The Portopia Remake Mistake

Post 00049 | December 29th 2023

Last year Square Enix released Square Enix released a remake of one of Enix' old classics: Portopia Serial Murder Case. The original holds a special place in gaming history. Not only was it Japan's first visual novel, it was also the first hit game designed by Yuji Horii who later gained fame as the creator of the Dragon Quest series. The game was released for the NEC PC-6001 all the way back in 1983 where it played as a text-based graphic adventure game. The game had graphics in the form of pictures, but you interacted with them using simple verb-noun commands (take key, open door, punch neighbour). The 1985 Famicom port ditched the text commands in favour of cursors, turning it into a point-and-click adventure. In the game you play as a police officer is trying to solve the mysterious death with his assistant. You go around to different locations, look for clues and ask people for information. It saw a few more releases in Japan on various home computers and mobile phones before finally being re-released last year as an AI tech demo to show off Square Enix's advances with natural language processing.

If you grew up with any of the text-based versions of the game you should be able to see the appeal of using AI for understanding and generating natural language. Games such as these didn't come with built-in thesauruses, meaning they were pretty picky about what words were used. Do you press, push, hit, or use the button? Or is the button a doorbell or a switch? Often it was more a game of guessing the word the developer was thinking, so if AI can help making this more user-friendly, then why not welcome it? Sadly, the AI featured in the game doesn't seem to work at all. As in, I have played old-school text-based adventure games from the 70's that had a better grasp of the English language. It's Hey You, Pikachu! for the N64 levels of bad when it comes to understanding commands. I didn't really want to egg on the game straight away. For me at least, I always associate artificial intelligence with machine learning. Perhaps the AI was bad because it was new at its job? Either that, or I wanted to give the Square Enix the release an update to patch the obviously ludicrous performance.

The original

Yasu, your assistant, standing in Hanakuma, the starting location.
All locations are based on real places in Kansai region of Japan.

While I waiting for a possible update for the remake, I decided to play the original, or rather the 2010 fan translation by DvD Translations. Considering how old the game is, I enjoyed it a lot. It was a pretty short game, which is probably for the best as it predates battery saves. The game doesn't have a title screen to speak of, instead throwing you straight into the streets of Hanakuma with your assistant Yasu. Here you learn that someone named Kouzou Yamakawa has been found dead in his mansion and that Mr. Hirata the greengrocer has gone missing. You then get to visit the mansion to look for clues or go to the police station to interrogate suspects. Yuji horii has always been able to spin a good yarn and this time is no different. Whenever you think you're close to solving the case, the game throws you another curveball.

I don't think there is much shame in following a walkthrough for the game. At least in the victim's mansion there are a few pieces of evidence that, while they are required to progress the story, are completely invisible, and as they aren't hinted at anywhere. Curiously, these hidden items only appear in the mansion, which is a relief from a game perspective, but as the mansion is one of the first places you visit in the game, you might feel conditioned to start clicking every random pixel whenever you're stuck later in the game. I would personally recommend DvD Translations' own walkthrough but again, after you've finished your first examination of the mansion, it becomes a lot more straight forward. Normally, I would write a bit the games soundtrack, but in this case there isn't one. The graphics aren't much to write home about either, although looking at screenshots from ports to other computers from the time, the Famicom version was one of the more fortunate versions.

What the game lacks in the audiovisual department, it makes up for with its writing. To mention a few of the humorous situations, if you dial 000-000-0000 you can get "hints" from Licca® which is a brand of dress-up doll. These hints are just as helpful as the emergency services who will scold you if you dial 110. There are also a couple of pervy instances such Yasu getting very excited when asked to go investigate a strip club. All in all, the game has a lot of charm so it's not difficult to see why the its so fondly remembered many years later. Many thanks goes to DvD Translations who did a great job with providing us with an English translation.

The remake

It has now been eight months, and the game has seen no obvious improvement. I also tried to check the game's Steam page for Japanese reviews to see if it was just the English version that was borked, but sadly the Japanese appears to have the same issues. If I read the game's Steam page correctly, it actually seems like natural language generation has been turned off due to a fear of it generating "unethical replies". I'm not entirely sure how you can release a tech demo without the tech you're trying to demo, yet here we are. Of course, the language generation is only part of the equation; Arguably, language understanding is more important if we are trying to solve the finicky text commands of yesteryear. Sadly, I have to say this also leaves a lot to be desired. Any attempt of straying too far from the classic verb-noun commands will be met by a "Hmmm..." or a "Let's focus on the task at hand" or similar. The original Yasu tried his best to obey any command you gave him, no matter how little he wanted to do so, so I can't feel like this is a downgrade. Rather than natural language, it feels like you're entering commands into a command line terminal that will reply with a "SYNTAX ERROR" if you didn't enter the command precisely the way you were supposed to. I definitely got further in the game than I originally did when it first came out, but I think that comes down the the fact I know what I'm supposed to do. It's quite pathetic that the almost four decade old Famicom port did a better job of dealing dealing text commands than this modern remake whose main objective was to solve this.

Toshi's new artwork looks delightfully punchable, and Yasu was only happy to oblige once he understood the task.

Yasu being a pronoun pedant over a presenting a pendant to a defendant.

It's a shame that the one thing they wanted to show off is as bad as it is because there is a good game underneath. It's the first official English release of Japan's first visual novel! The graphics also got a noticeable upgrade. Clearly, somebody made an effort re-imagining and drawing the characters. Also, a lot of the frustrating parts from the original has been improved: For instance, the hidden items I alluded to in the victim's mansion have been made visible with small glittery stars. You still have to play "guess the word" to actually find the thing, but it's better than nothing. Also, the original had a big maze that didn't really add anything other than padding. This has been completely removed, which is a welcome improvement. I honestly can't get over the fact that they developed the game to show off their AI, only to be scared of the AI and turning it off and still ship the game. I honestly wouldn't have minded paying a tenner or so for the game if they had completely replaced the text input with menus like the Famicom version offered. Instead this half-arsed abomination is an insult to the original work, a poor first impression for newcomers to the game and an affront to natural language processing in general.

You you can ask men for their alibis without adding a pronoun, but if you ask Yukiko or Fumie you have to add a "her" to the command.

Well done AI, I am literally turning into this man thanks to you.

The game is essentially free, but still feels like a waste of money. I would instead recommend playing the Famicom version with DvD Translation's English patch. If you want a more modern (but retro) murder mystery game, Nintendo released remakes of the Famicom Detective Club games for the Switch back in 2021. I also keep hearing good things about Retro Mystery Club although I haven't played it yet. Neither of my recommendations contain any AI, which is probably for the best all things considered.

Bonus info:

Here's something I found out while researching for this post: Yuji Horii actually grew up in Sumoto on the island of Awaji. With all the worlds he has created for us to explore, I think it's kind of fun how his first story was told in the neighbourhood he grew up in. While I was looking at the place on Google Maps, I found a Dragon Quest Monument which was put up to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the series. I'd love to go see it someday.