Master Detective Archives: Rain Code

Not lying, before playing Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, I wasn't sure if I wanted to get stuck in to it. It found its way onto my wish list after a YouTuber I'm subscribed to hyped it up, and I bought it for sale at half off, but when it came to firing it up the first time, I myself wasn't too fired up. I'd tried out plenty of games and such others had recommended, and just one or two titles impressed me like they were impressed, and taking a second gander at Rain Code, it didn't seem up my alley. But since I had put out the money for it, I might as well give it a go, and, boy, am I sure glad that I did, because not only did I discover a gem, I discovered what's easily a Top 10 Favorites of mine.

Synopsis

The story of Rain Code kicks off when a young man wakes up in a train station lost & found storage closet without a shred of memory to his name, not even his own name. The only things he has are some documents informing him that his name is Yuma Kokohead and that he's got a one-way ticket inbound for a city known as Kanai Ward, which has undergone a strict isolationist policy for the past three years. Together with a motley band of other seasoned detectives, he heads for the mysterious Kanai Ward in hopes of unraveling its greatest secret.

Setting & Characters

Normally, I prefer discussing the story of a game first to establish context for everything else, but as the story is the core experience of Rain Code, it's best to take the opposite approach, starting with its central location of Kanai Ward, which ranks top among my favorite cities in any fictional world.

Upon exiting the train station into Kanai Ward for the first time, the very first thing I did was stare out at the cityscape for an earnest five minutes, just soaking in the sight of its neon-lit skyscrapers and waving beams of lights stretching for the dark heavens. Even once inside the city proper, I would stop and gawk at the colorful blooms of light illuminating the streets or stand agape at the massive structures towering over me. Although Kanai Ward has an outward appearance and aesthetic rooted in cyberpunk, it hosts an imaginative blend of Japanese street design and European architecture, with a dash of steampunk. One of the treats of exploring a new district is seeing the inventive display of city design. One community is an expansive network of pile dwellings hastily constructed over a section of the city that's now submerged. My favorite area would be this posh commercial district decorated with synthetic plants—since real plants can't survive the endless rain besieging the city—the entrance to which is this footbridge overhung by an overpass with disposal pipes spilling water into the bay.

If Rain Code did just one thing right, it would be atmosphere. Kanai Ward is a city of contradictions, draped with the melancholy of an unending rain, weather that should keep people indoors, yet the citizens are accustomed to it, heading to work or eating in cafes, not because everything is normal, but because they have to treat it as normal. Accompanied by a theme that's equal parts sobering and mysterious, looking out at a street at people going about their lives, unable to discern if it was day or night, would remind me of times in my life when I would wake up with the overwhelming sense that something was very wrong, and though Rain Code doesn't dabble in themes of reckoning with modern life, the same undercurrent of emotion is there.

I love Kanai Ward. I've walked numerous cities across a good plethora of video games, ranging from majestic castle towns to cookie-cutter houses plopped down wherever, and Kanai Ward is probably the only city that's made me feel raw emotions. It's a metropolis built to house people and fertilize businesses yet transformed into something it's not supposed to be, but it persists regardless because what other choice is there? The city of Kanai Ward isn't just the place where the plot happens, but a character in its own right, with its own mood and history, and its state is stitched to the very fabric of the story itself, something only seen in works like Bioshock or Attack on Titan. Claiming Kanai Ward as my favorite character in Rain Code is an easy statement to make, but it's also an unfair statement, not so much because it's stretching the definition of character loose, but because the actual characters are a mixed bag filled with store-brand candies and porcupine quills.

Among the cast of Rain Code is Yuma, his ghostly sidekick Shinigami, and the detectives Yuma tag-teams with, along with the suspects, rotating cast of villains, and a handful of other side characters. While the villains deserve bonuses for acing their performances as people whose noses I wanted a horse to trample on, some of the people on Yuma's side fight for that bonus as well.

