Return to Shironagasu Island Review

It's an all too familiar thing that a trailer can make a game look completely different from what it really is. I've burned my fingers too many times by grabbing onto something I thought was worthwhile but actually turned out to be a red hot mistake. A case in point: a Japanese visual novel mystery thriller Return to Shironagasu looked suitably bonkers in the trailer. “I’m going to like this one”, I thought. Much to my dismay, though, in reality, the game has a big attitude problem; it’s misogynistic, morally dubious, and boring.

A rich man from a prestigious family has apparently committed suicide and his heir calls New York-based Japanese detective Sen Ikeda to the scene. Ikeda is accompanied by his teen-aged assistant Neneko, a child prodigy who has a photographic memory but who is terribly shy and socially clumsy. Together they travel to the titular Shironagasu Island where, in eerily isolated circumstances, suspicious cases begin to pile up. Is there a demon on the loose on the island responsible for witnessed terrors or is there something else, more grounded reason behind the morbid mystery?

The biggest problem with Return to Shironagasu Island is its repulsive main character, Sen Ikeda, who you play as for the duration of the story. Fiction has all kinds of bastards but when reading a book or watching a movie, you are the bystander. However, when playing a game, you have to be that bastard and unlike some role-playing games, the task is made more onerous by having no means to change his attitude. Ikeda constantly blasphemes and belittles poor Neneko and ridicules her weaknesses, such as stuttering and insecurity. That surely helps the girl’s low self-esteem, doesn’t it? I very well know that Japan is a very male-centric and patriarchal society but this is something else.

The same toxic attitude towards women permeates the whole game, whether it’s the female cast’s unpleasant personalities, gratuitous sexual innuendo (especially towards under-aged girls) or Ikeda telling them each off. I can’t help but wonder if the author has issues with women. Regardless, this dubious stance left the mystery of the island to the backseat as I rolled my eyes in disbelief each time the game stooped to neglect its female cast, whether it was through the juvenile script or questionable illustrations.

Interactivity – or the lack of it, thereof – is an eternal problem with visual novels. Here, occasional choices are only superficial. Even if you choose something like ”leave the door open” instead of ”close the door”, Ikeda mutters it’s better to close it, and closes the door. So, no matter what you choose, it’s already decided by the game. Why give a choice in the first place, then? There are few timed events where you just have to click through the script as fast as you can, and bomb-defusing minigames but nothing really that would make Return to Shironagasu Island more a game than a novel. There is no posture in the dramaturgy either. The cast is boring and unfortunately poorly personalized, and in most crime descriptions, the prosaic emptiness is filled with superfluous medical details that are so out of the context that it feels like they were just copy-pasted from an encyclopedia.

In the end, Return to Shironagasu Island is a dull and disturbing visual novel for all the wrong reasons. When illustrations are nothing to shout about and the music sounds like it was recorded during playing lessons, I really can’t come up with any excuses for its existence. If I hadn’t reviewed the game, I would have stopped playing it after half an hour, but on behalf of you, dear readers, I suffered my way through it and I say, don’t you ever bother with it.