Master Detective Archives: Rain Code Review
“Rainy Mood” Written by: Hunter (ReaperHunter23)
It was September of 2022 when I first learned of Master Detective Archives: Rain Code. A new mystery game from the team behind Danganronpa. The twist of this game being that you travel to an alternate world to solve a physical manifestation of the mystery in question. My curiosity was piqued as I enjoyed the Danganronpa series and mystery games in general. So let’s take a look to see if the mysteries within Rain Code were worth my interest.
Image Credit: Too Kyo Games, Spike Chunsoft
Rain Code follows the story of Yuma Kokohead, an amnesiac who has seemingly made a deal with a death god. We accompany Yuma as he explores Kanai Ward, a town that has shut itself off from the world and harbors a great many mysteries within its borders. Yuma teams up with a collective of other detectives to solve the myriad of mysteries that Kanai Ward contains.
The general flow of the story follows a pattern that players returning from Danganronpa would be familiar with. There’s an overarching mystery that the crew gets drip fed the details of. And while they are busy searching for clues about the larger mystery at hand, they usually stumble upon another crime that keeps them occupied for the chapter.
The story has its highs and lows. The pacing is quite slow to start out with and much of the opening part of the game ending up feeling superfluous once I got to the meat of the story. However I think that it comes together for a pretty solid payoff towards the final act.
The chapter by chapter mysteries are hit and miss. The main issue I had in a few cases was that once they introduced the potential suspects, it became pretty obvious who the culprit was. I can give the first couple of chapters a bit of slack in this regard because I’ve played a lot of these narrative mystery games so sometimes I’m thinking a little bit further ahead of where the introductory cases are expecting me to. However, this is an issue that popped up as late as Chapter 3 for me. And I feel like by that point in the story I should have been challenged a little bit more.
It’s a shame because Chapter 3 was a pretty drastic step back from the previous chapter. I thought that Chapter 2 was so close to being quite good. The mystery was put together pretty nicely, but the execution as far as how they delivered the information fell a little flat to me. Thankfully the final two chapters were the best the game had to offer and would be genuinely good in any mystery game of this variety.
The best thing that Raincode has going for it are its characters. All of the important characters stand out and are enjoyable. Yuma works pretty well as a protagonist. He’s lost his memories but at no point in the story did they have him acting in a way that made me think he was being foolish or unreasonable. All of Yuma’s Master Detective comrades are a lot of fun as well. Chief Yakou is a smooth negotiator but also worried about upsetting the peacekeepers of Kanai Ward to a comedic degree.
Halara Nightmare is a no nonsense, very capable detective who doesn’t do anything for free. They are a great straight man to the more exaggerated characters in the game. Desuhiko is mostly concerned with becoming famous and drooling over girls. To the game’s credit, they manage to reel him in enough to not be as obnoxious as other characters of his archetype. Fubuki is an adventure seeking airhead who again manages to avoid being obnoxious as a typical character from her archetype. Vivia Twilight was my favorite character in the game. He’s as good a detective as Halara but rather lazy. His general low energy moroseness was quite fun to interact with while I played.
Even some of the other characters introduced later turned out to be pretty cool. I thought Kurumi had a nice dynamic with Yuma and watching Yomi just be the worst possible person at every turn made him a really fun antagonist.
Another thing I’ll give this game credit for is how they balanced Yuma’s role against the rest of the detectives. For example: I think it's fair to say that Halara and Vivia are both better detectives than Yuma as he is for most of the story. However, they both have a respective character flaw that would lead to them not solving the crime of the chapter. In Halara’s case its because they wouldn’t have taken the job without payment and in Vivia’s it’s because he is too lazy. Yuma being good natured tends to be what drove the plot in most of the chapter by chapter mysteries.
And on the other hand, while Desuhiko and Fubuki may not be as smart as Halara or Vivia, their respective talents both made them vital assets for the investigations they took part in. Even if Yuma was potentially further along in solving the mystery than they were.
Image Credit: Too Kyo Games, Spike Chunsoft
Rain Code takes the general formula of its Danganronpa series predecessors and applies a few tweaks and a different coat of paint to it. You still gather and present evidence to solve mysteries, but rather than presenting your argument in a courtroom styled debate scenario you are navigating through a perilous dungeon.
