Review of Ouka Sabaki
| Subject | Ouka Sabaki |
| By | Helpfulness: 4 Vote: 8hexashadow13 on 2021-01-23 |
| Review | tl;dr: A trial based VN that has variable levels of quality but manages to excel in it's overarching story and final case centered around that story. Master Magistrate is a trial focused VN similar to the Danganronpa and Ace Attorney series. The game involves slice of life portions featuring the main cast of characters just doing their thing in Bakumatsu era Japan which flow like a standard VN with the player simply reading along and following the story. These lead up to cases, murders or attempted murders, which Ooka has to solve. These involve going around to various locations to search for clues and talk to people in order to obtain information. Movement involves simply selecting locations from a list. Talking to people involves making choices to ask questions, but the only choices are questions so the only control the player really has is what order questions are asked in. Finding clues involves pretty standard point and click, wherein the player can click various things on screen and Ooka and characters accompanying him comment about. By talking to people, evidence is obtained that is recorded the player can refer to later. Once all the evidence has been found, things proceed to the trial, which involves Ooka calling in the various suspects and questioning them. This involves the standard mechanics of such situations from the genre, wherein when characters make their statements a number of points are highlighted and the player has to choose which one to argue in favor of or against, at which point they must select something from the previously obtained evidence to back those arguments. In general, there is no game over, so the player is free to make as many mistakes as they want. However, there is a rating system where doing things more perfectly, without any mistakes, results in unlocking bonus art in the extras menu. Furthermore, there is no time limit or any sort of automatic flow in real time like in other similar games, wherein here the things only move forward upon interaction by the player and the player is free to at any time move back and forth during certain portions when thinking about what statement to make an argument about. All in all, the system in of itself isn't particularly enjoyable, but it doesn't get in the way at all either, and thus allows the quality of the story and writing to be the sole factor in evaluating the VN. The story and writing are a mixed bag. There are three elements I think that should be considered here, the story of each individual case, the overarching story, and stories of the main characters. In terms of the stories of each individual case, I felt that the stories surrounding them were decent enough, but the four cases themselves were generally pretty weak. The first case was incredibly straight forward, wherein their wasn't really anything like a trick, just finding all the evidence and wrapping things up, and thus it was overall pretty dull. The second case did a good job with the minor characters involved and had a bit more to it as a case. The third and fourth cases are a bit more complicated and also do a good job with character development in the main cast, as well as heavily contributing to the main narrative. However, they still face a major issue that the other cases did as well, in that they don't flow well. What I mean by that, is that though the latter three cases had pretty solid mysteries, how they ultimately get solved felt pretty random. It didn't just rely on forced mistakes by the culprit at opportune times, which is pretty standard, but rather just in general involved Ooka making a lot of crazy jumps of logic which everyone just goes along with, and which ultimately results in the culprit confessing, even though the presented argument is still full of holes. Furthermore, a lot of the time this involves the player having to pick evidence that feels completely random, which feels kind of weird. The mysteries and the tricks themselves were interesting enough that they could serve as the basis of good cases if they were solved properly, but it feels that wasn't sufficiently accomplished here. I felt that the overarching story did a much better job. It builds up over the four cases, with the fourth case essentially being entirely dedicated to it. It doesn't involve much in terms of tricks and such, rather it's heavily focused around character relationships, backgrounds, and politics. It's incredibly different from other VN in the genre, and does an incredibly good job at dealing with the subject matter, feeling like a breath of fresh air. To a certain extent, it felt that world building was kind of weak, in that it doesn't seem to explain much about various things like the working of the Shogunate or the Shinsengumi. I assume that's because this is a Japanese work foremost, and the world is heavily based on what I believe to be standard Bakamatsu era Japan, so there's probably a lot of implied information that Japanese people that consume a lot of works from the era know well but that may be unfamiliar to western players. Still, the world still comes out to be fleshed out enough to be pretty interesting, and thus the overarching story drawing so much from it works out well also. Lastly, there are character stories. While this is a case focused VN, it's also a galge. After the main story is done, in what essentially amounts to an extended epilogue, there are branches into five heroine endings. The way things are structured make it feel like three of these are main heroines, Rimu, Sakura, and Koume, while two are side routes, Yamanami and Okita. However, strangely enough, I felt that the side routes were significantly stronger than the main routes. The main heroines get focused development over the course of the main story. However, of those only Sakura feels like she got a proper fully developed character arc. With everyone else, it only felt like there were small bits here and there without any portions that focused on them enough to build things up properly. The epilogue portion for these heroines does a decent job at making them seem likable, but overall it didn't feel like this portion had much substance, essentially just being pretty standard moege type fluff. Thus of the main heroines, it only feels like Sakura really got a proper story of her own. On the other hand, the side heroines don't really get any development at all during the main story, but their epilogues have quite a lot of substance about them with really solid character development, and thus the two of them ultimately come out feeling like stronger characters with better routes. However, these routes are shorter than the routes of the main heroines, and this mainly comes at the expense of their being significantly less romance and thus weaker relationship development, so even if they have weaker stories, as heroines the main heroines still come out feeling stronger. Thus, here too the quality is very mixed. The art is decent enough though not particularly amazing. I will note though that there were a few CG that seemed really off. The SD art was also reasonably cute and decent quality. The soundtrack was pretty good, wherein there are definitely some great tracks, but they're used too much. The OP is also really solid visually, but it felt kind of weak just using the main theme BGM. The ED has decent but not exceptional visuals, in that they're different for each ending but incredibly simple, though here too I feel just using BGM is kind of weak, though how it was used for the main ending with characters speaking in a very fitting tone over it worked incredibly well. |
| 4 points |