Visual novels, despite their usual appeals (and my growing love of them) have a naughty way of misleading and over-exaggerating any ‘gameplay’ elements they might actually have. As much as I love Steins;Gate, even considering the multiple endings and the phone interactions, it is very much a passive experience. So of course, I hear about Root Letter, this investigation visual novel with comparable elements to Phoenix Wright, and what am I supposed to expect? Well, it turns out in this case I was wrong to doubt. Though the game is still very much a laid back affair, it is a much more hands on experience than some visual novels – containing actual mechanics and even putting the onus on the player to figure out some of your next moves. The game strikes a good balance, and for the most part had me well engaged and entertained.
Root Letter takes place in Matsue in the Shimane Prefecture, a beautiful area of Japan surrounded by sea and mountains – perfect for a visual novel that wants to show off with some pretty backgrounds. Our main character Max is now in his 30s living in Tokyo. 15 years ago he had a pen pal from Matsue named Aya Fumino, but their letters stopped and he came to all but forget about it. That is, of course, until he takes a trip down memory lane all these years later and revisits some of the old letters, discovering something worrying. A letter that he somehow missed all those years ago, left unopened, which reads “I killed someone, I must atone for my sins, we won’t speak again”.
Obviously this peaks our protagonist’s interest, and so he sets off to Matsue to see if he can discover what happened. It’s a little difficult to find someone who disappeared 15 years ago, so Max starts investigating with the only things he’s got, the letters and a picture of Aya. The letters mention a gang of friends she hung out with at school, and so it’s our job to find them and question them about her disappearance. But it turns out it’s not quite so easy, as these old friends seem reluctant to admit their knowledge of her, in addition to some creepy rumours and revelations about the whole situation.
As mentioned, the gameplay is mainly typical visual novel fare – reading dialogue, inner thoughts and watching the story progress in a fairly linear fashion – however, Root Letter also makes a good effort to keep us engaged all the way through. For starters, the city of Matsue comes with a handy map, featuring points of interest that you can travel to whenever you want, after you’ve unlocked them of course. Revealing these points comes about from conversations, looking at your guidebook and so on – during your investigation, for example, you might here about a place that could hold some relevant information, so you look it up in your guide book, it unlocks on the map and then you can travel to it and see what there is to discover. It’s quite simple, really, but it’s nice to actually be involved in travelling about – particularly later in the game when Max might mention he needs to go back to a place or see someone again, so that takes a bit of thinking on your part to remember where you need to go (for example, you need to see a man named Watanabe who is a baseball coach, so he will most likely be at the school on the playing fields).
When you get to new areas, you’ll want to check around to see if there’s anything interesting. Like a very basic hidden item game, you will use the cursor to hover over things in the picture to see if they can be interacted with. Often this will simply result in a comment from Max, however sometimes we get a new clue on where to go next, a new subject to bring up in conversation, or even an item. Areas may also contain people you can talk to by selecting the ‘ask’ option, and this will offer a few dialogue options to pick. Some options will offer just a bit of small talk or information on something unimportant, whereas others will garner new leads. Annoyingly the game has a tendency of skipping you forward when you’ve made the ‘correct’ discovery, which means you can miss lines of dialogue if you’re unlucky – you ask a specific question and they reply with the name of someone else or a location, and oops, looks like Max is trotting off again, I guess I won’t ask about that other interesting stuff. It feels a bit rushed when that happens, and obviously isn’t great for trying to get invested in the whole narrative and setting.
When talking to people, you might want to show them items you’ve picked up along the way, potentially leading to new clues or suspicious reactions. After all, this is an investigation about some potentially shady goings on – as difficult as that can be to remember considering the game’s upbeat music and gorgeous environments. Though the investigating plays an important role in the conclusion of each chapter.
Essentially there are a handful of regular faces you will meet in your adventure – each a friend mentioned in the letters you received from Aya. Finding them is the first challenge – after all, this was 15 years ago and you’ve never actually met them – and then getting them to give you any information is the final challenge. You’ll need to find out information about these characters, then gather evidence that they are who you think they are, before engaging them in a very Danganronpa-esque (only in style) investigation game.
