (which I wasn’t able to find any scans of) since the game starts you off in the middle of the action and never really fully tells you what’s going on.  The notes that came with the fan translation establish that you are searching for your two friends, whose interstellar shuttle has mysteriously disappeared.  While searching for them, you are ambushed by a space dragon (which is where the game picks up) and rescued by a mysterious woman named Jean.  You spend the game traveling between a few different planets searching for your friends.  It’s an extremely short and bare-bones story, almost feeling like they established the framework for a story and never really filled it out with anything substantial.  You can see everything the game has to offer in terms of its script inside of an hour.  It’s honestly pretty bad.

More than any of the other games I’ve played so far, this one makes use of a point-and-click interface.  All of the commands (look, talk, use, etc.) are executed based on the position of your cursor on the screen.  The commands themselves are toggled by holding the B button and using the D-pad.  It’s a bit clunky but not nearly as unintuitive as the controls for the move command.  When you select move you can toggle between different destinations represented as arrows on the screen.  You’re actually meant to press B to cycle through these, but when I first started the game and was trying to figure the controls out, I thought that maybe you need to hold B and use the D-pad (since the D-pad by itself does nothing).  And this does actually visually cycle between the different destinations but does not actually select them, leading to a confusing moment where I thought both exits from one of the early areas led to the same place. 

As I stated above, the game is very short and it seems like the strategy Square used to pad out the length is a couple of maze sections (one when navigating the depths of space and one when navigating Alias’s desert moon).  But they aren’t real mazes like the ones in Portopia or Princess Tomato.  It’s more like a series of screens that look exactly the same that give you three directions to go in.  Since you can’t really tell where you are or where you’re supposed to be going, you just kind of have to bumble around until you find your destination.  The closest thing it really has to tough puzzles is a sequence where if you do anything but use your gun on a character, they immediately kill you.  But you can continue again from right outside the room where that takes place so it’s no big deal anyway.

The character designs of the game were actually done by none other than Sunrise (known for Gundam, Cowboy Bebop, etc.) and they look fine for the most part.  The character portraits are the only thing in the game that look halfway decent.  All of the background art, which is what you’re looking at for most of the game, looks very crude.  The only character graphics which I don’t like at all are Jean’s, which have an atrocious white and bright teal color palette.  The game has only minimal sound effects and only one song that plays during the title screen.  The sole piece of music in the game is actually pretty good though, one of Nobuo Uematsu’s earliest music credits.

So, obviously I don’t care for this game very much.  But it’s just because there’s nothing to it.  It offers nothing substantial in terms of story, characters, gameplay, graphics, sound, or anything else.  Hell, I barely have anything to say about it at all.  But it’s short and it’s one of Square’s earliest games, so maybe it’s interesting as an oddity?  I dunno, but next time I’ll be playing something with much more meat to it, mostly because it’s actually a compilation including six different games - Jake Hunter Detective Story: Memories of the Past.  Until then, take it easy~

The setup of the game is a simple murder mystery: Bill Robbins, a wealthy businessman in the town of Liberty, was found dead of multiple stab wounds to the back and it’s up to J.B. Harold to bring the perpetrator of this brutal crime to justice.  The manual provides a bit more context, adding that it was Jad Gregory, a retired detective who acted as J.B.’s mentor, who asked him to take the case.  The game itself cold opens into a protracted noir-soaked opening set to some sexy sax music then plays some narration providing the details of the murder and pretty much throws you into the deep end.  There’s not even a title screen really, which is pretty strange.  Every time you boot up the game, you need to skip the opening cutscene, after which you’ll be in a new game.  And from there you go into the options screen and load your save file.  You also need to turn on the voice acting from here every time, since it’s off by default and the option does not save.

The majority of the game is spent traveling the city and interviewing the many, many people that are connected to the murder, many of which are Bill’s extended family and friends.  You can ask them about their personal details (name, occupation, blood type, alibi, etc.), their relationship with any of the other characters you know of, and about any other miscellaneous topics you’ve learned about, such as other crimes that have taken place.  Eventually, you’ll learn something through these interviews, such as that a character was sighted near the murder site near the time of the murder, that will justify a search warrant, which you need to request from the prosecutor’s office.  This will allow you to actually find evidence in the various locations which may allow you to request an arrest warrant.  And once you start making arrests and further pressing people in the interrogation room, you gain even more information and are able to start the cycle all over again until you are able to finally piece together who the true culprit behind the murder is.

