80%PC

剧情神作，极其独特且精细的叙事结构在ADV历史上绝无仅有，正片之外的番外以及彩蛋也非常丰富，再加上少见的真人演出剧照，让这个游戏脱颖而出。ADV玩家必玩。

90%PC

428 Shibuya Scramble is the modern day choose-your-own-adventure real-life-visuals Visual Novel I wasnt prepared to like as much as I did.

Maria Osawa, the daughter of prodigy virologist Kenji Osawa, has been kidnapped and her sister Hitomi has been instructed to bring the random money to the center of Shibuya for the hand off... Thus starts the story of Shibuya Scramble, and along the way we will meet many of the characters in Shibuya and how they all end up as part of this story.

First things first. This is a visual novel. AKA you will be reading for 99% of the games 30H run time. It is a book much, much more than a game, However...

While it is a visual novel, the gameplay element here is that at times while you are reading you will be asked to make a choice for the character. The cool thing with this game is that not only can your choice affect that characters story, it also might affect one of the other 4 playable characters stories in unexpected and either helpful or fatal ways. The "game" then is to pick and choose the "correct" thing to do at any give time so that each character successfully makes it to the end of each 1 hour chapter (AKA get everyone from 10AM to 11AM) - Choosing the "wrong" thing (which wont be anything close to readily apparent as you are making the choices) will lead to one of the 85 bad endings in the game... While that might seem bad the way they are handled is usually very fun and outside the last chapter they are actually quite fun to try to get to knowing you will go back and get the right one later (aka its rarely just "hey you picked the wrong thing, try the other one" - For example in one instance one of your characters can just up and leave the main story of the game to enter the lucrative world of competitive eating)

And as for the story, It is a gripping one that unfolds and builds in unexpected, intriguing, and often humorous ways. As far as visual novels go its up at the top for me. The use of real actors/locations gives the whole thing a very "season of TV" vibe, very cool. All the actors did a really great job and it was another fun game set in Shibuya as a backdrop.

Buuuut its not a TV show, its a game that we are playing and interacting with, and as a game there are some slight annoyances with the way it handles the "novel" portion of the visual novel (the mechanic is uses to skip already seen text leaves something to be desired), and the final chapter has a bit of a grind feeling to it with all the bad endings you can run into, but overall it doesnt take too much away from the excellent story being told here. I do have to knock 10% off my review total just because the gameplay does sometimes "get it its own way" and detract from an otherwise great story.

Some things I consider minor annoyances - As mentioned above, there are 85 bad endings and if you want to get the "true ending" to the game you must find all of them! Essentially impossible on first play through... But luckily youtube exists so I just watched it there instead. The choose your own adventure style gameplay sometimes results in duplicate texts that is sometimes skippable but not always, and the text speed is a bit slow so when you encounter a part like that it is a bit of an eye roll, but not enough to ruin the experience. And sometimes the choices you make dont lead to a bad end, just alternate text but I went back a couple of times and the section of the story I got the 2nd time was much more emotional than the original one I picked even though it didnt result in any game overs. Its unfortunate that some players wont get to experience those if they dont go back and just happen to pick a different option.

If you like visual novels, bump this one up to the top of your list, you wont regret it.

95%PC

30个小时彩虹书签，一周目无攻略24小时58个BE才完成。

感谢steam版的汉化大佬。20块7毛买的，不能更超值。

太好玩啦！

90%PlayStation 4

Cool Story game, very unique from the other visual novel games.

100%PC

The most compelling visual novel I've ever played (read? what's the proper terminology here?) and I couldn't put it down. Absurd pulp storytelling with twists, turns, coincidences, and everything else but the characters are so earnest. The story is hard to consider... plausible in any real world scenario but it's so fun it doesn't matter. It's equal parts thrilling and funny. It's just all around great.

80%PlayStation 4

It's a visual novel that uses photos of real life actors to tell a kidnapping story. This gives the game a certain old school feeling. By the end of it, I was feeling like a shibuya district born and raised local. It has definitely a very japanese humor, and I found the jokes mostly funny. The story has some anime nonsense like a girl that is stuck in a cat costume because of a broken zipper. The photos have some interesting angles and are more dynamic than I expected. There are also some video scenes here and there. The game's story is told by a lot of text with no voice acting. The white font can be hard on the eyes.

The sound effects and occasional rumble of the controller do a great job at conveying emotion. The music felt simple, but very appropriate. Some tracks gave me the feeling of a simulation game. Some of the tracks slowly grew on me. The game mentions Aya Kamiki a lot. I was surprised to find out that she is a real life singer. She gave me the vibe of a japanese Avril Lavigne.

You'll start with access to two characters. After you complete the first in game hour for both of them, 3 more characters will be accessible. Later on, there will be even more characters. At first, those new characters seem to be irrelevant for the main plot, but they will have many actions that intersect with the others, much like a butterfly effect. The characters are all very different and interesting. Each in game hour is a chapter. To advance to another hour, you'll have to play all the characters.