The investigations are the only part of the game that has any form of failure state. Basically it’s an ‘educated guessing’ game, and if you get an answer wrong you lose a ‘life’, eventually resulting in you having to start the investigation again. Pretty non-issue, I know, but at least there’s some form of challenge. You’ll have to switch between showing items to jog their memory, responding to their comments with proof and so on, before eventually they break and admit to who they are or their relationship with Aya. It’s nicely done – very dramatic and silly, and also offering a challenge in making you think about what items you have that are relevant to those characters. The letters Aya sent you also play a part in these as they give Max information about each character. A nice touch to the letters in particular is allowing you to customise their ending a bit. When reading over them, at the end Aya will ask you a question, and you are able to choose from a selection of responses to answer it. It’s pretty simple, but I have a sneaking suspicion these are important in determining the games multiple endings.
The last bit of ‘gameplay’, so to speak, is what Max refers to as ‘Max mode’. This was a bit hit and miss for me. Essentially you have a wheel with different levels of response. So the highest level has Max shouting something intense, whereas the first will be more reserved. A bar will go around the circle of responses, and when you reach one you want to pick you select it. Of course, different responses work for different occasions, though it’s never really clear which is supposed to be the correct one, ultimately resulting in a guessing game. On top of that it’s both timed AND attempts to trick you by switching up the progress on the bar moving around the responses, not giving you enough time to read them properly as well as occasionally making you screw up and select the wrong response. It just becomes a bit frustrating.
Thankfully that’s the only obnoxious element of the game, and the rest of it manages to successfully combine some light gameplay/investigating with a typical visual novel style. Having to select dialogue options, examine environments and defeat people in the investigation challenges does a lot to keep the player engaged and invested in the narrative. Splitting the game up by chapters also helps keep the pace smooth and the story easy to follow – each chapter concentrating on a different character from Aya’s past.
But perhaps the most important areas of the game, being a visual novel, are the writing, audio and visuals. And thankfully Root Letter excels in all those areas. I’ve already mentioned that the game is nice to look at, but what really impresses is the number of unique locations you can go to. Travelling all around Matsue to shops, shrines, bars, government buildings, so on and so on. There is certainly a lot of variety. The one problem I have with this is that often you spend a negligible amount of time in one area and then never return, leading to it seeming a bit pointless, and you also flit about the city like a mad man – going to visit one person for a minute, then all the way back across town to another place, then back…it’s a little bit ridiculous. But still, the variety is impressive.
The writing can be a tad cringe-worthy at times – particularly when you give incorrect responses, the game doesn’t want you to lose so will just have Max ask for another attempt (for example, trying to pretend you are someone else to get into a TV studio, Max will say a name, the person responds that they don’t know them, so Max simply has another go: “oh sorry, that’s not my name, let me try again”….seriously, Max?). But aside from this the writing is engaging and at times pretty hilarious. Max, in all honesty, is kind of a dick throughout. Pushing these strangers for answers by tying to provoke them and such. At first I didn’t like him for it, but as things got more and more brutal with the put downs I couldn’t help but laugh – like tempting a former obese man with some snacks.
And to top it all off, the voice acting and soundtrack are both stellar. There’s no voice work for Max, however every other character responds through speech when you talk to them – each giving unique performances. The soundtrack goes from peaceful to cheerful and to dramatic depending on the situation, and some of the tunes are quite catchy. It’s not a soundtrack that could bother the likes of Steins;Gate, but it perfectly suits the atmosphere and content of the game.
So an all-round great experience. Root Letter isn’t a massive game in comparison to other visual novels, probably lasting roughly 10 hours or so, but I feel it’s just the right length for the story it tells. I mean, if I’m honest, when I see “30+ hours of reading time” in the features of upcoming visual novels it does turn me off a bit. But the story is great, characters interesting, and the gameplay thrown in does just enough to make it a nicely rounded interactive experience. Apparently this is the first in a series of investigation type games from Kadokawa, so hopefully we’ll see more interesting titles similar to this in the future.