Game Review - by Spinner 8

The second NES game released by Enix, the first being the forgettable Door Door. I don’t know much about this game, but it’s by Yuji Horii, so you know it rocks. At first it looks like a standard text adventure, but I hear later on it becomes a weird Wizardry-style dungeon crawler thing.

DvD Translations adds:

This is the first adventure game released on the Famicom. Yuji Horii ported this, his successful NEC PC-8801 game, to the Famicom to determine whether the Famicom action game crowd would take to an adventure game. The game did quite well. Because of this, Horii was able to release the game he really wanted to make for the Famicom, the first Japanese console RPG: Dragon Quest.

(editor's note: and take to it they did, becoming perhaps the single most foundational title in the Japanese adventure game canon)

~ Juegos que Hay que Jugar Antes de Morir ~

Juego 63: The Portopia Serial Murder Case (1983)

Muy muy interesante. Se conserva mejor de lo que me imaginaba, después de haber visto capturas del juego por ahí.

Desde luego, tiene problemas serios, como el "haz-click-aquí-sin-ningún-motivo-que-hay-un-objeto-imprescindible-para-avanzar" típico de las aventuras gráficas antiguas, o el laberinto que te pide un bloc de notas junto al teclado para resolverlo. Sin embargo, es un inicio más que digno para estos juegos tipo Ace Attorney.

No me extraña que fuera la inspiración para genios como Kojima o Aonuma. Ojalá hagan algún día un remake.

a masterpiece of playful design coupled with well thought-out and executed narrative

there's a few instances of Pixel Hunting and slight "guess what the developer is thinking" that can be frustrating by modern standards, but being persistent pays off in incredible ways. it makes sense that several developers, namely Kojima, have said that this is the game that inspired them to make games, because it lays the groundwork for their types of "deadly serious in-world, yet goofy" tones. one of the best endings to a game ever.

Quasi mi sento in colpa a dover dare un voto non eccellente ad un gioco del genere.
Portopia ha fatto la storia, inutile girarci attorno: il secondo gioco pubblicato, dall'allora neonata, Enix detiene il merito di essere il precursore delle visual novel e di tutti i videogiochi con avventure narrative, che rappresentavano un'inedita alternativa ai giochi d'azione: al posto dei riflessi, il videogiocatore doveva ora fare affidamento al proprio pensiero logico e alla capacità di ragionamento.
Non solo, ma il lavoro di Yuji Horii (futuro creatore di Dragon Quest, a sua volta fondatore dei JRPG) fu anche un'importante fonte di ispirazione per aspiranti autori, essendo, insieme a Super Mario Bros di Miyamoto, il videogioco che spinse Hideo Kojima a incanalare il proprio talento creativo nel game design.

Ma storia a parte, il gioco com'è?
Sorprendentemente profondo e articolato per trattarsi di un gioco del 1983. Come ogni visual novel, ma anche avventura grafica dell'epoca, di stampo investigativo, lo scopo è quello di risolvere il grande enigma di un caso di omicidio compiendo una sequenza variabile di azioni standard (Spostati, interroga, prendi, esamina etc) a seconda della zona e del contesto in cui ci si trova. Il fiore all'occhiello che contraddistingue Portopia è la sua libertà d'azione: il giocatore non sarà obbligato a seguire dei binari fissi per poter avanzare nell'indagine, ma potrà gestirla come meglio crede nell'ordine che preferisce, data la possibilità di poter ottenere lo stesso risultato in più modi differenti. Occhio, perché non è scontato questo fattore; molti giochi moderni, per quanto siano più raffinati tecnicamente, non offrono sempre tutta questa libertà d'azione.
D'altro canto, non sempre il dosaggio di questo "libero arbitrio" risulta adeguato, poiché capiterà diverse volte di essere costretti a fare cose totalmente randomiche pur di procedere con la storia principale, senza che vi sia alcun riferimento grafico o dialogo a fungerci da indizio

Altra grave mancanza, poi sistemata in porting futuri, è quella della colonna sonora. Il sonoro è presente, pure con un ruolo talvolta fondamentale per la risoluzione degli enigmi, ma solo il minimo indispensabile. L'assenza di "musiche" rende sì l'esperienza di gioco più simile a quella di un'indagine reale, ma a costo di abbassare l'impatto emotivo di alcuni momenti chiave della trama, come il climax finale.

Se siete amanti dei gialli classici cosiddetti "dalla stanza chiusa", allora questo gioco fa per voi. L'intreccio narrativo sembra uscito direttamente da un libro di Agatha Christie e il colpo di scena finale, ripreso e rielaborato da giochi più recenti, vi lascerà di stucco. I personaggi che ci accompagneranno durante questa (dis)avventura non saranno molti, tuttavia saranno valorizzati dalla loro vibrante personalità e dalle diverse reazioni verso le nostre azioni più "sceme".

