Recently, both SHINRAI – Broken Beyond Despair and GENBA no Kizuna celebrated their release anniversaries. And since it was the very first time for GENBA, I’ve decided to dedicate today’s blog post to looking back at this first year of its release.
- Reception
Naturally, one of the biggest topics on my mind has been its reception. I’ve already talked about it on November 30 of last year, so three months after its release, but of course, much more time has passed ever since, so the question is if anything has changed or if any new realizations have been made. Unfortunately, the answer to that is primarily a “not really”. If anything, my impressions from back then have only been reinforced. Which is primarily because we haven’t really received much additional feedback ever since.
In fact, when I made that post in November, our review count was at fourteen on Steam. Now it’s at nineteen. So even though we broke the important “ten review mark” in record time, things have severely slowed down from then on, with only five more reviews coming in over the last ten months. So, just based on that, I guess it’s pretty clear that GENBA sadly isn’t selling like hotcakes.
SHINRAI, on the other hand, is still doing well even nine years later, without a significant drop in its yearly sales numbers.
But why is that? Why aren’t people interested as much in our second VN as they are in our first? That’s what I’ve been racking my brains over for a good while now. However, given that we haven’t received much more feedback since the last time I tried to answer this question, I consequently don’t have much more to extrapolate from. Let’s do take another closer look at those reviews anyway, though!
- Review Impressions
Out of the nineteen we’ve received, only three are negative, so that’s a very reassuring ratio at least! And if we read through those three negative reviews, we quickly realize that they are quite varied. One person hated GENBA with a burning passion (while absolutely adoring SHINRAI by the way), one person I honestly can’t fully decipher what they were trying to tell us, but they clearly didn’t like it. And the final one… well, they actually sound pretty positive at times, stating that “GENBA no Kizuna presents a compelling Mesozoic mystery, especially during the ferocious finale to its Triassic trial“.
It’s just that all the “character drama” didn’t really hit with them and it sounds as though they would have preferred the game to be much more focused on the investigation. Or, at the very least, that the character-related things wouldn’t have been explored in as much detail as they were. Which is a very fair opinion and one I can actually work with.
That aspect has been one of my biggest worries after all. But then again, the character stuff was the whole point of GENBA. That’s why it’s called “bonds of the crime scene”. The “character drama” was supposed to be front and center here, purposely making it very different to SHINRAI. So if that doesn’t really jive with certain players, it’s quite understandable. In those cases, I guess I sadly can only say that the game wasn’t really made for them, but I’m still happy they gave it a chance, of course.
However, all this still doesn’t really help us in figuring out why so many people don’t even decide to give it a chance in the first place.
- Potential Player Reservations
I’ve talked about this with a few different people, but to be completely frank, I can still only speculate here.
Maybe GENBA‘s price of 25€ still seems too much for most people. This is a theory that can easily be verified in the future by simply discounting the game with a higher percentage. Thus far, we’ve only gone up to 20% and I’m not gonna do sudden drastic increases any time soon, so it will still be a while before you’ll find it for 50% off. But maybe by then, we’ll see a noticeable change, who knows?
Another possibility is that GENBA‘s vibe just isn’t up most players’ alleys. Maybe the spooky, horror-esque Halloween tone of SHINRAI simply draws in more than the prehistoric dino/jungle theme of our police procedural does.
Maybe it’s also the difference between having a group of people trapped with a murderer in an isolated location versus showing up at a crime scene to investigate a murder that’s already occurred. In theory, I can certainly see how the first one may be a lot more thrilling, but since it always seemed to me as though there is a significant overlap in fans of Danganronpa and Ace Attorney, I’m not sure how much there really is to it.
Anyway, the only thing I know for sure is that we’ve gained a lot of fans through SHINRAI over the years, who were eagerly anticipating our next project and, in the end, only a tiny fraction of them ultimately ended up jumping into GENBA during its first release year. And that’s, of course, a little disheartening and something I’d really love to gain clear insights on. After all, while I do primarily wanna create the things that make myself happy, I would also like to improve and give the fans what they want to see as well.
- Love For GENBA
Now, with all of this said, I would be remiss not to also acknowledge the following: when it comes to the people who really love GENBA… they really love GENBA! There are people out there dedicating their time to breaking down GENBA in meticulous detail to categorize everything it contains on TVTropes, from all the little references and Easter eggs to a detailed timeline of events or even little theories regarding character motivations and what may happen in the future. Others still keep sending us fanarts or occasional comments of praise and how they want to see more of the GENBA cast. And recently, even a fun streamer stumbled upon GENBA, thoroughly enjoying it (particularly the dinosaur theme) along with her chat. At least so far (they’re currently right in the midst of the first investigation phase). It’s super exciting to watch them go through the game and ponder its mysteries in real time.
Needless to say, all of that not only warms my heart but makes me truly happy.
So while GENBA may not be doing as well as SHINRAI, I’m still glad that there are people out there that find such enjoyment in it and who I could entertain with this story. Words can’t properly convey just how much I appreciate them and how grateful I am that they did decide to give it a try.
- The Future Of GENBA
Now some of you may be wondering what the future may hold for this “spin-off” title in the SHINRAI series, particularly when it comes to a possible console release, as I’ve been asked about a couple of times. It’s still something I do wanna do, if only for my own satisfaction of being able to play it on a Switch. However, it might take a bit longer than originally planned.
The truth is, I was intending to use all the feedback we’d gather over this first release year to iron out any remaining kinks, similar to how we did a major update to SHINRAI right before it underwent the console porting process. Unfortunately, console updates are a bit of a bitch, since we can’t do them manually ourselves whenever we want. That would be in the hands of the publisher. Because of that, I wanted GENBA to be in the best state it can possibly be before starting to port it.
There is, for instance, still that one major evidence bug in chapter 3 that’s been reported to us. The people who reported it simply used a workaround and never got back to us on any specifics, so to this very day, we still weren’t able to pinpoint what the cause behind the issue may be and how to fix it. Now, no one else has reported it ever since, but… that could simply be, because not that many people have decided to play GENBA. I was really hoping to have the security and certainty of that no longer becoming a problem for anyone else before starting to port the game, but alas…
Anyway, we might just have to go ahead regardless, but it’s something I’ll think about more in the coming months. For now, all I can say is that we do still want a console port to happen, so I hope this gives you at least some reassurance if you’ve been waiting for that.
As for the people who’d love to see Keiichi and the others tackle more cases… well, you’ll definitely get to see them again in Withering Without Hope, although in much smaller roles. However, I’ve been thinking for a long while now that I’d love to see them tackle more cases myself. Now that their introductions and basic character arcs have been established through GENBA, I can easily see a possibility for them to tackle a bunch of smaller cases that would be more focused on investigation rather than character drama.
You know, something like an ongoing series comparable to Detective Conan. Doing something like that would definitely be the dream, but with the already limited time in life, I’m not sure when I’d get around to that “orz I do have a lot of ideas, though, so we’ll see…
But with this, I guess we’ll come to a close. Well, almost! Because there is one last thing I want to share with you: this most recent batch of GENBA fanart once again drawn by the ever-so-productive Ryuu-chan and depicting all four members of Raptor Pack Productions after the time skip, dressed up all fancily to celebrate the anniversary of their movie!
You can click on the individual pics to enlarge them! I violently love all of these as much as a T-Rex a juicy Parasaurolophus carcass!!!
Now, thanks for reading and, as always, please enjoy the rest of your weekend! Until next Saturday, take care ^w^