The Mystery Labyrinth as it is called contains all manner of obstacles for Yuma and Shinigami to overcome. Reasoning deathmatch pits you against a Mystery Phantom and has you dodging around their statements and presenting evidence to cut through their contradictions. There’s the hangman barrel game where you will have to play a round of hangman to present a specific word that the game is looking for. There are a myriad of QTEs that revolve around you being able answer a string of questions correctly.
I found the Mystery Labyrinth to be a mixed bag. I think it's a cool idea on paper but the execution could use some work. I thought it was at its best during the reasoning deathmatch portions. Finding contradictions and presenting the flaws in the opposition's logic is always when games like this shine. The hangman barrels were quite tedious for a couple of reasons. First of all, it was rather overused. I want to say the first mystery labyrinth had 3 or 4 of them. The other issue I always knew the answer beforehand and just wanted to be able to present it without all of the rigamarole. And the QTE segments were fine as connective tissue but felt pretty shoulder shrug inducing overall.
One thing about the Mystery Labyrinth that I find a bit perplexing is: It's presented as a sprawling maze ,but from a gameplay perspective, it's essentially on rails. Sometimes they present forks in the road but usually if one turns out to be incorrect you either can’t follow it anyway, or the game will make you follow it only for it to turn out to be wrong later. It feels more like a guided tour of a place rather than a physical puzzle for you to solve as you start to wrap your head around the mystery.
The investigation segments before the mystery labyrinths could be hit and miss too. You would get a different Master Detective to partner up with for each chapter. This would result in the investigations revolving around making use of the ability of the given detective that you are partnered up with. Some of these would be cool because you’d be utilizing the abilities in interesting ways to gather more info. However, other times the investigations would take too long or become very quick-time event heavy, which really slowed down the pace.
Overall I do think the gameplay of Rain Code is still perfectly serviceable despite being a little slow paced. I think the ideas present are really solid, and with a little bit of fine tuning they could really make the Mystery Labyrinth quite engaging.
Image Credit: Too Kyo Games, Spike Chunsoft
Much like the other elements of this game, the presentation of Rain Code is a mixed bag. on one hand: The character designs are really solid. And on the other hand: Don’t look too closely at the character models during conversations because they look off compared to the portraits. The Kanai Ward streets look really good when bathed in the neon and the rain. Unfortunately many of the interior environments and even some of the parts of the Mystery Labyrinth look rather muddy. The music is great but the sound balancing can go out of whack pretty frequently. The sound balancing was mostly present with the kind of stock audio sounds. Like when examining a crime scene my train of thought would be stopped by Yuma very loudly screaming “OOOHH”
I’d say that the biggest flaw in the presentation is its execution of the big revelation moments. I said earlier that Chapter 2 was so close to being good and I think a lot of what held it back was the way the information was presented. Rather than having a dramatic flashback with cool music to really put you in the moment, a phantom of the culprit just exposites the truth of the events to Yuma. The Mystery Labyrinth is supposed to be a physical manifestation of the mysteries in Kanai Ward, so it would have been really cool to see the labyrinth morph in response to Yuma’s understanding of the case. Maybe have it change to better set the stage for the big revelations rather than it just being abstract rooms most of the time. Perhaps It could have shown you the events leading up to the crime as well the moment it happened almost like what you do for the Closing Argument but through the environment you are traversing rather than a comic strip.
Image Credit: Too Kyo Games, Spike Chunsoft
Summary
At the end of the day, if you enjoy narrative mystery games, I would recommend Master Detective Archives: Rain Code. It's a slow burn but I believe that once the game hits its stride it becomes a worthwhile experience. The characters were great and left me wanting to see more of almost all of them. The final act of the game has a solid pair of pretty well constructed mysteries that I had a good time solving. Yeah, there are some issues with the pacing and presentation. But I think the ideas present in the game were interesting and I respect them for giving it a shot. And with the proper amount of fine tuning I think these ideas could potentially manifest into something great if they were to try again with a sequel.