SHUTEN ORDER Review (Switch eShop)

Leave it up to Kazutaka Kodaka to come up with one of the weirdest stories in gaming, huh?

Following on from the outrageously ambitious The Hundred Line - Last Defense Academy, the creator has now joined forces with developer Neilo on the new visual novel Shuten Order. I say ‘visual novel’, and that’s absolutely the overarching genre, but it also manages to feature five distinct sub-genres within its surprisingly lengthy story. Wild stuff.

Shuten Order itself is the titular cult obsessed with the idea that humanity itself is doomed. In fact, the cult not only believes that the end of times is at hand, but is actively wishing for it, rejecting any notion of an afterlife or an all-seeing deity. In what can only be described as divine intervention, however, its founder awakens following their brutal murder, seemingly resurrected to track down the culprit. If that’s not enough, two angels also accompany you throughout the game to provide advice and guidance. Could the cult be...wrong?

With just a few days on the clock before your resurrection ‘expires’, you’re tasked with completing ‘God’s Trial’: identify your murderer, get them to confess, and then, well… kill them. The potential suspects are limited to just five individuals: Shuten Order’s ministers, each of whom presides over a specific department. So you’ve got the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Education, and so on.

Once you’ve chosen which of the five ministers to accuse of your murder, you’ll have to pursue them and try to gain a confession, and it’s here where the gameplay diverges into one of five sub-genres.

I started with the Ministry of Security, which essentially sees you working to solve the mystery of a deadly entity called ‘Nephilim’, a grotesque creature that stalks its prey and gouges their eyes out. Lovely stuff. The Security path sees you navigate a series of labyrinths set in different locations as you progress through the story. It’s mostly a case of finding an item or activating a switch and then making it to a final destination without being caught by Nephilim, who constantly shuffles along the corridors. It’s shallow stuff with some pretty basic 3D visuals, and on its own doesn’t really hold up all that well.

In fact, the same could very well be said for every sub-genre: The Ministry of Education focuses on a romance story in which you need to woo three women within a typical school setting; The Ministry of Health is an escape adventure focused around a ‘death game’ that fans of Danganronpa will no doubt appreciate; The Ministry of Justice is a straightforward investigation in which you need to gather clues and deduce the correct course of action; and finally, The Ministry of Science is a multi-perspective visual novel that features several ‘protagonists’.

None of the gameplay tropes feel particularly new, and pretty much all of them can be seen in Kodaka’s previous work, but I guess you could say that this is the first time they’ve all been cobbled together in one single game. With that in mind, if you’re familiar with the likes of Dangaronpa or Zero Escape, then much of Shuten Order will be pretty familiar territory.

Despite the marketing push to highlight the different sub-genres, the overarching story is really the main draw here. As you start to unravel the mystery, you’ll meet some seriously entertaining characters along the way, and Kodaka’s writing alongside illustrator simadoriru’s visual design is consistently striking and unique.

Where Shuten Order begins to falter is in its execution of those sub-genres. Kodaka has stated his ambition to present a “culmination of all the visual novels I've ever read”, and it’s certainly an ambitious attempt, but the approach here screams ‘Jack of all trades’.

The five different branches wind up feeling little more than a novelty, and not a particularly compelling one. I mentioned how the Security path features basic visuals, but this is nothing compared to how simple and mundane the actual gameplay is. The devs want you to feel nervous as you avoid the gaze of Nephilim, but there's zero challenge, and it ends up just being a nuisance.

Similarly, the romance path has you searching (stalking?) for your potential date, with the game presenting multiple locations to visit, but not giving much indication as to where you actually need to go. So you wind up just guessing until you reach the right goal, forced to engage in random NPC conversations if you happen to search in the wrong place. This isn't a game that respects your time.

It’s not a short one, either. The length will vary depending on how much you’re willing to invest in the story and investigate every possible avenue, but each of the five narrative branches could easily take you 10 hours or so. At a total of 50, Shuten Order felt quite bloated and would have benefited from focusing on just one or two key gameplay hooks to tell its story. Coming off the back of The Hundred Line, which demonstrated an exceptionally strong combination of visual novel storytelling and tactical gameplay, the attempt to showcase several different genres here means that none of them are really able to shine.

What does shine, however, is the visual design. Shuten Order displays exceptional use of colour that really sets it apart from other visual novels, and the juxtaposition of the striking blues, yellows, and pinks against a story steeped in misery and despair is particularly notable.

Similarly, the music is consistently engaging, shifting in tone at all the right moments, while the Japanese voiceover work never falters. There’s no Western VO here, however, so you’re out of luck if you happen to prefer your Japanese visual novels dubbed.

In terms of performance, it all runs well on the Switch, with reasonably short load times. If you happen to be playing on the Switch 2, then you won't find any issues with performance, but you should note that character illustrations at certain distances can look almost pixelated, slightly – a simple symptom of blowing up the Switch 1 game's handled resolution on the larger 1080p screen. If you can, play it on the Switch OLED; the colours look simply marvellous on that stunning display.