One of the first detectives Yuma meets is this guy wearing the All-Night Mask who spoils for a fight over every minor thing. You could accidentally lock eyes with him for a split second in the grocery store and he would stomp over, grab you by the collar, and ask if it was the knuckle sandwich you were eyeballing. Then there's another detective who's cool, collected, and competent but condescends to Yuma when he can't solve a locked-room mystery in .07 nanoseconds, as well as charges basic bodyguard services for fees so exorbitant, they're basically extorting the Kokohead household for all its wealth for the next three generations. I've seen real doormats get less foot traffic than Yuma, and he just lies there and invites every Tom, Mary, and Gertrude to wipe their soles on his eyebrows. Strangely enough, it's not as though he's a complete pushover. He dishes good snark to Shinigami's many out-there quips, but it's only Shinigami who's dining. I wish Yuma had the stones to serve back everyone else's attitudes.

The character that probably got under my skin the most, bad guys notwithstanding, would have to be the head detective whose office serves as the base of operations for Yuma and the others. Some ways into the story, Yuma gets sentimental about this head detective, about how he put Yuma up when he arrived at Kanai Ward and didn't have a place to stay, but when I reflect upon Yuma's time with the head detective, it was nothing but Yuma getting ordered around to cook this, clean that, and pick up take-out. The head detective would just boss him around while loafing at his desk. And then the story expected me to feel for this prick.

I could go on and on, nitpicking each character, but my broad point is made, that while these characters generally were fine, it wasn't uncommon that they would try ticking me off in some regard or another. But it isn't as though I had a bone to pick with every character. A character I should've disliked but didn't was the detective who was basically Minoru Mineta, yet despite being a degenerate who goons at the mention of a woman's cleavage, he's a real bro. Yuma's got a pseudo-romance going on with a client, and the gooner detective is 150% supportive of their relationship. It earnestly endeared me to him. And then there were a few characters I did like, no asterisks, such as Yuma's not-girlfriend, who, even though she's not yet his sweetheart, is a sweetheart, as well as one detective who's so amusingly stupid, I was convinced the full length of the story that she was actually a 300-IQ genius putting on a front, because there was no way someone who can't count past three could dress herself in the morning.

For a game about solving crimes, it would be a crime for me to not talk at greater length about Shinigami. She's this game's breakout character. A lenient, mean, troublesome, adorable death god resembling the lovechild between Bowsette and a Boo, she follows Yuma around, helping him with his detective work, but mostly, she just makes comical quips about the sights and sounds of a cadaver. She has this, let's call it blasé, attitude toward the dead, cracking jokes at and snark at their expense, and not only is her demeanor a welcome contrast with Yuma's cowardice and anxiety at seeing a murder victim, it's also a refreshing take, as usually, characters will take one of two stances toward the deceased: grief or total apathy. While she runs away with nearly every scene she's in, as Yuma grows accustomed to her presence, he plays the straight man to her nonsense, making for a more balanced dynamic.

For as much as I liked her character, she had to hang up that asterisk and try my fondness for her in Chapter 2, when she starts acting like a clingy, jealous girlfriend because Yuma interacts with a girl his age. Not even romantically. It's strictly business for the case, but whenever he needs to speak with her, she gets into a huff, and I was begging Yuma to tell her to shut her mouth for five bloody minutes.

Gameplay

Investigations

Being a detective game, the first order of business after discovering a corpse is investigating the crime scene. Broadly, this is what one would expect: poking your sniffer around to huff out clues. However, Yuma isn't always able to collect all the necessary clues himself, so he needs to lean on the other detectives for support, which is where deductions take on fun twists.

Each detective has their own superpower that shakes up how deductions are carried out. One detective is able to see crime scenes even after everything's been cleaned up, allowing Yuma to investigate ongoing serial killings. Another can rewind time, which shifts gameflow from player-conducted investigations to a series of cutscenes with QTEs that prompt a time-rewind should you miss the button prompt. Even though you're conducting forensics in each chapter, how you go about them is always done in a fresh, new way.

