Post Script

Q+A: Koichiro Ito, director, The Centennial Case

Koichiro Ito is no stranger to knotty plotting, having previously navigated five intertwining narratives as the writer on the seminal visual novel 428: Shibuya Scramble. Now the director of The Centennial Case, he explains how HAND Inc brought the FMV mystery to life – and sent characters to their deaths.

Why did you decide to make the game as an FMVdriven mystery, rather than, say, a visual novel or more traditional adventure game with 2D or 3D art? Mr Yasuhito Tachibana, our cinematographer and scenario director, is incredibly knowledgeable about how to create narratives with characters who really feel alive. He brought together a lot of staff who excel at crafting dramas, and I think that having real people play the characters in the story adds a sense of depth to it. I believe that, for creators, an appealing game design and the story they want to tell come first and foremost, and the graphical style most appropriate to depict that concept follows afterwards. Pixel art and photorealistic 3D graphics are also wonderful, but I feel like there have been an increasing number of live-action FMV games in recent years. These points came together to help us realise our vision perfectly.

What challenges arise from working with FMV? Are the story and structure watertight before you go through the filming process?

Everything required for the story – the structure and the dialogue – must be complete before filming begins. It’s the same as for a TV drama or film. On top of that, you also need to make concrete preparations for all of the game-specific elements before filming starts. Where to put the clues, what mysteries you want the player to explore, the route they’ll take to pin down the suspect… We kept in mind that people would be playing it as a game, so we carried out two rounds of test filming and had many discussions on what kind of tweaks would make the game more fun to play. Even so, we did run into some difficulties – there were times when we had to remove something from the filming location because it would give the mystery away if we showed it, or sometimes we would find a flaw in a trick while we were filming and have to quickly adapt and rewrite elements of the script.

What’s the hardest part of writing a mystery scenario? From the perspective of the mystery itself, I think that one crucial point is how well you can hide the most important trick that the killer has set up, or their critical mistake. You need to skilfully mislead the player, making sure they don’t notice the suspicious point at first – but that it all snaps into place when they consider things carefully. It’s hard to create that moment of enjoyment, but it’s also the fun of it. In terms of the story, I imagine that if a murder actually took place in front of people, everyone there would be on their guard, and wouldn’t take any action at all. If everyone locked themselves in their rooms, then it would be difficult for any more murders to take place! But that wouldn’t push the story forward. Even though they know the culprit is among them, they can’t bring themselves to believe it, and try to reach out to someone – all the time knowing that it could be dangerous. I feel like that’s a difficult thing to portray.

What drove the decision to cast the same actors in different roles in different time periods?

It was partly because I had some interesting ideas of what you could do if you kept the cast the same, and it was an interesting form of being resourceful! Keeping the cast consistent meant that we worked with limitations in terms of the ages and genders of the characters that could appear in each time period, and it creates a bit of a puzzle in terms of the structure of the game, where you have to think about how to make the identities of the victim and the killer surprising in each episode. At the same time, I think it’s a device that gives a sense of consistency to the game as a whole. The premise is that the episodes from 100 and from 50 years ago are written down in a novel. The main character reads the novel, and pictures the people mentioned in the novel as the members of the Shijima family. So, there’s a proper explanation in the story for the multi-role system, and it allows us to indirectly depict one of the central narrative themes – that the past is connected to the present.

“You need to skilfully mislead the player, making sure they don’t notice the suspicious point at first”

Which was harder to juggle, the fractured timelines of 428, or the web of deceit in The Centennial Case?

In 428, you have a branching story of the five main characters coming into contact with other people, and it required a lot of effort to reflect the actions of all the main characters at every single moment, like a puzzle. It involved a lot of trial and error. With The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story, the most difficult part was thinking up the trick for each episode, and I wanted to make all the separate incidents function as part of the overarching story. Once these two points had been pinned down, we worked steadily on creating the assets. Both games were fun to work on, so I didn’t get tired of either – but if I were asked to work on something exactly the same again, I’d hesitate with 428. It makes me happy when people play 428 and think, ‘Wow, they did a great job coming up with something so convoluted’. And I would be all the happier if people play The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story thinking, ‘I’m going to see through this scheme the creators have devised!’