Adventure Gamers - Forums

Not sure why Siliconera’s article has two major mistakes even though the original source is so short and clear.

1) The game is scheduled for a spring release, not a summer release.
2) The source article does not mention Kanasaki as the director of the game. Only that he works on the game. Kanasaki worked as a director and character designer on both the Another Code and Hotel Dusk/Last Window series, and while we can definitely recognize his artstyle from the images we have, there is no official confirmation he’s the director of Chase.

Anyway, I saw the news this morning already when it was first posted on 4gamer, and quite excited!

This is really good news, here’s hoping the game comes west and sees localization in NA and EUR.

The website was updated with a short trailer, as well as the first chapter in a short story/prologue. I posted a quick translation of the first chapter on Court Records (an Ace Attorney fansite), if people are interested. (I wanted to repost it here, but I can’t find the forum function to collapse long posts).

http://www.arcsystemworks.jp/chase_tooikioku/

The website got an update today, which told us the game will be released on the eShop on Wednesday May 11th, for the price of 800Y. The website also features a new, 2-minute trailer.

For those interested, I made quick translations of the prologue short story posted on the website, as well as a Famitsu article on the game on a different forum: you can find all of that gathered in this post.

The game was released today. Already got it downloaded on my 3DS, and will probably start on it later today.

There was a pretty interesting (and long!) interview released two days ago on the game. It included topics like how Cing was established and Kanasaki’s ideas on adventure games. They also explained the concept behind Chase, which is to bring a focused, 2~3 hour experience similar to a film. They hope to release more ‘episodes’ of this series later, if possible.

I’ll have to see if there are any reviews of the game - see if it gets rave reviews like Hotel Dusk did.

wilco - 11 May 2016 12:20 PM

So far only this episode is confirmed? The other are depending on sales?
And what are Kanasaki’s ideas on adventure games, if you don’t mind sharing?

Yep, so far, this is the only game actually confirmed, and more probably depends on sales.

In the interview, Kanasaki explains he originally came from a shootin game background, but then entered Riverhillsoft, known for the J.B. Harold Murder Club adventure games. A group of developers would leave the company to form Level-5 (Professor Layton). RHS shut down, and Kanasaki joined another group of ex-RHS developers which became CING. Both Level-5 and CING thus came from RHS, were situated in the city of Fukuoka and focused on adventures (at the time).

And there’s where Kanasaki’s (and CING CEO Miyagawa’s) ideas on adventures show. Whereas Level-5 focused on quirky adventure games that would be accessible to the grand public (like Layton), CING focused on the traditional, no-nonsense story-based adventure. Kanasaki notes that nowadays, you have games like Ace Attorney and Dangaronpa, which have better appeal to the public, as well as many gameplay mechanics, but Kanasaki admits he wouldn’t be able to come up with that. But that’s also because he loves the good old traditional adventure, aimed at a more adult public with less smoke and mirrors. So his games tend to be much sober.

As for Chase, I played the game last night, and it was… disappointing. I understand it was a small project, but similar DL-only projects by Arc System Works have showed more ambition than this game. The story starts with the Unsolved Cases Section getting a mysterious call saying an explosion accident five years ago was not an accident at all, and detective Nanase (forced by his subodinate Amekura) start going through the files and calling people to the interrogation room for further questioning.

The game is fairly short. It was envisioned like a film, and I did indeed clock in at about 90 minutes (which is almost half of what they estimated it would take, but whatever). The story, while not groundbreaking, is fairly amusing, and is accompanied by a short soundtrack by Satoshi Okubo, whom we know of his CING work. The story is standalone, but it does hint at more to follow, also regarding Nanase’s past.

In the interview, Kanasaki mentioned he wanted to make more traditional adventures, as opposed to the more game-mechanic-reliant Ace Attorney and Danganronpa. Here, he fails miserably. While the story is okay, it is not presented as a game. It’s just dialogue. The player has pretty much nothing to do: the story flows automatically. The only times you, the player, can do anything is 1) at the rare times the game asks a question and you need to select the correct answer, classic CING style (you get a penalty if wrong, but you usually only get to pick out of two or three options), and 2) some investigative sections where you need to point out something in old crime scene photographs (including a _weird_ instant game over sequence, where you absolutely need to pick out the right answer in one go). That is all you can do. The rest of the story goes automatically, from calling the witnesses, to the questions asked etc, all the way to the ending.

The biggest problem of Chase is really it isn’t an adventure game. It isn’t even a real novel game, as the choices you make do not lead to different story branchlines. They just want you to give the correct answer. And it’s a shame, because the story itself is okay; it’s just that the conversion to a game isn’t really there. And I guess that this also has to do with the scale of the project, but it’s so different from Kanasaki’s other adventures, it just doesn’t feel right. The story isn’t written by the usual CING writer by the way, but it actually doesn’t feel that out of place, and I think many players will think it feel somehow familiar in a good way.