Written by Yuji Horii, programmed by Chunsoft and published by Enix, The Portopia Serial Murder Case is a narrative investigation game released in 1983 on a microcomputer and then ported notably to the Famicom, a platform on which it met with spectacular success to the point of exceeding 700,000 sales. Very modern for its time, this pioneer of the visual novel introduced a menu of commands to select an action (move, ask a question, use evidence, arrest), menu of commands that Yûji Horii will put then in application by carrying out a certain Dragon Quest. Inspiration for luminaries like Hideo Kojima and his Snatcher, this action-packed game features a conversational system with dialogue choices and non-linear gameplay. If he does not find the identity of the real culprit on his own, the player also receives one of the bad endings. Rich in texts and carriers of mature topics, the game has never been officially localized…until today.
I will tell her the blue words
Only here, instead of making a traditional remake that would have allowed us to discover this piece of Japanese adventure game history under normal conditions, the department Square Enix AI utilise The Portopia Serial Murder Case as a demonstration of its “Natural Language Processing” technology, or “Automatic Language Processing” in French. The idea is therefore to communicate with your partner in a natural way by entering text with the keyboard and giving him instructions to progress in the investigation. This method was already used by the 1983 game released on the microcomputer, but modern technology is supposed to allow the game to react correctly to instructions written by the player, as can be seen in the videos. As in the original game, the investigator embodied by the player is indeed mute, so it is up to us to dictate the actions and ask the right questions by typing on his keyboard (or by betting on the function speech-to-text to convert his words into writing).
Here’s how Square Enix presents it:
« This software is an educational demonstration of automatic language processing, an artificial intelligence technology, applied to the adventure game “The Portopia Serial Murder Case” (created by Yuji Horii and first published in Japan in 1983). At the time the game was released, most adventure games were played using a “commands” system, where the player had to type in text to decide their character’s actions. Free text input systems of this type allowed players to enjoy a great deal of freedom. However, they came with a common source of frustration: players knew what action they wanted to perform, but couldn’t do it because they couldn’t find the right wording. This problem was due to limitations in computer performance and technology at the time. 40 years have passed since then, and the performance of PCs has improved dramatically, as have the capabilities of automatic language processing technology. Using “The Portopia Serial Murder Case” as a test, we would like to show you the capabilities of modern natural language processing and the impact it can have on adventure games. »
The rest of the Steam file is then lost in an endless technological jargon which radically moves away from the subject which interests us: the game and the treatment to which it has been subjected. Since this is a tech demo, is the original adventure at least available in its entirety? THE official site does not answer this question, but the experience is in any case offered free of charge on Steam. Niche project requires, the game is only available in Japanese and English only.
On paper, the project is not uninteresting and aims to involve the player even more in his role as an investigator, but the technological application still has to hold up, which is clearly not the case, according to the first feedback from users, many of whom complain that the experience is particularly counter-intuitive and that the player’s partner does not understand much of the text entered, unless he tells him exactly what he wants to hear. Artificial intelligence in all this? No idea, but if Square Enix has managed to make a visual novel unplayable, they can still boast of having achieved a feat, in a certain sense.