It’s an extremely open-ended game, almost to the point of seeming structure-less.  Unlike in Portopia, where you can go pretty much anywhere from the start but are kept steered in the right direction by events that occur at the police station, everything in Murder Club comes down to the player’s own intuition.  At no point after learning a piece of information during an interview does J.B. narrate to himself that this makes such-and-such seem suspicious enough to justify a search or anything like that, you the player have to reach that conclusion on your own.  This is both good and bad.  It makes the game very difficult without brute forcing it (ask everyone about everything then request search/arrest warrants for everything, rinse, repeat).  The analysis and investigation screens (accessed from the options menu in the police station) provide some automated notes: a character relationship chart and metrics on how much evidence, information, etc. you have (as well as a vague hint from Jad Gregory) respectively, but they’re not really helpful.

But on the flip-side, the lack of feedback from J.B. as a character or from the game at all makes it feel somewhat empty.  The majority of the game is spent interviewing suspects, but because J.B. lacks any dialogue of his own and you’re just hearing a one-sided conversation, it feels a bit dull, like you might as well just be reading their LinkedIn profiles or something.  It really feels like it would benefit from some dialogue to characterize J.B. or at least an intermediary character who is with you throughout the game, adding a bit of flavor, like Yasu or Percy from Portopia and Princess Tomato respectively.  The fact that they give him a name and establish that this is his first case (as if setting up that this is the prologue to the career of a legendary detective) rather than just having him be a nameless detective for the player to project onto (like Boss in Portopia) and then having him act like a blank slate anyway seems weird.

It’s a shame, because despite the somewhat flawed execution, the twists and turns and ultimate conclusion of the case are very good.  It’s a classic example of a murder mystery going deep enough to become tangled in another unsolved mystery which must also be solved to bring both cases to a close (think the DL-6 Incident in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney).  Of course, this conspiracy involves the titular Murder Club.  While the game is difficult, its title provides a bit of meta-knowledge that gives the player sort of an artificial lead early on.  Anytime a character mentioned that they were a part of some strange club I had never heard of, I immediately became suspicious of that.  But I’m sure the writers accounted for this, since there are multiple suspicious sounding clubs like this in the game, only one of which is the Murder Club.

Unfortunately, the graphics and sound of the game (at least this version) also leave a bit to be desired.  The majority of the graphics in the game resemble digitized photographs of the various locations and characters you meet, with the only outlier being the map of the city which resembles a map in a strategy game more than anything.  The photorealistic look is an obvious choice to make, since the game is going for a more serious noir feel, but the TurboGrafx doesn’t really have the color depth to do this justice, so the character portraits often end up looking somewhat washed out and bland.

The game has three CD audio music tracks: "Quivive” which plays during the opening, “Gimlet” which plays on the options menu, and “The Long Good-Bye” which plays during the end credits.  All three of these songs are pretty good and wholly appropriate for the genre, with “Quivive” sounding exactly as moody as a noir game needs to and “Gimlet” resembling lounge music.  However, the majority of the time you’ll be hearing the various PSG tracks played elsewhere in the game, which get pretty repetitive.  The voice acting, on the other hand, isn’t half bad, especially for the time.  In 1991, the game was light years ahead of some of its peers in this regard.

Ultimately, while I did enjoy the narrative that this game laid out and the challenge it presented, I felt myself wanting to know more about this J.B. Harold guy, since the game is named after him after all.  But really, it’s pointless to wonder about how the game would be if it were written in a completely different manner.  I just wish some of the later versions, like the ones for the DS and Switch, were released here, since the audiovisual presentation of those looks much better from what I’ve seen.  Unfortunately, because the English release of this game was on the TurboGrafx-CD and the English release of its sequel, Manhattan Requiem, was on the Pioneer LaserActive, the series was doomed to obscurity in the West.  So, this will probably be the last I see of old J.B. Harold.  Next time, I’ll be covering Squaresoft’s Crystal Dragon.  Until then, take it easy~

The story of the game goes that, one day in the Salad Kingdom (which is, uh... mostly inhabited by anthropomorphic fruits and vegetables), Minister Pumpkin betrayed King Broccoli, kidnapping his daughter, Princess Tomato, and stealing the Turnip Emblem, which gives the right to rule.  He then retreated to his castle in the Zucchini Mountains and sent out his farmies (human farmers who eat vegetables, which of course makes them the bad guys) to terrorize the citizens.  It’s up to you, Sir Cucumber, the bravest knight in the land to rescue Princess Tomato and restore peace to the land.  Along to help you is Percy, a young persimmon who you help in the first chapter and becomes your squire, essentially fulfilling the some of the same role as Yasu in Portopia by acting as your narrator and sometimes giving you advice.

