This review may contain spoilers.
This review is based after playing the International version, not the Japan only version. Differences between versions are not taken into account in the review

Visual Novel set in Tokyo’s Shibuya ward. It tells the story of 5 different people who come together to solve mystery behind a ransom kidnap case. A crime thriller with different writing styles and multiple endings. Excellent and very lengthy read, which can slog at a time, but well worth it to read until the end. Best experienced without a guide. Recommended.

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428 Shibuya Scramble (hereinafter 428) is a visual novel adventure featuring use of real actors and photos as backgrounds instead of typical anime art. Originally released in 2008 on Nintendo Switch it has since been released on PS3, PS4, PSP, mobile and Windows. 428 was made by Spike Chunsoft, more known for their Danganronpa series.

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The Visual Novel tells the story of 5 different people. The story is told from the point of view of each character with the writing style of the story varying between each character. The story takes place in Shibuya Ward of Tokyo and takes place between 10 am and 8 pm, a 10 hour time period of a single day.

This is a visual novel. So, in other words, it’s a book that you read. The visual parts are photos of actors in different situations and sometimes actual video clips. There is no voice acting in the game with the exception of small part of the game.

The gameplay mechanics come from choosing in certain points how the characters will react. The choices you make for each character can and usually do have an effect on other characters stories. To keep you from advancing too far, the game employs a “Keep Out” mechanic that stops a single character’s story until you reach far enough in other characters story to unblock the blocked story parts. The story is further divided into hour blocks. You need to complete each hour block to advance to the next one. Completing the block requires you to read through all the characters’ stories.

Other than that, the gameplay is reading the text from the screen and pressing button or having the game on autoread to progress through the story.

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It’s a book. It runs great on Steam Deck and there are very few options available. Options consist mostly of resolution, window mode and control glyphs. In-game options have settings for autosave and vibration. Controls cannot be rebound in the game.

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DLC: The game has no DLC.

Achievements: The game has 27 achievements. Some of the achievements require hitting every single bad ending in the novel, which can consume quite a lot of time.

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This novel was a fun read. The localization was good and there were very few typos in all of the text I read. The novel is quite long to read through. At times when it got the ball running it felt like the writers wanted to force it to slow down and introduced some very questionable parts.

I don’t know if it’s just for the international version, but I would’ve liked to hear the actors to voice act some of their lines. It was also a shame, that there were very few actual videos during the read (but it is easy to understand the lack of videos considering this was a Wii title originally). Now it feels like that the actors were bit wasted and could not show full range of their talents. However, the photos clearly showed that the actors weren’t found from the backstreets of Shibuya and the more experienced actors clearly could show their range in a Visual Novel style setting.

The multiple endings kept the story quite fresh. At parts it became quite funny to see, just how this route would end. The story itself had few very good surprises, but some of the bigger twists were quite clear from early on.

The jumping mechanism could make the story confusing at times, but rereading some parts of the route usually fixed those parts for me.

I liked that it was divided into hourly blocks. It made reading it much easier than trying to read very long visual novel in one go. It also gave me some kind of indication on how far in the story I was and made reading multiple storylines much easier.

At the time of writing this review, I reached the true ending of the story. The ending felt like they forgot to properly wrap up some of the storylines and the only typos I saw were in the final parts of the game.

I have to say that the start of the novel can be bit slow, but if you can fight through the initial tutorial, the story will truly open up and get going.

All in all, I really enjoyed the read. I just feel bit sad that I had kept from really starting to read this novel for so long, but better late than never.

I am happy to recommend this novel if you enjoy reading fun stories and you have enjoyed visual novels. Best played on Steam Deck.

Easily one of the greatest visual novels ever made. It's as close to perfect as anything else I've played. The writing seamlessly shifts between being hilarious, thrilling, heartrending, and back to being hilarious. You will laugh, a lot, and then at some point the game will trick you into really caring about the characters.

Gameplay-wise, there are some cool ideas that were very new in 2008; the gameplay is less unique now but it holds up well. The use of photo and video is still very unique, and it works well. The acting and directing is excellent.

You owe it to yourself to play this.