My favorite chapter is Chapter 2, when Yuma, with the aid of another detective's disguise ability, infiltrates an all girls' school to investigate a recent murder. Not only does Yuma sneak in to find potential leads, he disguises himself as the suspects to interrogate the student body, learning about the school's politics and drama, who's friends with whom, who has what role in the school play, and so on. It plays not unlike Hitman—though Yuma obviously lacks Agent 47's capacity to increase the body count—and much like Hitman, one of the keys to success is obtaining a psychological profile on your quarry. It contrasts with half the other cases—which tend to view the victims as cadavers to receive a once-over and the murderers as culprits to be apprehended—better resembling what the investigation in Tangle Tower turns up. Yuma gets an idea of who Chapter 2's victim was through her friends and how those friends are coping now that she's gone, and it adds a true human touch to a crime I entered just to test my brain power. Chapter 2 was such a joy to play that I kinda wish its outline was expanded into the full game. I love Chapter 2 so much that its moments are frequent guests in my thoughts. It's one of my favorite levels from any game.

Deductions

Kanai Ward is a shady city, and not just because the sun never shines. It's a few tanks short of being an official military state, with a police force cracking down hard on any murder investigations and burying the truth. Therefore, to uncover the truth, Yuma travels to a place known as the Mystery Labyrinth, a wacky on-rails theme park attraction in another dimension that guides him over every minute detail of the case while occasionally pulling the brakes to pop-quiz him on the make and model of the murderer's getaway car.

Much like the investigations, every trip to the Mystery Labyrinth is a fresh, new amusement park ride, reshaping itself to match the case and Yuma's progress in it. One case, for instance, has Yuma running into a bunch of dead ends when scrutinizing each suspect because some detail or another absolves them of the crime, and it's only when he alters his line of thinking that new routes open up. Similarly, a later murder seems totally impossible, and the Mystery Labyrinth reflects this, completely stonewalling Yuma and any feeble attempts he makes at cracking the truth until he begins thinking outside the box.

Painting the full picture of a murder makes for a stunning final work of art, and it boggles my mind how creative some of these cases are. If tasked with writing a train murder, I'd probably have the culprit stow away in a suitcase or something. Rain Code goes above and beyond with rearranging the cars and burning corpses to hide their identities. I can't imagine how many drafts these cases went through before arriving at the final product.

Because Yuma doesn't begin solving mysteries until he enters the Mystery Labyrinth, it can be something of a painful crawl figuring out the mystery yourself beforehand and waiting on Yuma to play catch-up. But even then, I would would be corrected on one or two details I had gotten wrong, and it isn't as though all mysteries are a cakewalk to piece together. An impossible murder was still an impossible murder until the game helped guide me toward the truth.

While puzzling together the how of the cases is an intellectual joy, the same doesn't apply to the who. Suspect pools are always small, four tops, and pinning the crook is often an instance of uncovering that one clue that clears the others of suspicion. Rain Code got so caught up in perfecting the means and methods of murder that it sometimes neglected the same care in how to deduce the culprit. It does throw some wrenches into the suspect pool once or twice, but every other time, I would've liked a better challenge in naming the purp with a wider array of suspects, red herrings, or alibis to throw me off their scent.

Noteworthy to bring up are the upgrades Yuma can receive to make the Mystery Labyrinth a little bit easier. However, aside from a single upgrade done to test out the mechanic, I didn't bother with any upgrades, opting for a challenge run to see if I could get through the game without them, and sure enough, not once did I regret not investing. Frankly, I found them useless. One upgrade reduces the number of pop quiz answers, but when the victim has a twenty-centimeter gash in their forehead and the murder weapon options are a rock, a rabbit plushie, and a twenty-centimeter-long butcher's knife, it's a moot endeavor informing me that the rock is, in fact, an incorrect answer. I did have my moments when I struggled in the Mystery Labyrinth, but they were more from trying to match wavelengths with what the game was asking than not having a single clue how a murder was carried out. Early on, for instance, I was playing a game of Hangman, and the answer was something along the lines of uncouple, as in to separate, but that wasn't the precise answer, and I spent a good few minutes scratching my skull over what synonym the puzzle wanted. A certain skill might've helped me arrive at the answer sooner, but this situation was an exception, and I breezed through most other puzzles. The only upgrades I would say are worthwhile are stamina increases, as stamina's application is universal, plus it'll help keep you alive for the combat segments where you have to dodge projectiles. They come at Yuma at a moderate speed and no more than two or three at a time, so it's not like Rain Code turns into Touhou, but they can be a touch tricky to dodge because of the camera angle.

