Shuten Order is the latest project from Danganronpa creator Kazutaka Kodaka—though a look at the game’s credits implies he had a smaller role in writing the story than the marketing might make you think. Not satisfied with being a simple visual novel or even one single spin on the concept, Shuten Order claims to be five whole adventure games in one, introducing entirely different genres of gameplay to each of the game’s five routes. It’s an ambitious concept, but actually playing Shuten Order reveals that calling this “five adventure games in one” is wishful thinking at best. The reality is that most of the time it’s a simple visual novel that occasionally dips into poorly thought out and underdeveloped copies of some other game that’s much more worth your time.

Before you choose which route you start with, Shuten Order opens with a prologue to set up the basics of the story. You play as Rei Shimobe, an amnesiac who wakes up to discover that she has recently been murdered. Two angels appear and tell her that she has received the unique opportunity to return to life by completing God’s Trial. She has three days to make her murderer confess and subsequently kill them in order to reclaim her soul and return to life. The five suspects are the ministers of the mysterious Shuten Order, and each route has Rei follow one of them in order to catch her killer.

The first route I played was the Ministry of Justice, which is marketed as a Mystery Adventure. Taking obvious inspiration from Ace Attorney, this route has you gather evidence and investigate persons of interest in order to solve a murder (not your own—a different murder). During investigation some words in the dialogue will be highlighted, which is an indicator that you can press that statement for more information. If you press the wrong statements, then you will lose credibility as a detective and eventually fail the case. How do you know which statements to press? Well, if you lose trust points after pressing a statement then you know that one was wrong!

You can call this a skill issue, but you really are making shots in the dark for the majority of this chapter. At one point you get the following statements back to back: “It’s a thick-bladed machete,” and “I have to thoroughly investigate to see if this was really the murder weapon.” Both of these statements can be pressed, but only one of them lets you record the machete as evidence. Which one do you think it is? Once you’ve gathered all your evidence you’ll present your findings in the Daily Meeting by solving an evidence puzzle. This is functionally the same as the end-of-trial recaps in Danganronpa where you must put a pre-determined selection of facts about the case in order to answer prompts about what happened. This was the most fun I had playing Shuten Order.

The second route I played was the Ministry of Health, which the eShop store page claims is an “Extreme Escape Adventure” that “features escape room adventure gameplay where you must find the exit to a mysterious locked room by undergoing dangerous trials and puzzles, and wrong choices can lead directly to life-threatening situations.” This is technically not a lie, because the six-hour chapter does feature exactly one escape room puzzle. This is where I realized that each chapter of Shuten Order is actually just a linear visual novel that very occasionally has you do some other gameplay so it can pretend each route is different.

So how do the other five hours and fifty minutes of this route break up the cutscenes? Well, you walk around copypasted rooms until you find a door. When you examine a door two things can happen: Either Rei tells you that this door can’t be opened, or she’ll say that you have to solve a puzzle to unlock the door. All of these doors look exactly the same, so it’s anyone’s guess why some can’t be opened. The actual puzzles cycle through three types: arranging differently shaped blocks to fill the empty space in a grid, connecting colored dots on a grid, or a sliding puzzle. That’s it, it’s just those three puzzles over and over again, and they never get any more interesting than that Book of 1001 Puzzles you keep seeing at the grocery store checkout.

The third route was the Ministry of Science, which is a “Multi-Perspective Visual Novel.” This route has multiple playable characters, and each one has a flowchart of scenes that branch off of choices you make during the scene. Don’t misunderstand this to mean that there are branching paths with different outcomes; this is a linear visual novel, and you must select the correct choices. Any incorrect choice will either lead to a Game Over or “close” the route. What “close” means in the game’s own words is that it “isn’t a ‘bad ending,’ but you can’t proceed with the story.”

Closed endings are just Game Overs by a different name, and they are separate from Scenario Locks which prompt you to swap your point of view to a different character. Scenario Locks are very frequent, and I would rarely be following a character for more than five minutes before being forced to switch to another. The closest this chapter ever gets to real gameplay is when occasionally I made an incorrect choice that didn’t immediately give a Game Over, but instead gave a Game Over roughly twenty minutes later. When that happened I would need to go back to an earlier dialogue choice, make the correct choice this time, and then continue on. If you happen to make the correct choice every single time, then the only “gameplay” this chapter will have is Scenario Locks prompting you to swap from one character’s linear story to another’s.

The fourth route was the Ministry of Education, which is a “Romance Adventure.” This part is just a linear visual novel that adopts the aesthetics of a dating sim. It pretends to have time management and different activities you can do, but when you strip away the smoke and mirrors you’re just watching cutscenes in a linear order. If you select the wrong dialogue choices then you will get a Game Over, which is functionally the same as the Ministry of Science route.

The twist on this chapter is that there are three different romantic interests you can target and, well, it’s a linear visual novel so you’re going to be dating all three of them at the same time (but only in the predetermined order). Once you get a girl to fall in love with you, you then have to periodically check in with her so she doesn’t find out that you’re cheating on her. This sounds like it could take careful time management, but you have so much leeway before they get suspicious that I managed to complete the entire chapter by checking in on each girl exactly once. This was mercifully the shortest chapter in the game.

