Review | Urban Myth Dissolution Center - Stylish, Vibrant, And Flawed To A Fault
Japan has a long and diverse history of adventure games. There’s the titles everybody knows, like the beloved Phoenix Wright series; the influential greats, like The Portopia Serial Murder Case; and indie successes such as Corpse Party and Ib. Then there’s a vast underground of cult hits, most of which are only available in Japanese. (A fun place to start: the as-yet incomplete Danganronpa-like Your Turn to Die.) Urban Myth Dissolution Center, developed by Hakababunko (Makoto Wakaido’s Case Files) and published by Shueisha Games, is a new challenger for the adventure game crown. It is just thoughtful and stylish enough to be strong competition — to a point.
The game’s title says it all: this is the story of the Urban Myth Dissolution Center, an organisation devoted to busting local legends. The protagonist, Azami Fukurai, is the detective. Her supervisor, company head Ayumu Meguriya, is the brains. Meanwhile, local cool girl Jasmine drives the van and apprehends suspects. They travel around Tokyo investigating occult phenomena: ghosts, doppelgangers and even doors to the netherworld. Meanwhile, an online cult heralds the arrival of a Great Reset. Does kind, naive Azami have what it takes to stop the apocalypse?
The first aspect of this game that will catch your attention is likely the graphics. Urban Myth Dissolution Center combines big, chunky pixels with a limited colour palette to create an old-fashioned world of horror. Character models are simple on the field but blow up into larger, detailed character portraits during conversations. Every character in the game, no matter how minor, is given multiple expressions to distinguish how they are feeling at any given moment, including over-the-top “breakdowns” you might remember from the Phoenix Wright series.
The game’s central trio in particular is a triumph of characterization through emoting. Azami’s nervousness is sold by her dilated pupils and constantly moving hands. Ayumu’s charisma comes out in the game’s “identification” and “dissolution” setpieces, which arrive with the ritual and inevitability of magical girl transformation sequences. And Jasmine in particular is a triumph; she even has an entirely different set of expressions in one chapter when she becomes ill. Urban Myth Dissolution Center is fortunate to have a strong localization that gives each of these characters their own voice. Even if it didn’t, though, you would understand them just by how they move and behave.
Urban Myth Dissolution Center’s principal gimmick ties into the graphics as well. Azami has the power to see into the past. By putting on a pair of glasses, her blue pixel world is overlaid with red spectres that embody recent events. Azami can then make deductions based on her findings. The series of steps Azami takes — from interrogating witnesses, to investigating past traces while searching for the truth, to drawing conclusions — is the central loop of the game.
In between phases of the investigation is the research stage. Azami and Jasmine have access to a conspicuously Twitter-like app on their phones. By keeping an eye out for wiggling words on the screen, Azami can use her glasses to find search terms that might point her in the right direction. These sequences steadily build out the wider world of Urban Myth Dissolution Center, pointing towards other local legends that are otherwise just tangential to the game itself.
The first case does a great job of laying out the game’s formula. I was excited to see how Urban Myth Dissolution Center might then tweak it as it moves on. Well, it doesn’t really. Each chapter proceeds in the same way. You investigate every node on the map, put on the glasses, revisit the earlier nodes for follow-up information, then move to the next stage of the investigation. Once in a while you select a choice or “fill in the blanks” to devise a hypothesis regarding the case. The only exceptions to the rule I found during the game was a number lock puzzle in one chapter and another that asks the player to revisit four past maps in search of new clues.
On the bright side, this means that you will rarely be at a loss for what to do in order to progress a particular case. But the fact that every chapter is structured so similarly can make the proceedings feel repetitive. I would have appreciated it if a later case added (or even removed) mechanics just to shake things up. As it stands, I’d say this game is best played nightly chapter by chapter so as not to burn yourself out.
Urban Myth Dissolution Center’s lack of real puzzles demands that the story carry the weight. Thankfully there’s a lot to like here. This game drills deep into “urban myths” — not just ones I’m familiar with (Bloody Mary, The Man Under the Bed) but also local memes like the Samejima Incident (a 2chan cognitohazard.) Watching Azami and company flesh out each manifestation from vague to specific over the course of each case can be very satisfying.
Every one of the game’s urban myths, including Azami’s unusual powers, is given a real world explanation. This might disappoint fans hoping for actual manifestations of ghosts and goblins. “What is this,” they might say. “Scooby Doo?” The key to Urban Myth Dissolution Center, though, isn’t Scooby Doo but (according to this interview with WayTooManyGames) the novels of Japanese writer Natsuhiko Kyogoku. Kyogoku specialises in doorstopper mysteries in which yokai manifest through human psychology. The inevitable real life explanation is always far more absurd and convoluted than the supernatural.
Urban Myth Dissolution Center modernises the Kyogoku formula by moving its setting from post–World War II Japan to the modern era of social media. Just like the state of Japan in the 1950s dramatises Kyogoku’s staged conflict between past and present values, this game’s emphasis on technology speculates about the future. Who are we, and where are we going? How do the stories that we tell about ourselves, and the way in which information platforms shape those stories, affect our reality? The best sequences in this game interrogate urban myth with the ardour of a true enthusiast.
Which is why I was disappointed when the ending drops the ball. The final case successfully wraps up threads left dangling in every prior chapter. It even shakes up the dissolution ritual that ends each chapter in a satisfying way. But then it goes one or two steps too far, revealing a plot point that was foreshadowed previously but also breaks the dramatic arc of the game. Worse, this scene plays out after the game has already ended, meaning that the player isn’t even allowed to come to that conclusion on their own. While this choice might work in a film or television series, I’m not convinced it does here.
Natsuhiko Kyogoku’s most successful novels connect pseudoscientific psychological spiritualism with defined characters that reveal themselves together with the mystery. He is able to accomplish this because the length of a novel allows for space to flesh out characters unique to each mystery along with his recurring players. Urban Myth Dissolution Center’s chapter-based structure, where every case is roughly two hours, allows for big personalities but inevitably shortchanges characterisation. I think that’s why the ending, which should be the grand unravelling, instead reads as if it came from another game with different priorities than the one I was playing up to that point. Hakababunko tells a good pulp mystery but not quite good enough to connect the dots of their project in a way that feels inevitable.
All in all, it’s tough for me to pin down my feelings regarding Urban Myth Dissolution Center. Between its sumptuous pixel art, vibrant personalities and unabashed nerdiness, it’s a game that I admire a lot. (I haven’t even mentioned the music and sound design, which perfectly sell the game’s paranoid atmosphere.) But the final scenes left a bad taste in my mouth, and that’s just enough to sink a game that in other respects struggles to express its love of mysteries through real system design. Then again, you’re not my doppelganger. There’s every chance that this ambitious, stylish and rather flawed labour of love will work for you.
