I don’t know when Kazutaka Kodaka sleeps. On top of releasing The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy—the tactics RPG with 100 different endings and dark horse for Game of the Year discussions—this year, the Danganronpa creator has also been working on Shuten Order with Neilo, a multi-genre adventure game that isn’t quite as massive, but is no less ambitious. I’m still working my way through its five distinct routes, each of which has a different genre and tone, but what I’ve seen thus far is an infectious experiment in how many ways a game can rearrange a single premise, maintaining its identity even as it offers something distinct no matter which path the player takes.
Shuten Order stars Rei Shimobe, an amnesiac who wakes one day in the care of two angels. The pair explains that the night before, she was murdered, and her body was hacked to pieces and scattered across a public park. Upon her death, God with a capital G granted her one chance to live: if she could return to the real world and solve her own murder, she could exchange her killer’s life for her own. However, Rei can’t just freely walk around and start investigating, because she’s no ordinary citizen; she’s the leader of the Shuten Order, a God-rejecting, cult-like group which has taken control of an entire country.
© Too Kyo Games / Kotaku
Based on the information provided by the angels, Rei believes that her murderer is likely one of the five ministers of the Order. All that’s left is to find out which one. However, for Rei, it should be pretty simple. She has the blessing of God, so if she believes someone to be the culprit, it’s probably true. That’s where Shuten Order splits off. You’re told to go with your gut and pick one of the five ministers, and who you choose to investigate and accuse determines what kind of game Shuten Order will be for the next five to 10 hours. If you accuse the conniving Minister of Justice Kishiru Inugami. Rei’s investigation will take the form of a Danganronpa-like murder mystery. Pursuing the hot-headed Minister of Security Manji Fushicho, meanwhile, will end with Rei being chased by a serial killer in a top-down hide-and-seek horror game. Go after the cold-hearted Minister of Science Teko Ion and Rei will spend her investigation in a perspective-shifting narrative adventure. Each route shares the connective tissue of long stretches of visual novel dialogue, but mechanically and tonally, they are all radically different.
Similar to The Hundred Line, Shuten Order lets Kodaka and the teams at Neilo and Too Kyo Games pivot into different genres of storytelling, from Inugami’s Knives Out-esque detective story to the Jurassic Park-style science fiction of Teko’s route. As disparate as they seem, Shuten Order’s routes make five slices of one whole, as it becomes clear that each arc only tells part of the full story. On top of the detective work and bespoke mechanics, each route fills in the gaps of Rei’s memory as she learns more about the Order she supposedly led in life, the interpersonal politics between her and the rest of the ministers, and how a woman who led a group of religion-hating cultists ended up being granted a second chance by God. Despite all these moving parts, Shuten Order is perhaps Kodaka’s most concise and focused work, as each route has fewer characters than the average Danganronpa or Hundred Line, so it doesn’t have the problems those games do with bit players interrupt the flow of dialogue with non sequiturs. Kodaka’s always had a knack for weaving overarching mysteries across dozens of hours in one long, interconnected story, but surprisingly, the anthological nature of Shuten Order’s routes suits him. They’re bite-sized packages reflecting all his best qualities as a writer, with less space for the grating albeit often endearing filler that plagues some of his other work.
© Too Kyo Games / Kotaku
That’s not to say Shuten Order doesn’t fall into some of Kodaka’s known pitfalls. In the escape room/death game route, part of the storyline centers on a group of sisters who discover that one of the death game participants is attempting to kill all the men trapped in the facility. The eldest sister confides in Rei that one of the sisters is a transgender woman, and that if the man killer finds out, it might put her in the line of fire. For some reason, after she tells Rei this, she starts referring to her sister with male pronouns. Any Danganronpa fan is probably getting flashbacks to Trigger Happy Havoc and how it tried to use gender to set up a narrative twist in its own death game, and the result was a lot of characters making sweeping assumptions about a character’s identity without a drop of nuance or consideration. Kodaka has gone out of his way to include queer themes in a lot of his works, with Danganronpa, Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, and Hundred Line having confirmed queer romances and gender non-confirming characters, but Shuten Order’s trans storyline is giving “his pronouns are they/them.” It gestures at possibly confronting one villain’s TERF ass and then trips down a flight of stairs onto a pile of rakes. It’s a shame, too, because Shuten Order has some interesting ideas about gender presentation that Rei explores across multiple routes and that I found legitimately compelling. I respect Kodaka’s continued efforts to get this stuff right, but Shuten Order’s trans storyline doesn’t even clear the bare minimum.
In addition to the questionable decisions around a storyline or two, I will say Shuten Order’s translation can be pretty rough. The game doesn’t feature an English voice-over so all you have is text on the screen, and it reads as if no one on the translation team ever tried reciting it out loud; if they had, they would have quickly realized how unnatural some of it sounds. The text is also riddled with typos, which I can forgive in a game when they crop up here and there, but they’ve been so frequent in Shuten Order that I’ve noted them throughout each route. That includes some consistent errors like using “it’s” when you mean “its” and “who’s” instead of “whose.” As writers, we all make mistakes, but for as much as I’ve been enjoying Shuten Order, the game really could’ve used another editor’s pass.
© Too Kyo Games / Kotaku
I’ve still got one and a half routes left to go, and each time I accuse a different minister, I’m genuinely impressed by how distinct Shuten Order feels in each of its stories. I wouldn’t say that any one route is that complex to play through, as the hide-and-seek horror game really only has you executing a couple of verbs as you run away from its mascot serial killer, the detective route only has one way of presenting the information you’ve gathered, and the escape rooms are mostly simple block puzzles. Still, while separately they might have felt unremarkable, collectively they become more impressive, as it’s clear Shuten Order is doing a lot with what looks like very little. It changes genres at the drop of a hat, and even as it skyrockets into the most absurd corners of its universe, it all feeds back into the question of “Who killed Rei Shimobe?” I still have to explore every option, but Kodaka’s endgames haven’t let me down thus far.
