The Portopia Serial Murder Case

The Portopia Serial Murder Case
Boxart of the Famicom version
Developer(s)	Chunsoft
Publisher(s)	Enix
Release Date(s)
Famicom	JP: November 29, 1985
Famicom	JP: November 29, 1985
Platform(s)
Sales	700,000
Genre(s)	Adventure Visual novel

The Portopia Serial Murder Case<sup>(JPJapanese: ポートピア連続殺人事件

Romaji: Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken)</sup> is a game that was released for the Famicom in 1985. It was designed and written by Yuji Horii. The game was originally released for the NEC PC-6001 in 1983, but would later be released for the Famicom, as well as other personal computers and mobile phone services. The Portopia Serial Murder Case is notable for being one of the defining games for the visual novel genre. Horii was inspired to make the game upon reading about the American genre of PC games called text adventures.

Gameplay

The Portopia Serial Murder Case uses the typical visual novel gameplay elements that it helped define, including first person gameplay and narrative, nonlinear gameplay and branching story, an open world, and conversations with non-player characters. The Famicom release would add more gameplay elements, including a point-and-click system, a command menu with dialogue options to replace the kkeyboard, and a 3D maze. The Portopia Serial Murder Case has players interrogate suspects, examine and collect evidence, and call important NPCs through a phone. At the end of the game, if the player has chosen the wrong culprit, the police chief will reprimand the player and force them to reopen the case.

Plot

The game takes place in the real life city of Kobe, Japan, following the unnamed detective known only as Boss. Boss, along with his assistant Yasuhiko "Yasu" Mano, must investigate the murder of the president of a successful bank company, Kouzou Yamakawa. Other key characters include; Fumie Sawaki, Kouzou's secretary and the person who discovered his dead body; Hirata and his daughter Yukiko; Toshiyuki, the nephew of Kouzou and heir to the company; and Okoi, a stripper.

Trivia

• The Famicom release of The Portopia Serial Murder Case is the first collab between Yuji Horii and Koichi Nakamura. Horii and Nakamura would later create the Dragon Quest series together.
• The Portopia Serial Murder Case was inspired by many games and sources, including text adventure games and manga authors Tetsuya Chiba, Mitsuru Adachi and Katsuhiro Otomo. The maze system of the Famicom port was inspired by the Wizardry series, and the command menu system was based off a similar system used in Horii's 1984 game Okhotsk ni Kiyu: Hokkaido Rensa Satsujin Jiken.
• The game was never released outside of Japan due to the mature themes present in the game, such as murder, suicide, fraud, bankruptcy, interrogation beatings, drug dealings, and a strip club.
• The Portopia Serial Murder Case was a very influential game, and would serve as an introduction to game design and inspiration to many influential figures in the video game industry.
  • Hideo Kojima cited the game as one of the three most influential games he has played, and that it inspired his Metal Gear series as well as his game Snatcher.
  • Portopia was one of the first games played by Eiji Aonuma, the director of The Legend of Zelda series starting with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
  • The game would serve as an inspiration for different aspects of Horii's later game Dragon Quest, primarily the menu system and storytelling techniques.
  • According to Sophia Aubrey Drake of Rings and Coins, Portopia would also serve as an inspiration for the Ace Attorney and Zero Escape series.
• An English ROM hack was created by ROM hacking group DvD Translations.

External links

• The Portopia Serial Murder Case at Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• The Portopia Serial Murder Case at GameFAQs