Sidequests

Something I'm obliged to bring up, I suppose, is that in between cases are sidequests, and honestly, there isn't too much to comment on. They're your run-of-the-mill sidequests where you act as an errand boy for an NPC who can't run the errands themselves because their feet are magnetized to the ground. They're not painfully lengthy or tedious like a Xenoblade sidequest, but delivering someone's mail doesn't tend to make for a spectacular or memorable tale.

What gets me about the sidequests, though, is that they're menial tasks. This is Kanai Ward, the city full of mysteries. Yuma's a detective. Why are the sidequests not about solving the many mysteries of the city? I'm not asking for Yuma to casually solve a drive-by between gigs. Simply putting a rumor to bed would be enough. Like maybe there's talk of a monster prowling an alleyway on weekday afternoons, and when Yuma checks it out, turns out it's some kids testing out a robot for their club. It's not much of a mystery compared to cracking locked-room murders, but it's still more in line with the game's core identity than working as an errand boy for zero pay. Even Trails of Cold Steel has more investigative sidequests, and that's a military-political drama.

The Story at Last

Rain Code begins with a sharp enough hook—Yuma waking up as an amnesiac with only the vaguest outline of what his mission is, setting off for an enigmatic location—but despite having me on the line, it took its sweet time reeling me in. After boarding a train, the next hour of story is talking with a bunch of people with random vocal ticks in lieu of actual personalities, and then the hour after that is Yuma repeating himself ad nauseam. It had me apprehensive the entirety of my playthrough would be some twisted return to my days of dragging my eyeballs across poorly written stories. Honestly, I probably would've dropped this game no later than a dozen hours in if it wasn't for Shinigami's banter, as well as the fact that the mysteries are really good. Like, really, really good. The mysteries themselves are what kept the controller in my hand.

I've already prattled about how the creativity and diversity of the cases is like savoring a medley of chocolate-covered fruit, and another factor that kept me reaching for seconds is the pacing. Chapters start off at a mellow pace—a relaxation period from the previous case—as Yuma's distracted by some drab task before finding himself roped into a murder mystery. Chancing upon a corpse is always enough to up the excitement in one's day, and the excitement only grows as Yuma uncovers clues, the police insert themselves to put a stop to investigations, and the bodies pile up. And everything reaches a crescendo when the police force Yuma into a corner with no escape route but into the Mystery Labyrinth. However, it's this point in the storytelling where the adhesive holding the plot and the cases together loses its effectiveness.

Rain Code being a detective game with the central goal of solving murders, it would stand to reason that solving murders would be the solution that gets Yuma out of his pickles. However, that's almost never the case. Whenever Yuma and Shinigami pop into the Mystery Labyrinth to set things straight, time stops for everybody but the pair, and once they drop out, time resumes. However, aside from one spoilery detail, solving the cases has no effect on the real world, and the police will still move in to arrest Yuma for his meddling. Baring the exception of two cases, one being the finale, Yuma's savior is an eleventh hour superhero that drops in from out of nowhere and chases away the cats cornering him. In almost every case, he could've stood around waiting on Superman to come and save him, and the story would've progressed largely the same. There is that one spoilery detail that does relate to the final case, but its effects are a small ripple on a lake, not a huge wave, and so it makes Yuma's ventures into the Labyrinth seem moot. The only other thing that makes trips to the Mystery Labyrinth worth the admission is the self-satisfaction that comes with solving a case, though that's speaking more as a player, not to Yuma's character.

That would have to be my biggest non-spoilery gripe with the cases: that great as they are individually, aside from a tangential connection to the final case, they're heavily isolated from the city's central mystery. While it does better fit Kanai Ward's moniker as the city of endless mysteries, speaking to my personal tastes, I think it would've been super clever if the cases all tied to the central mystery in some substantial way. They could've seemed isolated at first, but as Yuma investigates the central mystery, all the clues come together, and so none of those earlier murders are isolated as assumed. As things stand, only the second-to-last case has a tether to the central mystery, however thin, with additional information drip-fed between cases, so they serve more as distractions to what's supposed to be Yuma's main goal of investigating the city's central mystery. And now that I bring that up, that's nothing Yuma ever actively pursues. The other detectives he works with bugger off to investigate themselves, but Yuma doesn't. He just runs chores for the head detective and will stumble over unrelated murders at random. He's more reactive than proactive, and the only reason he solves the central mystery is because the final boss hands him a manila envelope outlining all the city's secrets.

