Visual novels are a dime a dozen these days. In the last few years, since developers and publishers have realized there’s a market for these games in the West, we’ve been inundated with a ridiculous number of them. Sure, some of them are utterly spectacular, such as Steins; Gate, Muv Luv, or The House in Fata Morgana. But for every fantastic visual novel, there are twenty terrible ones and a fair number that are simply passable as well. Fortunately, PQube and Kadokawa Games have re-released one of the best ones for the Switch, PC, and the PS4!
Root Letter: Last Answer is a full remake of Root Letter for PC, PS4, and Playstation Vita and follows the protagonist (let’s call him Hiro just to make things easier…you pick a name) in his adult search for his high school penpal, Aya Fumino. As you play, you scour the city of Matsue, a city on the north coast of southwestern Japan. Matsue is a real city, and one of the best things about Root Letter: Last Answer is that all the footage is live action as well. Whether it’s all actually from Matsue, well, that’s a question for Kadokawa Games, but it’s certainly both realistic and compelling.
Hiro used to correspond with Aya via letters. She sent him several letters and then vanished. In his thirties, Hiro discovers a final, unsent letter where Aya claims she’s killed someone and has to cut contact. Hiro’s interest is piqued and he travels to Matsue to investigate. Throughout the course of the investigation, your decisions during the game both in responses to letters and conversational choices lead to several compelling alternative stories of what happened to the mysterious Aya Fumino. Along the way, you’ll encounter all the high school friends detailed in her letters, each with their own vested interest in keeping you from the truth and propelling you down the path of their own narratives. It’s a complex storyline, occasionally fraught with silly asides and oddly teenage angst from Hiro, especially considering his age.
The biggest draw for Root Letter: Last Answer is it’s fantastic live-action imagery. The original game is drawn in anime style, but Kudokawa Games has managed to pull together an entire game that looks remarkably similar to the original source content, but completely in real photos with actual actors. The only other game I’ve seen like this is 428 Shibuya Scramble, and it was utterly fantastic as well. You can switch between live action (drama mode) and original mode at any time in the main menu, but honestly, it’s just more immersive in drama mode. The developers have been painstakingly careful to match every scene as closely as possible.
There are a few hitches though, mostly in the way that live imagery matches up with the hand-drawn original content. There’s a scene in the second act in the TV studio, for example, where it’s extremely difficult to find the one small spot to click on with Check mode to advance the storyline. This is due to the images not lining up exactly with the original artwork. Certainly the game would have been better suited to having a fixed cursor that moved from point to point rather than searching across an entire image for things to interact with. Fortunately, this isn’t an issue often and it mostly doesn’t affect gameplay.
In terms of the Switch, the other main issue with Root Letter: Last Answer is a complete lack of touch sensitive controls. This seems like a severe oversight, as most visual novels for the Switch have a full complement of touch controls. Tokyo School Life for example (WAY better and more wholesome overall than it sounds) is completely touch-sensitive, as is Kotodama: The 7 Mysteries of Fujisawa. And everything from Mages, the makers of Steins; Gate is touch-enabled. Why Kadokawa chose not to enable this for Root Letter: Last Answer, I don’t know, but it’s definitely sorely missed in undocked mode. Also, if you read fast as I do and like to skip dialogue, the buttons are irritatingly responsive, zipping past dialogue easily. I found myself missing a few sentences here and there because a single press seemed to skip two sentences. And yes, I am talking about these games like you’ve heard of them all. You likely haven’t, but if you’re interested in visual novels, you should definitely check them out too.
Suffice it to say, aside from the lack of Switch touch controls, Root Letter: Last Answer is fantastic. It tells an interesting series of stories, depending on the patience you have and the number of alternate choices you choose to make, and ends up in some very unexpected places. Along the way, the game is clean, crisp, and witty, with dialogue that often catches you off-guard, both with a hint of pervesion and a delightful relevance to the real world. It gives a taste of real-life Japan that we rarely see in the Western world, even with a very structured story such as this one. There are a few hiccups along the way, but it’s an effort of love from the developers to bring this story to a wider audience. In fact, Root Letter has been so popular, there’s a video project in the works, a sequel coming, and Hollywood is even working on some sort of adaptation.
You honestly can’t go wrong with a visual novel as good as Root Letter: Last Answer. Sure, it’s a bit hokey at times, but that’s the charm of Hiro. He comes off as a genuine person and we see how he thinks and feels even as we control his actions and choices. If you’ve never played a visual novel, they’re much different than your standard gameplay, primarily focusing on reading a story with static background images, but they can be surprisingly compelling. This is an excellent place to start and it’s a rather immersive mystery once things get moving! Don’t expect it to be pulse pounding, edge of your seat stuff though. Root Letter: Last Answer is definitely a deep dive into Japanese culture and it’s a slow lead in with around 10 or 12 hours of solid gameplay with eight chapters and five endings, most all of which is written text and conversations. All the dialogue is spoken Japanese and written English, so you have to pay attention too. There’s plenty of replay value here!
Go take a look at Root Letter: Last Answer. If you’re interested in Japanese culture and love a good mystery yarn, this one will be right down your alley. Whether you prefer the original game art of a live-action remix, either way, you’re getting a solid story with a few nice additions and an added epilogue and certainly one you won’t soon forget!
This review was based on a digital copy of Root Letter: Last Answer provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes. I wish my penpals in school had been this interesting!