![Doukoku Soshite [慟哭そして…] Game Sample - Sega Saturn](/images/yt/7u/doukoku-soshite-game-sample-sega-saturn-phi0m.jpg)
Doukoku Soshite [慟哭そして…] Game Sample - Sega Saturn
63There are quite a few niche games that were released on the Sega Saturn that have little to no information about them... "Doukoku Soshite" is not exactly one of those games though. While I hesitate to call it "well-known" as it certainly has its fans within the Japanese gaming community, it was one of the more unique adventure-style games on the platform that combined Eastern and Western sensibilities to separate it from your garden-variety Japanese visual novel but was released fairly late in the system's life and didn't get as much exposure as it could have (though it would ultimately sell over 100,000 copies). As a joint venture between Data East, Studio Line and SAS Sakata in 1998, it managed to garner some fame back in its heyday as one of the more popular softcore mature / adult titles and would go on to produce a re-release a few months later with extra goodies (Doukoku Soshite... Final Edition), a sequel for the Sega Dreamcast in 1999 called "Revive... Sosei", and it was also a fairly unlikely candidate for a remaster in 2018/2019 for PS4, PSVita and Nintendo Switch.
Being one of the system's numerous "yellow label" games, Sega marketed the Saturn quite a bit as the "grown-up and edgy" console of choice as they waged their aggressive battle with Nintendo and the (at the time) newcomer Sony for console supremacy. What the game essentially is your typical gal game merged with some survival-horror elements, basic exploration, point-and-click explorable rooms and puzzles, a few escape-room-esque moments and a fairly complex branching route system triggered by what the game calls the "Trap Divergent Story" or "TDS", but we'll go into a little more detail on that in a bit. What you need to know is that the game is about a faceless protagonist who is riding on a bus late at night when he runs into one of his high school peers and drums up a conversation about the news reports of young girls who have been going missing in the area. After a few more characters get on the bus to foreshadow things to come, your trip is derailed as your bus collides with a car and you narrowly avoid sudden death before passing out as a cute Japanese girl calls out to you.
When you awake, you're trapped in a strange old mansion with a host of other odd characters and all you know is that there may be a murderer among you. It's a pretty straight-forward set-up for our anime-style whodunit adventure, but the game was unique for having a large emphasis on finding items, searching for clues, and not just being another title with hours of reading with the occasional multiple choice selection to string you along. This game is highly dependent on searching and being situationally aware as the slightest deviation in actions can put the TDS system in full-effect and lock you out of certain routes -- some choices you make at certain points don't have obvious ramifications until later. Doing certain actions can trigger events that require items you may not have (and trying to back-pedal is a no-no) and the game is curious as you can try to save everybody, try to protect certain characters you like, or you can just find the exit and not tell anybody and save yourself, so it's a little refreshing in terms of route flexibility. Each heroine also has at least two endings and there are segments where the player can die if they don't disarm certain traps or make poor choices.
In spite of all these things, the actual delivery of the story is a little juvenile at times (for example, the whole kinky gum / shoe scene with an arbitrarily specific item just to alter a route or get locked out in the future... really?) and the game lacks the weight of a horror title... I mean, there's some violence, but the game itself isn't really scary. If you're the type who also likes their Western-style adventure games to have inventive puzzles with witty solutions, you won't get that either; the puzzles in this game are about as basic as they come and aren't always logical. There's still a few good moments to be had though and the game is not short on the fan-service.
The audio / visuals are pretty good too for this type of game with a slight bit of animation here and there, almost on par with some of Elf's mature offerings (which comes as no surprise since its development team shares some key players from said company) and while each run is initially pretty short of about 2-3 hours or so (depending on what you want to accomplish), there's obviously quite a bit of replayability. Try every little action you can, explore every nook and cranny after every event or item you find, beware of stranger danger, and you might just survive this tale. The game is pretty good overall.
This is a video showing a few things and avoiding the first death trap. Enjoy.
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