To tidy up this section, I want to expand on a point I only touched on at the top of this section, that being Yuma repeating himself endlessly in the first chapter. Thankfully, this isn't a trait he carries into the rest of the game, from what I recall, but it is a glaring example of how much fat an editor could trim. Rain Code took me about 46 hours to beat, main story, sidequests, and everything, but if you do away with all the repeat lines, at least two hours could be cut, and depending on how aggressive you got with removing fluff, up to an additional eight hours could be ejected. The length of conversations didn't bother me when I was playing, but to research and double-check points for this review, I did reboot the game or consult YouTube playthroughs, and even with fast-forward on, I thought to myself, “Wow, these people are talking for quite a while.”

There're plenty more negatives I wanted to gripe about, but that would've been an additional four or five beefy paragraphs complaining about specific character moments, and I don't want to give off the impression that the story is too flawed or that the characters ruin it. The story does have its issues with Yuma making progress by sheer merit of being the protagonist, yes, and the moments when side characters were getting under my skin stand out more in my memory than the moments I was chummy with them, but when I reflect upon Rain Code's story, what I also remember is its imagination and sheer brilliance in how it lays out its pieces before bringing them together. Like the brief scenes that foreshadow later revelations or how the murder method of the first case completely throws you off the trail of the final mystery. There's even details unimportant to the plot that still hit me when I ventured to my fridge, like how much sense it makes that the batch of detectives who make it to Kanai Ward, when a hit was out for all incoming detectives, were the ones who made it when you consider how their superpowers would've kept them alive. It's things like that that kept me fastened to my chair and excited to see what came next in the story.

DLC

After beating the main story, I still hungered for more Rain Code, so I tried satiating that appetite with what morsels the DLC could provide.

The DLC in question are five side stories of the five detectives Yuma works alongside throughout the main story, and as story-focused as the base game is, the side stories are even more story-focused, with just enough gameplay to legally be labeled pieces of interactive media. Literally, the only thing you do in one episode is walk to the right, and the same would be said of a second if it didn't also have a multiple-choice exam. For what these episodes are, what they cost, and their forty-minute-a-pop lengths, the better option, if you bought the Switch version and not the PC version, is to spare opening your wallet and just watch the episodes on YouTube after beating the main story.

Regardless of whether you play them for yourself or watch someone else play them, how do they hold up? Like the characters themselves, it's a mixed bag.

Ch. Desuhiko – Charisma Killed the Cat

The protagonist of the first episode stars Detective Desuhiko, the skirtchaser and Yuma's bro, as he attempts to apprehend a phantom thief. It starts with him failing to catch said thief, then interviewing townsfolk to get a better picture of the thief's identity. It's got decent buildup as Desuhiko concocts his plan to catch the thief, then carries out that plan, the most memorable part being the double-twist he pulls to bring the thief out of hiding. It shows how shockingly clever Desuhiko can be, which is a side he doesn't really show during the main story. Overall, pretty good, though the ending is a facepalm because of Desuhiko's last-minute dopiness.

Ch. Fubuki – Fubuki's Luckiest Day

Now we move on to Detective Fubuki, whose sole merit as a detective is that she can rewind time. She does this in an effort to prevent what appears to be a man's suicide as he falls from a building, but the more she intervenes, the more inconsistent his final words are.

This episode can be split into two halves: conducting the investigation and dealing with the cause of the man's apparent leap. Speaking on the latter, this is the movie part of the episode, wherein Fubuki and two other detectives enter a casino and try to expose the operation by out-cheating the house using Fubuki's time-rewind. A pretty risky plan, because even with her superpower, a tremendous amount of luck is required to get the result they need, since her power has limited uses. And for the former half of this episode, it might've made for a decent spot of the Socratic method if the solution wasn't plain as an exploding star in the countryside. Being given the answer in plain sight in a cutscene doesn't make me feel like a smarty-pants detective.

Overall, this episode fumbles bad with its investigation, and its resolution amounts to chucking a Hail Mary and celebrating when the receiver happens to catch the ball because he was stretching.