The fifth route is the Ministry of Security, which is a “Stealth Action Horror.” This chapter features the most unique gameplay by actually taking place in a 3D environment where you must walk around and avoid a monster that’s trying to kill you as you interact with glowing objects to trigger the correct cutscenes. This chapter has the depth of a Mario Party minigame, and while it’s not much longer than the Ministry of Education route I can’t imagine anyone enjoying a single Mario Party minigame stretched out to last over an hour.

This chapter also struggles to keep a consistent framerate on Switch 1, usually hovering around 50fps. The inconsistent frame pace honestly gave me a headache, and I only got to the end of it by playing on Switch 2 via backwards compatibility. This chapter keeps a flawless 60fps on Switch 2, but I should point out that the game cannot be completed on Switch 2 despite the eShop page claiming that Shuten Order has no backwards compatibility issues. Late in the Ministry of Justice route there was a mandatory line of dialogue that would consistently trigger a bug on Switch 2 where my controller inputs other than the home button permanently stopped working. I have no idea why this line of dialogue in particular caused the problem since it was a completely mundane line with no special effects or gameplay prompts, but I experienced this bug every single time I reached this line on Switch 2 and never had this problem playing on Switch 1.

When it comes to the writing, I keep thinking about an interview where director Takumi Nakazawa described how Shuten Order’s five routes can be played in any order. He said “imagine a character X who appears in multiple routes. Perhaps they are portrayed as a villain in Route A, but as a good person in Route B. Someone who plays Route A before Route B will have a very different impression of character X very(sic) from someone who starts with B.”

I have no idea what Nakazawa is talking about in this interview. Aside from Rei and her angel companions, there is not one single character who appears in more than one route. My best guess is that he’s actually talking about the way Shuten Order’s story reveals happen slowly across the different routes and he’s just using characters as an oblique example to make it easier to follow, but this is actually something I think was weakened by the ability to play the routes in any order. The biggest twist of Shuten Order—the reveal that explains everything that’s going on—happened at the end of my second route. This meant that I spent half the game already knowing the twist, and since the three routes I played afterwards couldn’t assume I knew the twist, they all kept foreshadowing the reveal I had already seen while hitting me with other reveals that were much less important to the truth of what was really going on.

Seeing the game this way also made it clear how much dialogue had to be written around the twist in a way that felt deeply unnatural. Rei is the only character in Shuten Order that does not already know the twist, and the vast majority of other characters are not trying to hide it from her. This leads to everyone in the story speaking in metaphors and simply not addressing basic facts that really don’t make any sense for them to avoid. Imagine if the twist of a story was that it took place in the winter, and so every character exclusively referred to snow as “the blanket” while never mentioning that the temperature is cold. This could happen; it technically makes sense. But there’s a difference between making sense and being interesting, and Shuten Order consistently fails to do the latter.

I wish I could call Shuten Order garbage and move on with my life, but it’s just not that simple because now we need to talk about gender politics. One big plot point that runs through the entire game is that other characters do not know Rei’s gender. To the player there’s no mystery; the very first scene of the game goes out of its way to clarify that she is unambiguously a woman, and we later learn that her gender was intentionally kept a mystery so that she could appear more charismatic. Despite her gender being intentionally “mysterious”, every single character that doesn’t already know the truth assumes she’s a man. In addition to this already having unfortunate implications for what it means for her image as a man to be more charismatic, this also leads to a major development in the story being based around the fact that another character was able to tell Rei was a woman by seeing her bare chest some time before the game began.

The game’s handling of queer identities also leaves a lot to be desired. As you can expect from most stories of a woman being mistaken for a man there are plenty of scenes played for comedy where another woman expresses romantic interest in her because they don’t know she’s a woman. But there are two female characters who express romantic interest in Rei after they learn the truth. The problem is that both of these characters happen to be excessively violent when compared to the rest of the cast, and both of them also excuse unsettling or harmful actions they commit with the phrase “love makes you crazy.” This is a deeply unfortunate way to portray queer characters, and it only pales in comparison to the game’s blatant and out of pocket transphobia.

There is a character in Shuten Order who is unambiguously a transgender woman. The scene that reveals this uses the metaphor of an egg cracking that is commonly used in the trans community to refer to the moment that a person realizes they are trans. We learn that this character is trans because her sister tells us this without her knowledge or consent, and after this is revealed the sister exclusively refers to her with masculine pronouns. This is obviously disrespectful towards her gender identity, but what really makes this moment insulting is that Rei, the point-of-view player character, immediately praises the sister for being so good to her family. The fact that this character is trans is never mentioned again.

Shuten Order is a game that takes so much time to say so little. There are so many video games in this video game, and yet not one complete video game. The multiple routes being able to happen in any order hurt the mystery-driven story more than they help. The varied gameplay styles are underdeveloped and rarely make it feel like you’re playing anything other than a linear visual novel. The writing is boring at the best of times and actually insulting to me as a queer woman at the worst of times. This game clearly wants to swing for the fences, but it doesn’t accomplish anything other than striking out every time it steps up to the plate.