Calling Big Dick
The Silver Case , like all visual novel that want to call themselves such, lives and dies of his fiction, the characters that inhabit the bizarre game world, their interactions and how the player enters empathic contact with them: from this point of course, though many elements are unconventional (what else did you expect from Suda?), the work before Grasshopper Manufacture is intrigued, curious, surprising.
Acclimatized back in the near-future, originally placed on the eve of the millennium, the story is divided into two distinct scenarios initially that will eventually intertwine, with two different characters and written in six hands of three authors.
The first, Transmitter, is entirely made by Goichi Suda, and puts the player in the shoes of Akira, a first-rate detective jokingly nicknamed “Big Dick” (!?!) By his older colleagues, joining a team put on the trail of Kamui Uehara, a serial killer who is distributing death and terror in the 24th district.
In the future imagined by the dad of No More Heroes, in fact, Tokyo has become an even larger and populated megalopolis than it is in reality, so that it requires a division in twenty-four districts, each of which is self-governing and has police forces autonomous.
Split into chapters, with so many cases apparently disconnected from each other but pointing to a larger design, Transmitter proposes a silent and very incisive protagonist, in the tradition of many Japanese role-playing games, which he suffered from his colleagues as a spectator and not ease the identification of the player.
Nevertheless, the topicality of many of the topics dealt with, dialogues always at the limit of seriousness and non-sense, and a companion cast that balances Akira’s anonymity, can make intriguing progression, especially for those who love thriller investigations and the noir branch of science fiction, with lots of explicit references to Blade Runner.
Although there are some recurring reasons for South Sudan, here the Japanese developer does not press too much on the grotesque accelerator, alternating characters far above the rows, which would not disfigure in an ideal followed by Shadow of the Damned, to others much more credible and sensible.
Proceeding in the story of Transmitter will also unlock the second scenario called Placebo and written by Sako Kato and Masaki Doka with a style and tone completely different from those of the good Goichi, to create a unicum unusual and not too harmonic, but no less charming.
In Placebo, the player dressed in Tokyo’s Morishima, a journalist who is following the case of the serial killer and who has to write articles to keep his readers informed: logging, decision-making and hyperactive, this second protagonist is as far as the detective of Transmitter, which offers a remarkable change of gear and a completely different tone in social interactions and dialogues.
In this second part, once unlocked can still be experimented to the liking of the player (also reversing the narrative attribution of the title), aspects not revealed by Akira’s investigations are revealed and a deeper knowledge of both individual cases of general design.
