Root Film

released on Jul 30, 2020

Root Film is the successor to Root Letter. Masterful storytelling meets a multitude of interactive elements in the new game from Kadokawa Games.


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A perfectly pleasant little cozy game.

Root Letter, its predecessor game, is pretty bad. The main character is bizarrely cruel, and the answers to the mysteries vary wildly depending on player actions. Its just a mean, inconsistent game.

By comparison, Root Film is just kind of a cozy time. The mysteries aren't particularly complex and the mechanics are equally simple. Your main task is just hopping from place to place, trying to activate dialogue. The confrontation sections are really simple with the evidence you have and there's not a lot of concern to be had over failing. Its just simple little mystery time.

The core film gimmick is also kind of delightful. The two alternating leads, Yagumo and Riho, fill different roles of the film industry. Yagumo is an aspiring director trying to catch his big break. Riho is a model who's traveling as part of a media personality gig she's hoping to nab. You would think that mean they'd encounter the same kinds of characters, but not really. Riho's public visibility and charm gets her invited into fancy parties or happily welcomed into private succession conflicts. She can mingle among the rich, even when she's just scrounging for jobs. Her mysteries all focus on her easing her way into these superficially pleasant social spheres and poking holes into the facades.

By comparison, Yagumo's down-on-his-luck status in life forces him into an underdog position. I kind of wish the game leaned into Yagumo as a dipshit more, even if it was a quality I hated in the Root Letter protagonist. Riho solves mysteries out of the goodness of her heart. Yagumo, for much of the game, seems to be solving mysteries because these murders are getting in the way of his location scouting. He really, REALLY needs this job, so he'll dig through the dirtiest corners to solve a crime and get back on the path of getting paid. Even if I preferred Riho's cases to Yagumo's, its a fun distinction.

The final case is sort of a shrug for me. The game pulls out its Twists to reveal how Riho's story and Yagumo's story connects, but it doesn't fit together for me. It means a lot of pretty grim endings for Riho's charming cast, endings that don't line up with the characterizations that I thought were established.

But its hard to complain too much. I didn't go in expecting a masterpiece, just a distraction for my lunch breaks. It filled that purpose with a solid Good Enough.

Really enjoyed every minute of this visual novel.

CWs for Root Film: Sui*, spousal abuse, gaslighting, falling from great heights, traffic accidents, emotional manipulation, drowning, blood, graphic wounds, body horror, torture, asphyxiation.

Root Film, despite seeming like a wide turn from it's extremely pastoral predecessor, is mostly a very chill workplace comedy adventure novel game about small actors and directors working in made for tv mystery films who accidentally stumble into various mysteries and then actual murder cases. Both perspective characters Yagumo and Riho are a delight, having really snappy rapport with the supporting cast without ever sneering into the camera for a quip or belaboring the genre tropes the game is often quietly building upon. The Root games continuing to be about adults who have jobs in a specific town or city that then end up in situations is a really grounding approach to character and scenario writing that is really absent in novel games and games as a whole and ultimately makes these games really phenomenal despite also being extremely average.

The mystery solving and adventure game stuff is cleaned up a lot from Root Letter. They've dialed back the fucked up volume of locations to keep in order and have made the chapter culminations really simple affair, sitting somewhere between Ace Attorney Investigation's Logic Chess and the evidence bullets of Danganronpa trials. The steps to win these cross examinations are much more slight, but really it's better that you only have to prove like three or four argument points because the game is otherwise a breezy affair. I dislike how the tone of the overarching mystery develops against my taste and what I liked the most about the first game, but the way it builds and uses the all of the game's formal and promotional material is exciting when it does finally let you give answers. This is a really smart follow up to Root Letter that answers a lot of shortcomings of that game while still keeping the same low key identity that makes that game stand out.

It's been a long, cold month, but I think we're finally back in the money.

Root Film starts off a bit silly; you're an indie film maker interested in the world of art punk horror on the come-up, and you've just received one hell of an opportunity to break into the mainstream by investigating this abandoned and cursed film. And then along your pursuit to make it big, people keep dying for no goddamn good reason! It's a classic yet welcome variation upon the murder mystery genre, and while I can't say it's the most interactive visual novel out there (you simply pick the right locations/spots to inspect and watch everything play out), it sure as hell is a lot of fun breaking down exactly how everything played out and watching these "masterminds" squirm as you, a supposedly clumsy and down on his luck creator, own them with FACTS and LOGIC! The game's got great characters with mysteries that aren't tough at all to solve but still give you that nice tingly feeling of satisfaction, and there are some fantastic twists at the end that really tie all the separate elements of the story together. It's definitely not the heaviest VN I've played with very upbeat moments scattered here and there, thanks to a lively cast and some (admittingly) absurd sketches of life, but I also really appreciated how humanizing the game felt in its conclusion and interpretation upon creating art to seek meaning beyond death. I'll admit I was a little skeptical going into this cold without playing Root Letter after hearing of the previous reception, but I was hooked in less than an hour and binged the whole thing in two days (yes, even despite the dumb typos that are littered throughout the translation here and there). This is a great hidden gem if you like murder mysteries and don't care about forcibly inserted "gameplay." I do wish that there was more of it, but in a way that's almost a compliment I'd say. Funny that I'm feeling this way after playing a narrative rooted in death, but I gotta say, it's nice to feel alive and kicking again after a long stretch of let-downs and party games, enjoying one of my favorite mediums on a cozy couch.

This is the least interactive visual novel I've played. It at least has a good story and fun characters to follow. It's a mystery story. There are several mysteries to resolve over the course of the game most of which are murder mysteries. There are two main characters to play as with separate connected stories that must be completed in one playthrough to progress to the end. The gameplay consists of selecting which location to go to, selecting which person to talk to or object to observe to collect clues, and then interrogating persons of interest using clues gathered to resolve the mystery.

The story is really fun, but it can drag at times. Especially in the final part. The game also has an issue where it won't say exactly where to go leading me to visit every location until some event happens. The number of locations to visit is always small, so this wasn't too big of an issue.

The game is fully voice acted, but it only has Japanese voice overs. I had to read everything anyways, but it's at least good to know the tone in which dialogue is said. There are also many typos throughout which was weird.