izigame.me

The Centennial Case : A Shijima Story is a live action drama centered around the question of agelessness and the intertwining history of two families and a historical killer haunting their past. The way the game is told is interesting and a lot of effort has been put into making this drama come alive by the actors and everyone working at this game. The extra material was fun to watch as well - I always love watching the effort and production that goes into making live action movies with game elements like this.
The gameplay is pretty straightforward: you watch the videos unfold and, once in a while, can respond with different dialogue or notice clues around you. At specific points, you can put those clues together with mysteries to create Hypotheses. Those hypotheses will then be used to solve whatever case is at hand.
While this all does sound fun, the game has a few weaknesses. The plot gets a bit convoluted near the end and some of the explanations were, at least to me, unsatisfying and didn't make much sense. I do appreciate that this is a self-contained game that answers all of it's questions, but some of the answers - and how some of the conclusions were argued for - seemed a bit forced to me.
The game part itself also has some weaknesses. Creating hypotheses involves a lot of clicking and then watching a shot film explaining the hypothesis. For some of the cases, this can take upwards to 30 minutes of clicking and waiting - it isn't very exciting, especially considering that some of the hypotheses don't make much sense and are just there to create clutter.
Finally, I felt that some of the cases and questions in this game were intentionally obtuse. Often I thought I would present the right clue that made sense to me, only for the game to say "nope, not it". I had to present a similar, but slightly different hypothesis. Later, the game would then argue exactly the way I did just 10 minutes ago, but it just wasn't time to present it. While some hypotheses are clearly wrong, there are also a lot that make sense and it sometimes seems like you just have to guess what happened without too much of a clue presented by the game. It does get explained afterwards, but sometimes it feels like a stab in the dark. Idk, maybe I was just bad.
Regardless of those weaknesses, this is a clear passion project with a lot of effort put into it. The actors are great, the story has a clear beginning and end, and there are memorable moments and characters. I highly disagree that this game is on par with Ace Attorney, Danganronpa or Zero Escape, as one other review argued - not even close. However, as it's own little mystery drama, it is competent and a nice way to spend a few evenings; just wait for the price to drop a bit as full price isn't quite worth it.