Shuten Order by developers Neilo Inc. & Too Kyo Games in collaboration with DMM GAMES and publisher Spike Chunsoft—Switch 2 review written by Jim with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes.
Shuten Order is a challenging game for me to review for multiple reasons. First is some of the subject matter. The game focuses a lot on a God, and I was raised and still am a Christian, so some of the talk might be sensitive for some players. When you use "God's power" to accidentally blow up someone's head at the beginning of the game, I didn't like it. Now, I'm usually okay with most things in games, even if they talk about God or gods, because games are fiction, but I really didn't like how it was used in this game, like praying for the end of humanity. Anything that makes this game hard for me to review is that, every time I play it, something bad happens in real life. I'm not superstitious at all, but when something awful happens every time I play the game, it just gets to me. This also brings me to my apologies to the devs, the publisher, and everyone here at CGR. I'm sorry for taking so long in this review, and thanks for being so understanding about the circumstances.
Mainly, Shuten Order is a visual novel game with multiple paths you have to take to solve the murder of the cult leader of Shuten, who also happens to be the character you are playing as. What makes this visual novel so different is that each path or route you take is a different genre. The genres are murder mystery/investigation, much like the Ace Attorney games; an extreme escape game like the Nonary Games series; a dating sim; and a survival-horror escape game where you mostly just run away from a killer. If you enjoy genre-blending games or murder mysteries, this game offers a variety of experiences, though some may find the religious themes less appealing.
I played through three of these, but as I stated above, each time something happened for real that took me away from the game. I played the murder mystery route, and as a fan of Ace Attorney, I enjoyed this path until the end, that is. After you complete a route, you will be taken back to pick another one, so it doesn't matter what order you pick them in; you will always have a chance to come back and play the others. The second route I took was the horror escape route. It was a decent route, but lacking a little, as the killer is easy to get away from just by hiding. Lastly was the dating sim. I liked this one the least out of the three routes I played. It's less serious than the others, but it's basically like all the other dating-sim VNs out there.
I did run into a few issues with the game. The translation is hit-or-miss, with some sentences making no sense, and I had to reread a few times to understand what it was saying. Another issue was that the text sometimes appears off-screen, and there's no way to see it. In some scenes, the text becomes blurry as a way to make the game scarier or something, but it was annoying to read like that. The game is voiced in Japanese. It wasn't an issue for players in Japan, but with no English dub, this effect should have been changed or removed from the text. Lastly, I ran into a problem a few times when the sound, music, and voices all stopped working, and I had to reset the game to get them working again.
The Japanese voices are good. I wish they would get an English dub for these types of games, but most don't. I liked that the main character is a female who everyone thinks is male, and the Japanese voice actor does a good job of sounding like either a male or a female. All the other voices in the game seem to fit their characters very well. The music is decent for the type of game, too. Graphically, the game is decent for a VN. I like the twists and turns in the game, but the overall religious themes are a huge turnoff for me. A few religious things here and there in a game are fine with me, but when the game seems to be mainly about a cult and religion and God, I just couldn't get into that.
Overall, the game is very unique, and I like that, but it doesn't excel in any of the genres it offers beyond being a VN. The story is okay, but I didn't like the game's theme much. If there were less religion and more about solving a murder, I probably would have enjoyed it more. I won't take points away for it because these are just personal opinions. So, the game is decent but not my cup of tea.
Score: 7 / 10
