When judging media, I am very adamant about the importance of influence, antecedence, and seriation. This probably wasn’t always the case, but as far back as I can remember, the many works of fiction I have experienced over my decades-long personal and professional formation have only continued to reinforce the notion that these things should never be ignored. To put this in context, I usually feel that film reviews which criticize a movie’s writing without so much as acknowledging the book there’s a 90% chance it was based on lose out on a substantial amount of credibility. The present wouldn’t be here without the past— why ignore such a basic truth?
It is this very core idea that ended up illustrating my perception of three cult videogames (though if I’m being perfectly honest, the term “game” might be a bit generous when discussing the latter two in particular) which I was compelled to experience over the course of the past month or so, after the last of them, The Silver Case, came up as part of a book-club-of-sorts-but-for-games that we do over at the Chase VGM discord.
If you know me at all it should be no surprise that I’ve followed the adventure/story-based game genre very closely, to the point of making a big ol’ index of just about every single game that I could feasibly look up that fit that mold some years back for a few different reasons, but mostly out of personal interest. This index includes a few data fields pertinent to each entry for ease of browsing and sorting, including whether or not an entry was part of a specific series. Naturally, this included Silver Case, which, as is the case with most of Goichi Suda’s work, I was mostly ignorant of at the time, but a brief search determined that it had come after a couple of games that I was also marginally aware of, Twilight Syndrome and Moonlight Syndrome, which made up Suda’s contributions during his early career as an employee of HUMAN Entertainment1.
As memory serves, the first time I (and probably a good amount of people) heard about these titles was while playing Spike Chunsoft’s Danganronpa 2, a game of a story-heavy nature comparable to those already mentioned, which is usually given the “visual novel” label. This game’s second chapter has a briefly highlighted plot element which namedrops and parodies Twilight Syndrome, imitating the original duology’s basic aesthetic and the blocky early 3D graphics seen in Saikai, the first of the sequels that released after the series IP came into Spike’s hands following HUMAN’s closure in early 2000. Something I ended up discovering as part of my forays during these past 30 days is that there is also a considerable chunk of people who became aware of that series because of its connections to Suda’s early work, even if I’m quite certain that I myself didn’t make that connection until I was putting together the index I mentioned just a few years back.
But I digress; the point is that there was a definitive, concrete link between Silver Case and these two earlier titles, and if you read the first paragraph of this post you already know that was something I could not possibly ignore, especially considering that “Suda’s work” is not a series that I’m specifically averse to as a whole. Granted, I had no way of knowing how concrete this link was from an intradiegetic perspective, as I was only privy to the specifics of its paratextual aspect, and I was offered the opinion that in that sense it was inconsequential and I could afford to ignore it.
Of course, I wasn’t gonna let that stop me. This is the result.
Billow st. Bookshop 