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Playing The Hokkaido Serial Murder Case remake got me in the mood to play more Famicom adventure games, so I played through the first Detective Saburō Jingūji game, the Shinjuku Central Park Murder Mystery(探偵 神宮寺三郎 新宿中央公園殺人事件)! Some of you may know this series by its English translation, Jake Hunter. This story even got remade in one of the entries to get an English translation, but from skimming some of a longplay, outside of some basic details, it seems to be very different. This post is just about the Famicom original. The Detective Saburō Jingūji series is massive, so how was the start of the series?



The mystery starts out pretty simple: a popular hostess from the East Bar was found dead in Shinjuku Central Park… and honestly the mystery remains pretty simple as you figure out who did it lol I was a bit surprised how straightforward this was. It’s pretty obvious early on where this is going, with only one addition that you couldn’t really figure out until the end because you just didn’t have the information. The writing is not particularly great, the characters don’t have much to them to make the mystery interesting. It’s really short, about an hour if you know what you’re doing, but knowing what you should do is where the issues truly begin…

This game is difficult in terms of the roadblocks it places. Most of the game is typical menu-based detective game stuff, but you can get game overs from doing certain wrong actions. I got one of these by accident when asking Jingūji’s police friend Kumano for his alibi. This seems intended to get you to be intentional with your actions and not just brute force all options, but it ends up making you feel discouraged from experimenting. The original PC-88 version of Hokkaido Serial Murder Case has something similar, so it’s not an uncommon design decision from the era, but there’s a reason why it gets left behind (for example, the Famicom version of HSMC released 2 months later does away with this).



There is also a time system where days can pass by. This means there’s a hard limit on the amount of days you can investigate, and hitting that limit results in a game over. Honestly not a big deal, the issue is that certain characters apparently only appear on certain days, which if playing without a guide would require you to check everywhere each day to avoid missing something important.



Most interesting about this game is that the titular Shinjuku Central Park is not a typical menu screen like most adventure game locations, but a JRPG overworld that you can walk around and investigate. This seems really cool at first, but in practice is actually a pain to play. There are points you need to find locations by looking around certain tiles, and it is so difficult to do. Even with a text guide I couldn’t find a location when I knew what and where it was, I had to look at a video guide to see exactly where I needed to look. It’s the combination of needing to find a specific location that isn’t distinguishable from other areas on a specific day that makes this game so hard. The specific moment I’m talking about was probably a quarter of the game time.



The main thing the game has going for it is its aesthetic. It nails the hardboiled feel with that title screen, as well as touches like the eye catch between loading screens. It also apparently was the first adventure game to have musical phrases to accompany certain actions, like a musical sting when shocking information is revealed, something games like the Famicom Detective Club series would take.

Was kind of disappointed with this. I hope the sequels are better, I’m at least still interested in playing them. It wasn’t awful, but there was just a low hum of annoyance playing through this.