For Famitsu, 428 equals 40

It would be nice if someone would try a text adventure title on wiiware. I think think a graphic novel game might work in North America.

Wait, they gave Brawl a 40/40?

Well that's another review source I can cross off my relevant list...

I don't trust Famitsu as a review source. I mean, Nintendogs got a perfect score. What the hell? It's a virtual pet. Like Tamagotchi.

Strange. It seems like one of those FMV-games that plagued the Sega CD and the 3DO, but of slightly better make.

Could they be making a comeback?

Never cared about reviews anyways, but I had some respect for Famitsu until the 40/40 for brawl.

I've played my fair share of text based games, they're most for PC though. I'm pretty sure 428 isn't going to come to America because the genre doesn't appeal too much to western players.

But there is always hope they take a risk.

Personally, I think a game like this would work out fantastically on DS. I'd play it on there without hesitation.

428 is the spiritual successor to the 1998 game Machi, and are/were text adventures that only could have been realized as video games, only using live actors and filmed on location.

In Machi ("The City"), the player follows the stories of 8 different protagonists, each pursuing their own unrelated agenda, all in parallel but all taking place in the same city of Shibuya, Tokyo. The player can read the stories, switch between characters to read, and backtrack to any point in the story at will.

Since everything is running in parallel, what one character did would often unknowingly lead another character to a dead end; For instance, one character casually locking a warehouse door would lead to another character who happened to be hiding in the warehouse to starve to death.

The player's role, as the sole overseer of all 8 protagonists, is to make each character behave so that none of them would block the progress of the others, and let the story continue on to the end of that "day". The game was essentially an intricately woven ball of narrative yarn that the player had to untangle.

Machi was massive, with the story spanning five days with over 300 major and supporting roles. Even the minor characters which you didn't control lived their own lives; Many of them would exit the story path of one character, only to walk into the story of another, often showing different sides of their personality.

Machi was regarded one of the best games ever by those who played it, but suffered profit-wise. The planned sequel was canned. In the 10 years that ensued, Chunsoft released numerous adventure games that took the parallel narrative gameplay mechanic and tweaked it in various ways.

With 428, they've come full circle and are releasing what comes closest to being a true sequel to Machi - the game even unfolds in the same city as where Machi took place.

Hell, I waited 10 years for this!