The 25th Ward: The Silver Case is a sequel to The Silver Case. It was originally released for mobile devices in Japan but was remade for consoles. It is a visual novel and very similar in style to the first game. If you didn’t like the first one, you will not like this one.
The story is set several years after the original and is split into three arcs. It is set in the newly created 25th ward where we learnt that it is an experimental state. It is described as an utopia where people are selected and come to live in peace. The first arc, Correctness, follows two detectives, Shiroyabu and Kuroyanagi. Like the first game, the player often takes on the role of a silent protagonist that tags along where the other characters will comment and speak to you. In other instances, this isn’t the case so it can be somewhat confusing.
The Correctness arc actually starts out strong as Shiroyabu investigates a series of murders which hints at a deeper hidden plot behind the 25th ward. It can be somewhat disturbing and seems to have layers of complexity to it. Just like the first game, it ends up going in a very bizarre route and you’ll quickly lose interesting as the storytelling is not great. Events start to become ridiculous as you progress though each chapter, to the point where you’re not even sure if the game is being serious or actually trolling you.
Also similar to the original game, the other routes are different perspectives around the same core events. It will cover off events that other routes didn’t but the same events kick the story off. The second arc, Matchmaker, follows two officers of the Regional Adjustment Division, which is the department behind and overlooking the people that caused the events that the characters in the first arc was investigating. It reveals a bit more about the inner workings of the 25th ward. It diverts from the first route from the third chapter but like everything about the series, it quickly loses its appeal and becomes very boring and bland. It gets to the point that you don’t really react at all to the supposed twists and surprises as the pair dives into the underworld organization of the 25th ward.
The third and final route is Placebo and it follows the returning character Tokio. The beginning of his arc takes on a familiar form of being primarily set through a computer’s functions such as email and chat. There are a lot of password entering in this arc which will test your patience. The story is probably the better one of the three, although that isn’t saying much but at least it makes a bit more sense and ties together the various routes. Tokio is effectively doing his own research into the events, following the death of Kamijo and finding out what happened.
The gameplay is not great as well. It is not a pure visual novel since it likes to throw random things at you. There’ll be sections where you navigate similar looking corridors in the hopes of finding the correct path. There’ll be others where you have several choices to make, emulating a turn-based combat system. Then menus are all based on polygonal shapes, which can be annoying to navigate. You can look, talk and use items in several sections but since one of those options are required before you can move on, it is false freedom.
The “puzzles” are obtuse since you can have no idea on what to do. The game might give you some hints but they’re vague and clunky. All they ever involve are deciphering / guessing the one word password sometimes it is too vague, for others the game literally tells you what it will be. It’s more of a case of paying attention and remembering things but done in a one-note and very boring way. There are a lot of pointless “interactivity”. It stops the text and then gives you “options”, but really, there’s only one option you can take in order to progress. Everything else just gives you one line to say it was incorrect, so what’s the point of all of these pauses?
The graphical artstyle hasn’t changed from the first game. It’s still mostly 2D drawings with minimal amount of color and detail. Environments may have some rudimentary 3D animation, it works in the style of the game but it ain’t the prettiest or the most expressive. The art shifts can make the game feel inconsistent and does nothing to actually make the story more engrossing or good.
For a visual novel, the lack of customization options is disappointing. You cannot adjust the speed of the text, the best you can do is hold down the X button to speed it up a tiny bit. You cannot go back if you advanced too quickly nor can you skip scenes. Most annoying though are the constant screen transitions which have the location and time slowly fade in, and then slowly fade away. It wastes five to ten seconds each time which quickly builds up. You cannot skip these either and they add nothing to the game. You literally select to enter the room, the location is at the top and it still requires you to wait as it shows the location and then fade away. When it constantly does this by going back and forth with only a few pieces of dialogue in between each location, it is really grating.
Ten hours later and you’ll have completed all three arcs and unlock the final chapter with all the endings. This is where the game is even more disrespectful towards the player’s time. There are around one hundred choices leading to an ending and if you are a completionist or want the Platinum Trophy, you have the monotonous task of going through all one hundred of those choices.
It’s better to just give up on getting all the endings and not indulge the developer for something this ridiculous as it’ll take you another ten hours to get through it one hundred times. Even if you wanted to parody something or make a point, this is not the way to do it. These are short text endings that don’t make sense, as in they break the fourth wall and make cultural references that don’t relate to scene at all. Having a hundred of these is one of the laziest and useless trash filler in a game that’s already pretty trash.
Overall, The 25th Ward: The Silver Case is not a great game. Just like the original, it starts out fairly strong but quickly devolves into a bland and badly told story. Coupled with horrendous gameplay that literally involves the redundant nature of selecting “move” or “look” when it never should have required the player’s input, or the “puzzles” which are little more than testing if you’r paying attention and writing down the phrases to be used as passwords, this is a terrible game. It is best to avoid this game as apart from the atmosphere, which isn’t even that unique anyway, there’s nothing going for this game.
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