During the first few days of this year’s GDC, it was pouring rain at the Moscone Center. Just when I thought I’d pulled myself out of the pouring rain, I found it again in the Spike Chunsoft interview room on the underground Expo floor.There Xiao Gao Yixiao (formerly the lead writer of the Danganrompa series), translators and some crew take me through his latest project: Detective Files: The Rain Code.
Set in a “neon black” city that’s often washed out by rain, you play as a detective who solves a variety of bizarre murders with the help of fellow detective masters, each with their own unique looks, quirks, and idiosyncrasies ability. It’s your job to unravel the mysteries and immerse yourself in the clues while immersing yourself in that unique style that longtime fans will recognize from the Danganronpa series.
Kodaka told me through a translator that he’d been reading detective stories since he was a kid, explaining his interest in the kind of detective stories that appear in Raincode. He points to Nine Lives, the Detective Conan manga series, Sherlock Holmes, and Japanese novelist Ranba Edogawa as his particular favorites, dripping elements from those sources into the various cases throughout the game.
Rain Code is the first game Kodaka has directly worked on since leaving Spike Chunsoft to form Too Kyo games with other notable ex-Chunsoft employees. According to Kodaka, working on Rain Code is different from his previous work in Danganrompa because they can put more people and influence in Rain Code. Even though Rain Code appears to be the biggest of the Too Kyo games, Kodaka doesn’t feel too much pressure.
“He just wants to create what he wants to create. So instead of worrying about sales and stuff like that, when it’s not going well, he thinks [it can’t be helped]This is in line with previous interviews in which he stated that Too Kyo Games aims to create new IP. In fact, this is a large part of his vision for the studio’s future: “He wants to make games in a shorter period of time. More games, like two to three years, and then create more games with the development team. “
In my limited time, perhaps the most intriguing aspects of Rain Code are the visuals, the rain-soaked cities, and some excellent 3D environments and characters, especially for a Switch exclusive. In the demo I showed, you could walk into distinct areas, each with its own look and feel. Kodaka says he’s most proud of the vast aesthetic improvement over his previous work.
“So compared to Danganrompa where you just read words and pictures might seem boring because there’s not that much to see. In Rain Code you can see and have fun [exploring and interacting with it]. He likes puzzle games, so this presentation is more conducive to the visualization of puzzle solving. “
The game was known to be an ambitious project from the staff of Spike Chunsoft and Too Kyo games, but within a month of its release, it faced some serious competition. Final Fantasy 16 was released eight days before Rain Code, and with Kodaka himself commenting online that the game was “buried” by the JRPG giant, I wanted to ask him how he felt about the release. As it turns out, he wasn’t worried, and his tweet was just a joke, hoping to get people to buy the game out of sympathy.
“Final Fantasy is so big, it really doesn’t make him anxious. Rain Code is on Switch, and Final Fantasy is on PS5. Even the visual difference makes him feel that they are not competitors. Compared with Final Fantasy 16, Rain Code is more Like an “animation style”. So it’s a very different style, and it makes them feel like it’s a very different game.”
Overall, Kodaka hopes his work will continue to delight players, as he has done in the past with the Danganrompa series, and while he can’t say how he intends to do this time due to spoilers, he believes Rain Code will do to the same.
Master Detective Archive: Rain Code launches June 30 on Nintendo Switch.
(This interview was conducted through a translation by Spike Chunsoft. Quotations used have been minimally edited for clarity)