Ch. Halara – Raining Cats & Dogs

The next episode belongs to Detective Halara, the detective who should be receiving a tasty salary yet still charges clients out the wazoo, and for the exorbitant price of a pet cat, they investigate the death of a woman's father, who appears to have drowned in one of his fish tanks.

This is the one and only side story where you conduct proper detective work, from inspecting the crime scene to assembling the logic of how the crime was carried out. Much like the main story, the case is creative, if over the top, and takes advantage of Kanai Ward's environment in a way none of the main story cases do. And much like the main story cases, your suspect pool is pathetically small, consisting of two people, and given that one of them is the client, next to no sleuthing is required to name the crook.

That aside, this is the best side story so far. Nothing else to say.

Ch. Vivia – The Near-Death Detective

We're past the halfway point in the episodes as we now follow Detective Vivia as he follows a woman who seems to be the leading cause of suicides. This leads him into an elevator, where he gets locked in with said woman, and the two wax poetic about death.

Maybe it was because I was half-asleep during this episode and had to finish it the next night, but I didn't gel with this side story. It's half an hour of Vivia and the woman talking in every way one can about death. Vivia expresses his desire to die, something played for laughs during the main game but here seriously, and the woman feeds him the usual trite one does when they see a suicidal person: “it's not worth it,” “you have so much to live for,” blah, blah, blah. What strikes me about this episode is that the woman has tried and failed to stop suicides, blaming her inability to persuade, but the kicker is that her presence alone should've dissuaded. I've read plenty of stories by the formerly suicidal who passed on taking the leap when they go and find a family or a couple hanging around the bridge. This episode has the exact setup for the woman to succeed, yet it's misguided on how she can help.

While I get the message this episode is trying to get across, it goes about it in a ham-handed manner. It preaches to the suicidal without offering any unique perspectives, and the paragraph-long anecdotes on depression and suicide I've found on Reddit or in YouTube comments offer more compelling, thought-provoking, and emotionally resonate tales than what this episode tries achieving inside of forty minutes.

Ch. Yakou – Thank You, My Detective

We arrive at the final side story, for which we step into the shoes of Detective Yakou, the head detective of Yuma and the others. The interactive parts of this episode take place after the main story, but the rest are flashbacks to way before then, when he met his wife. It's this sweet boy-meets-girl story as the two meet under fairly morose conditions but stick together because neither has anything else. It's strange how numb the previous chapter had me, yet this one played my heart like a harp. It tells what's a beautifully tragic tale, precisely so because you're watching what appears to be the beginnings of something wonderful, but that something won't last forever, knowing the outcome of the main game. It's the shortest episode but by far the most emotionally charged, and it made me like and understand Yakou when I previously didn't. Strangely, all of these episodes showed me that Yakou could be a really great, upstanding man. It's just Yuma he punted around like a kickball for no reason.

Upon finishing the main story of Rain Code, I wanted a sequel. The main story wraps up nicely but leaves itself room for a potential sequel. However, after finishing this episode, I don't know that I want a sequel. It ends on this ambiguous note that, honestly, is best left ambiguous, and I loathe to think how a sequel might ruin that. In this debate, the part of me that wants a sequel wins out, but I want the sequel to take place outside of Kanai Ward and never once acknowledge the city. That story's finished, and I'd like to see what more this world has to offer.

Rankings

If I had to rank the episodes, here they are from worst to best:

5.) Ch. Vivia – The Near-Death Detective

4.) Ch. Fubuki – Fubuki's Luckiest Day

3.) Ch. Desukiho – Charisma Killed the Cat

2.) Ch. Halara – Raining Cats and Dogs

1.) Ch. Yakou – Thank You, My Detective

Conclusion

I love Master Detective Archives: Rain Code the way I love Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Yes, the game has its faults that sometimes put a damper on my experience, but not once did I think dropping the game would be worth it because the things that kept me playing were just that good. Ever since seeing its ending, Xenoblade 2 has taken up residence in a loft in my head, and after learning the true nature of Kanai Ward, Rain Code has taken bunk right beside Xenoblade 2. Its story is of a quality that makes me examine my own creative pursuits and question if they're even half as good. I went in to feel smart for solving some good mysteries and came out feeling for an entire city and the people living there.