One Hundred Years of Detective Fiction in THE CENTENNIAL CASE: A SHIJIMA STORY (2022)

Originally posted May 8, 2024.

 An early footnote in The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story summarizes Edogawa Ranpo’s A Taxonomy of Mystery Tricks. One such trick is the ‘narrative trick,’ clues which are disguised through the presentation of the story. But, the game assures us, “such tricks are considered impossible in films & TV.” Anyone who’s seen Poirot‘s awkward adaptation of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd would probably agree. But a suspicious player might well wonder if The Centennial Case, a PC/PS4/Switch game presented in live-action FMV format, will attempt to invent one.

Haruka Kagami is an up-and-coming mystery novelist whose science consultant, the biologist Eiji Shijima, invites her to his family succession ceremony—apparently for research purposes, but secretly because an unidentified hundred-year-old skeleton has been found under the Shijima family’s cherry tree. To identify the skeleton Haruka and her editor Akari Yamase dig into records of strange murders in the Shijima family’s history, in 1922 and 1972, while in 2022, the guests contend with another murder and an attempted poisoning. The Shijima family is rumoured to have discovered the secret to immortality, and the records spanning fifty years all involve a mysterious vagabond-detective named Josui Kusaka.

Immortality is real in the setting, but otherwise, the mysteries are completely fair play. (Indeed, the game makes it explicit from the beginning that this is the only way that the mysteries deviate from reality.) A major theme of the story is the history of crime fiction (particularly in Japan), the reasons for the enduring popularity of the genre, and the way it has evolved over time. As the chapters progress, a timeline is updated which situates the Shijima family events among notable mystery publications and notable historical events—including, unusually, the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s a love letter to mystery fiction made for the type of aficionado who already has some encyclopedic genre knowledge. The protagonist is a mystery reader, too. In attempting to solve the case, Haruka envisions herself and Eiji as narrator and detective, respectively, with the other guests and family members occupying supporting roles. Sometimes, rather mind-bendingly, they even play each other, as when cheerful youngest son Mitsunaga portrays his drunken, ornery father Ryo’ei in 1973. [1] The limited gameplay consists of theorizing solutions in the course of reading a mystery novel, and if you’re not careful, these arcane theories can quickly get away from you. (These mechanics were the weakest part of the game, which could otherwise could have been a solid low-budget TV series.)

Even in a genre pastiche, you want a decent mystery. The ones here are… ‘decent’: most of the individual cases are middling and a little derivative, employing the kind of shin honkaku tricks typical of Detective Conan. Some involve questionable leaps of logic. The 70s case was the strongest, while one of the 20s cases had a promising pseudo-locked-room (a crime scene blocked off by an army of delicate ceramic statues) with a somewhat disappointing solution.

But as far as the promise of a narrative trick, all I’ll say is this: it’s there. It’s good. And despite anticipating something of the kind, it genuinely fooled me. So despite The Centennial Case‘s flaws, I really do have to salute the writing team. They’ve come up with a twist that I’ve never seen before—possibly has never been done before—and I salute them for that.

[1] I have been unable to find a transcribed cast & crew list anywhere online, screenshots are blocked, and the game doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, so the character names, scenario writer, and other details are from my own memory. Apologies for any mistakes.