Master Detective Archives: Rain Code Plus review: Nothing but the truth

Danganronpa’s impact can’t be understated. It was a huge deal for visual novels in the western world, and showed how online communities could form around an extreme niche and turn it into a hit. The original PSP game was almost more of a fandom than a video game, as most fans experienced it as a translated, transcribed Let’s Play on the paywalled Something Awful forums. It bled into Tumblr, and it wasn’t until this people-driven groundswell that the game itself was localized and released as a remake on the PlayStation Vita. Cosplay and fan works propelled the surreal “death game” story into a franchise overnight, to the point where the series itself was forced to examine the cyclical creative decline that can be found in repetition brought by success.

Through that lens it appeared the creative team, led by Kazutaka Kodaka, was able to leave Danganronpa behind and try new things. Master Detective Archives: Rain Code is the most Danganronpa–like project from Too Kyo Games, formed by this team after leaving Spike Chunsoft (which still acts as publisher here). Thanks to the distinctive visual and musical styles from Rui Komatsuzaki and Masafumi Takada respectively, you could put Master Detective up next to Danganronpa and easily assume it’s a sequel. But while there are structural and thematic similarities, Rain Code is very much its own work with its own ideas. This is the kind of project that happens when a group of creatives can iterate where it found success, without being tethered to an IP.

The weirdest Scooby gang you'll ever meet

Master Detective Archives: Rain Code is set in a strange world held up in part by the World Detective Organization, a global police force of sorts working with the Unified Government to solve mysteries and keep the peace. The WDO does its thing thanks to a bunch of weirdos with bizarre, supernatural powers called Fortes, ranging from the hyperspecific (the ability to view a crime scene in its full state at its moment of discovery) to the absurdly powerful (rewinding time). These people are called Master Detectives, and you play as Yumo Kokohead, who seems to be involved with this organization in some way or another. He wakes up in a lost and found closet at a train station with no memories, so it’s hard to say aside from the invitation in his pocket.

Despite having amnesia, Yumo is able to tackle his predicament thanks to a mysterious contract he’s formed with Shinigami, a weird, puffy, purple ghost-like being that has a gleeful interest in the macabre. Turns out the memory loss was part of the contract. Yumo and Shinigami get wrapped up in a massive case involving the Kanai Ward, a city permanently covered in rain clouds that has its own sovereign status beyond the reach of the Unified Government. After a train ride into the city goes horribly awry, Yumo finds himself with a group of Master Detectives in a city openly hostile to their presence, on orders from the WDO’s “Number One” to help solve the ultimate mystery.

Mystery Dungeon! Like, literally, a mystery dungeon

I opened this review talking about Danganronpa for a reason. It’s hard to separate the two, and putting them next to each other accentuates what makes Master Detective interesting. The most striking thing about Danganronpa wasn’t the “death game” genre hook, a horror subgenre made popular by works like Battle Royale. Nor was it Monokuma, the two-toned teddy bear doubling as a murderous freak. We do stan Monokuma though. The biggest oomph was how Danganronpa played with surrealism to orchestrate absurd visual scenarios that defied reality while telling a functionally grounded story.

A character is killed early in the first game in a nightmarish batting cage for example, with Monokuma pelting him to death with thousands of baseballs. Where did the batting cage come from? Is that how the character actually died or are we seeing some kind of insane, edgy as heck Charlie’s Chocolate Factory-style metaphor meant to distract as much as entertain? Are we really solving mysteries on a cosmic surfboard, or are we simply seeing an abstract representation of someone’s mental process? It’s probably not real, because it couldn’t be! But it’s wild to look at and adds to the unhinged vibe.

In Rain Code, the absurd and surreal is the truth come to life. In exchange for the contract, Shinigami is able to save Yumo’s bacon on several occasions by freezing time and opening a pocket dimension, ripping the pair from the jaws of death into a last-ditch effort to solve a crime. In this space a Mystery Labyrinth is erected, an unimaginable structure that gives the twists and turns of a mystery physical, lethal form. Yumo is armed with a sword and several Solution Keys, which Shinigami (showing her true form of a goth princess moonlighting as the Grim Reaper) literally vomits into being.