Sicuramente Portopia è un gioco difficile da recuperare in lingua, quantomeno, inglese, ma lo sforzo è stato più che sufficientemente ricompensato da un'avventura ispiratrice e ricca di segreti. In caso aveste la pazienza di un santo, o foste dei folli, non esitate un solo secondo a giocare The Portopia Serial Murder Case.

This is one of the most influential games do ever exist. Let's go over just a few of the small things it's inspired.
• The entire Visual Novel genre. That's right this is quite literally the very first VN to ever exist. Ace Attorney? Danganronpa? You name it. Detective mystery games started here.
• Almost every RPG made in Japan. The development of this game lead to Dragon Quest being made which inspired Final Fantasy, Pokemon, Shin Megami Tensei, Kingdom Hearts, and yeah basically everything under the sun in the genre.
• Inspired the Metal Gear creator to want to become a game developer meaning it also heavily impacted the stealth genre.
• One of the devs of this game went onto become the director of Zelda Ocarina of Time, Breath of the Wild, and many other games in the series. This means Portopia helped inspire the game that set the standard for 3D adventure games and the game that opened the gates for true open world games.

Ok so this game is clearly one of the most important games ever made but is it actually good? I absolutely think it's amazing for an early 1980s game. In tried to actually have an interesting plot in an era where almost no game actually had a significant story. This is a game with an actual significant plot twist in 1983. That alone makes it exceed in value over most games from this era. In fact this is the only game older than 1985 that I think I'd actively recommend to someone if I think it meets their interests. There are some flaws I think are worth mentioning such as the lack of being able to save the game but the story is short enough and save states now exist which erases these kinds of issue.

Despite having watched like hundreds of Detective Conan episodes last year and expecting a typical melodrama gimmicky mystery with revelations that become predictable as the cause for the murders, the extremely short lenght makes for a cute breeze of a playthrough and a story which actually has an emotional plot twist at the end I didn't expect.

Hoped it was a much more complex story that doesn't involve these tired bussiness conspiracies Japanese mystery works often tend to become, though, even if it was ambitious for its time.

It's really odd to me that so much of the writing on backloggd about this game is about whether it is "bad" or "good". Is this why we play games? Just to determine whether they pass a factory inspection test of being better than Mario Bros?

I recognize I am simplifying the process of review here, but isn't it kind of incredible how much influence this game has held over time? How you can see it in modern mystery titles to this day?

Isn't it cool that Yuji Horii played Mystery House and was like, "damn why can't computers talk to you?" and made a non-linear world for you to explore and work through dialogue trees?

Isn't it kind of just....wild that the end of this game is an abstract white walled maze that feels completely tonally offbeat in comparison to the rest of itself??

Is it a pixel hunting game with solutions that are a complete stretch! Totally! It can be a slog to play to be honest!!

But it was also paving the road for a genre and experimenting with what was even possible with an on-screen mystery adventure. Knowing this while I play makes it enjoyable enough for me.

An adventure mystery game with a healthy breadth of verbs boiled down from a text command released for early home PCs. Portopia, in its verbage and roundabout area connections, come together to articulate how miserable casing people and points of interest as a beat cop would feel like. The short form writing of the era effortlessly conveys the NPCs' insistent lack of cooperation while the few images of the game still call upon the cinematic in their simplicity. The point is friction. The game is not poorly composed, it is a singular jigsaw puzzle with a very specific solution, completely indifferent to your victory. The maze is odd, but obviously serves to express a great final challenge in an otherwise sparse system and isn't very hard if you just bust out pen and paper (or just check the guide because we live in the future and you can do what you want). I'd also say the obtuseness of the pixel hunting is incredibly overstated if you spend at least a couple of minutes (in an extremely short game) poking at the obvious locations. The nature of finding truth is all trial and error, so persevere.

This is the second game after Night in the Woods that has made me do something I don't wanna do. In that game was to touch somebody's ripped off arm with a stick in the middle of the street. The thing is that if you insisted, you would discover a mysterious symbol in the arm. In Portopia's case, it's simple police brutality. But even with that, I consider it even more interesting, because it defies the notion of fiction VS reality. Unfortunately, I can't say the same about the sexist bits. They just feel idiotic and, worst of all, unnecessary.

The way the wide range of options is displayed to you to make use of them makes me think that the game is not about a story of profound relationships, but an option showcase to generate text through interactions constantly, while you're trying things over and over.
Because of this, it can be tricky to go forward here and there, but it's worth the experiment. The thing I liked the most about this experiment is the scenery investigation part, where nothing looks suspicious at first glance, but when you use the magnifying glass, it kinda feels like you're using one, because that's when you might discover where does some things hide.