The game has a time chart that makes it easy to go back to each character and select a specific time or event. You are supposed to get many bad endings before seeing the true ending. So one of the most annoying traces of visual novels is totally gone from this game. As you get a bad ending with one character, you need to go to another character and change his actions so that the story can progress. At the bad ending screen, the game gives good hints at what you need to do. After six o'clock, for some mysterious reason, the game stops giving hints, and it can be a matter of try and error to find out what decision you have to change. This breakes the narrative and is a bit frustrating. There is a specific decision that is very important for progress, but it's also very random. It might be better to just follow a guide after 18h. You can only progress to another hour when all the characters have successfully arrived to the 'to be continued' at the end of the hour.

You can't skip/fast foward any text, and that is a feature that is missing. The only good thing is that texts usually show up pretty fast and the time it takes to get to the decision is usually short anyway. The ff function would be more important for the post game content. You can press down on the d-pad to get quickly through texts you have already seen, but mos of the times the game doesn't let you return to playing on certain parts of the text. It felt very random. The game has an autoplay mode with 3 speed levels so that you don't have to press any buttons to advance the text. Some people use this autoplay to advance text they have already read, but it certainly doesn't go any faster. I prefered to do it manually, smashing the buttons to vent my frustration.

Its 'game aspect' is almost non-existing. There are two basic game mechanics: highlighted texts - that you can select to get more information on a topic - and jumps - that allow you to jump from one character to another, unlocking a previously blocked path -. It's very important to select every highlighted texts you see. The game introduces this mechanic as a dictionary function, but it can sometimes hide possible jumps. It's not such a chore to read them all as they can give context and add funny commentaries. The bad end and keep out screens take a bit to load out and that is a bit annoying.

The post game content is great. You'll get a true ending, some alternative view points and some complementary stories for some of the characters, including a sexy scene involving a costume and a scene about cooking sprites. What's not great is the quiz and some other random requirements you have to do to unlock this content. I'd advise to go with a guide. The biggest problem is that there isn't a very complete guide for the game. I think it's worth it to look the conspiracy scene on the internet.

All in all, the game does have some repetition and frustration common to all visual novels, but the story is entertaining. It ended up giving a good explanation for everything. The characters were the best part for me. They will be fondly remembered: Minorikawa that is always pointing with his index finger, Kajiwara that has a banana for every occasion, Chiaki with her over the top cute outfit, Yanagishita and his determination, and so on. Speaking of determination, for those undertale fans out there, this game might be a good choice. And fyi 428 can be pronounced Shibuya.

70%PlayStation 4

Minorikawa deserves his own game, he's the GOAT

100%PC

This game is an absolute masterpiece! It's a visual novel where you control multiple characters and make choices with them over the course of a day in order to keep them alive. There is no true game over, thankfully, and you're supposed to make the correct choices to progress the story. However, finding bad endings along the way was also really fun, especially because some of them were hilarious, while others were super creepy. The characters are all different, interesting, and likable, and even the side characters were interesting. The story is a mystery, which I adore, and there's tons of twists and turns and lots of stuff going on. It was damn near impossible to stop playing once I got going. The game uses live action photographs for scenes and it's amazing the lengths they went through to capture so many different scenarios and events. The music they created perfectly accompanies each of these scenarios and events too. I was tense in scenarios where I should have been tense, laughed in scenarios I should have laughed, and felt sad in scenarios where I should have felt sad. The writing is also spectacular and the localization team did a fantastic job translating the game to English. It's clear there was a lot of love put into this game. There's also a whole bunch of hidden scenarios put in the game too. Most companies these days would turn these scenarios into DLC, but I'm glad that Spike Chunsoft didn't go that route. Fuck that business practice. Anyway, a few of these scenarios were cryptic as hell to find, but thankfully, in-game hints were provided for most of them.

My only complaint with this game was that it doesn't have a fast forward button. They should have definitely included one when they ported this game to the PS4 and PC. You can jump ahead to certain parts of the text that you have already read by pressing the down button, but they're usually pretty spaced out. Other than this problem though, I thoroughly enjoyed everything else about this game and I highly recommend it!

60%PC

Bad End 01 - ”So Long, Shibuya”

100%PlayStation 4

GOTY 2008

Story 10/10
Characters 10/10
Music/Sound 10/10

Difficulty EASY

Overall 99%

90%PlayStation 4

After a slow start, this turns into a fantastic story with unexpected twists and fun puzzle mechanics!

80%PlayStation 4

Loved the characters! The editing/acting/music is nice too. The story is fine.
The game could use more polishing, then it will be great. Currently it's a bit annoying sometime.
Really need a good speedup function, no good way to skip repeated text other than the autoscroll thing.
Gameplay is kinda gimmicky. True ending unlock condition is a bit stupid. Although just do whatever and look up the conditions is also fine, so you get more endings out of it.
Might be better to watch playthrough than playing it yourself if you're not sure you want to spend the money.