Every clue and question Yumo and Shinigami face takes absurd form in some way or another, from Yumo having his blood splatted on walls to reveal prompts to Shinigami suddenly being in a spinning barrel on a beach, while the player throws knives at letters to spell a sentence-completing and mystery-solving word. Which is then used to fuel a laser beam to destroy an obstruction. Hell yeah, we love video games. Unlike the spectacle metaphors of Danganronpa, this narrative conceit not only makes space for a new level of wackiness, it does so in a way that makes it all as real as a bullet fired into your gut by a gun. It’s cool as all get out, and takes a familiar concept for fans of the team’s previous work to look at it from another angle.

The whole truth and nothing but, so help you Shinigami-chan

“Truth” is really important here, and part of why it’s meaningful to make the goofy visuals part of the reality of this work. This is a story about detectives, and about the value of seeking out the truth. Or rather, it’s about the calculus one has to make in truth-seeking, measuring the ideal of solving a problem with the harsh consequences that can and will actually follow. Of course, Rain Code being what it is, that consequence is delivered to us with the subtlety of a fireworks stand in the southern United States in June. See, when Yumo risks his life to make it through a Mystery Labyrinth, fighting supernatural pitfalls and phantoms threatening to trap his soul in an unsolved crime forever, there’s a price to pay at the end.

The true culprit has to die, and Shinigami herself is the one to accept that payment. Every time Yumo solves a mystery, no matter what his motivation for taking the case, he has to contend with it being impossible to save the day without blood on his hands. And he quickly learns that just because he’s a detective, just because he’s helping someone out, that doesn’t make him a hero. When Rain Code’s story is at its most successful, I wasn’t proud of myself for figuring out what was going on. I was disgusted at myself for butting my head into a situation that wasn’t black and white, because I knew I was barreling towards an outcome that was. I added to a pile of bodies, and for what? What is the truth actually worth when uncovering it just causes more pain? That stuff hits hard when Rain Code is firing on all cylinders.

Cyberpunk Sleuth

Unfortunately Rain Code often isn’t firing on all cylinders, suffering from a runtime that’s at least ten hours too many. A whole case feels like treading water at one point, offering little but some mechanical plot development after its conclusion. Running around in the game’s admittedly gorgeous world also tends to feel like a chore, especially when factoring in some collectibles and side quests that don’t amount to much besides modern gaming’s apparent need to make everything last for a minimum of 30 hours. It’s a bummer because when Rain Code is on point it cooks to an absurd degree, reaching heights the Danganronpa series never did for me. But by the end, especially when Rain Code starts revealing its hand and jumping the shark at the same time, I felt as deep as its thematic ideas were, the actual execution was more often like stomping through a puddle. The story ends on a high note thankfully, but there’s so much momentum-shattering padding on the way that it’s not as high as it could have been.

The weird part is, as much as Rain Code got in its own way at times, I was almost never physically bored. Each case is a different kind of mystery, and thanks to Yumo teaming up with a different character utilizing a distinct Forte, each case also has unique mechanics. Paired with the recurring gameplay hooks such as "Reasoning Deathmatches" presenting Ace Attorney-style interrogations as Punch-Out with a sword, the moment to moment action in Rain Code is a lot of fun. It’s not until the moments between the zany exploits that the game stumbles. It’s a dangerous kind of problem to have in a hybrid visual novel though, making the lows really low.

Much like Danganronpa before it, despite its problems my time with Master Detective Archives: Rain Code Plus will be hard to forget. I’m thankful I waited until this updated version to give it a whirl; with a silky smooth frame rate and high resolution, the visual elements really get to sing. Even when I wasn’t fully on board with where the story was going, Rain Code made me think, which is high praise for a game about a deadly goth girlfriend puking rainbows and shooting heart-shaped laser beams from her face as a means of exposing criminal conspiracies.

Master Detective Archives: Rain Code Plus is available now for the PlayStation 5 and PC. The non-"Plus" version is also on Nintendo Switch. A PS5 code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.

Lucas White

Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He's far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.