You spend the game traveling from location to location, gathering clues and talking to various cute and wacky characters.  Structurally, the game is a lot more linear than Portopia, being divided into nine chapters (or four in the PC versions).  It’s a much longer game too, but thankfully there’s a password system you can use to resume your progress from the beginning of whichever chapter you last reached.  Each chapter takes you to a different location in the Salad Kingdom, from the Celery Forest to the capital city of Saladoria to the resistance base (where you meet Princess Tomato’s sister, who is a regular human for some reason) and eventually to Minister Pumpkin’s castle itself where you finally meet the princess and have a showdown with the villain.

Obviously, it’s a very lighthearted and cutesy game, especially in the Famicom version, which probably contributed to its success with a female audience in Japan (I remember Arino mentioning a few female celebrities that considered this game a favorite of their childhood in the game’s GameCenter CX episode).  It’s also a pretty humorous game, with a few gags that actually made me laugh out loud.  While Sir Cucumber acts as the silent protagonist, Percy actually has a fairly fleshed out personality thanks to all of his dialogue over the course of the game, coming across as a bit cowardly.  There’s also a gameplay purpose he serves at the end of every chapter where he gets rid of all the items in your inventory that are no longer necessary.  But because of the way its presented, usually as him losing the items, it makes him seem like a bit of a fuck up.

The game itself plays very similarly to Portopia, seeming to wear the influence on its sleeve in a couple of ways.  The original PC versions, like the PC versions of Portopia, featured a simple “verb noun” text parser.  And like the Famicom version of Portopia, the Famicom version of this game replaced that with a menu, with the overall HUD even looking kinda similar..  Also like Portopia, the Famicom version added a few first-person mazes, but apart from the third one they’re actually much simpler to navigate than the one in Portopia, though it can still be somewhat easy to become disoriented.

Another thing the Famicom version added, which is very strange, is the combat system.  The combat, or finger wars as the game calls them, plays out as rock-paper-scissors.  Specifically it uses what I’m assuming is an additional Japanese rule where, after somebody loses the toss, the winner points in a certain direction and at the same time the loser looks in a certain direction, and if the loser looked in the same direction as the winner pointed then they actually fully lose the point.  It’s a pretty strange addition, but most encounters have some sort of pattern you can exploit or a weakness such as always throwing the same sign or looking in the same direction.  If not, then it really just comes down to luck, which can be a bit frustrating.

The graphics of the PC versions have a somewhat similar style to the PC versions of Portopia in how they’re drawn, with very simple lineart with solid fills.  But the sillier tone of this game allows that graphical style to work very much to its advantage compared to Portopia.  The characters are very colorfully drawn with some really out there designs.  Overall the game looks very stylish but also completely weird and crazy, similar to a couple of Hudson’s other visual novels from this era: Dezeni Land and Dezeni World.  The Famicom version on the other hand ended up having to redraw the graphics, mostly due to the fact that they had to be crammed into a smaller area to make room for the new menu elements.  The graphics in this version turned down the crazy and turned up the cute, which I’m sure gave it some wider appeal.  And the characters really do look cute, especially Princess Tomato herself, who is just precious.

The game, at least the Famicom version, also has a huge leg up on Portopia in that it features music.  It’s pretty serviceable and mostly has the same cute feel as the rest of the game, with the exception of the music used in the maze sequences which sounds appropriately mysterious and the music that plays in chapter 5 (the resistance base) which sounds way overly dramatic for some reason.  My favorite tracks are probably the songs that play in chapter 2 (Saladoria) and chapter 8 (Minister Pumpkin’s castle).

I think this is a pretty good game and actually wish the PC versions of it or even the two Dezeni games had translations so I could check them out more fully and see just how weird Hudson got with them.  Before playing it, my only experience with the game was the GameCenter CX episode, where it became known as “the game that made Arino fall asleep,” but it probably just isn’t his cup of tea, who knows.  Anyway, next time I’ll be tackling either J.B. Harold Murder Club or Crystal Dragon, neither of which I really know anything about.  Until then, take it easy~