Seven Viewpoints, One Morning: How 428 Made Shibuya Converge

At ten in the morning on 28 April, a college student is handed an attache case in front of Hachiko and a gun is pointed at her. A few streets away a rookie detective is waiting at the Shibuya scramble for a ransom handover that goes wrong. A man who used to head a Shibuya gang is picking up litter, because he quit. A virus researcher in a pharmaceutical company has not thought about his family in years. A freelance writer with a talent for provocation is looking for the story of the year. A person in a cat costume with no memory and a decent right hand is being handed a job they do not understand.

None of these people know each other. By the end of the day they have all touched the same ten hours, in a game called 428よんにいはち 〜封鎖された渋谷で〜 — 428: Shibuya Locked Down — made by Chunsoft and released on the Wii in December 2008. It remains the most structurally audacious thing the Japanese sound novel has produced, and most of its ideas are about text: how to write a story that runs sideways, how to make a reader stop, and how much help to put under a word before the reader stops being able to read on their own.

Ten hours, five strangers

The game opens at 10:00 on 28 April with a kidnapping: 大沢マリアおおさわまりあ has been taken, and the ransom instructions are absurdly specific — fifty million yen, carried by the victim’s identical twin sister, 大沢ひとみおおさわひとみ. That detail is the whole plot in embryo. The conspirator needed a body, and twins are interchangeable; the girl with the case is not the girl they wanted.

From there the five viewpoint characters run in parallel and the player is expected to keep switching between them. The interface is a five-minute-resolution timeline chart: you can see, at a glance, which hour each person is awake in, which hour you have already read, and where your own decisions are already affecting somebody else’s morning. A choice made in one chapter routinely kills a character in another. Some of the bad endings are genuinely funny, which is either a joke about game structure or an admission that the structure is a toy, and possibly both.

What makes 428 different from Chunsoft’s own Machi (街〜運命の交差点〜, 1998) is the direction of travel. In Machi, eight characters had eight separate stories that ran alongside each other and never touched. In 428 everybody’s morning is the same morning. The police procedural, the runaway’s escape, the scientist’s guilt, the reporter’s scoop and the cat’s confusion are not five plots that intersect; they are one plot seen five times, and the pleasure is the click of recognising the same street corner from four different heights.

Even the title is a piece of wordplay, and the pun is the reason the in-story date moved from 25 April to 28 April: read the digits in Japanese and they say the place.

428      よん・に・はち    yo-ni-ha-chi
しぶや    し・ぶ・や      shi-bu-ya

The rule of seven

The most quotable thing about 428 was never said inside the game. In a Famitsu interview given in November 2015 at a talk event about both games, director イシイジロウいしぃじろう explained that the number of principal characters had been deliberately capped: people cannot hold more than about seven viewpoints in their heads at once, so a story that wants to be understood should not ask for an eighth. Eight is what Machi had. Seven is what 428 has, and the difference is the difference between a story you follow and a story you admire from a distance.

The same interview explains the two other decisions that people tend to mistake for accidents. Shibuya was chosen because it is famous everywhere, because it has young people and old people and everyone in between, and because the fans of Machi deserved to see the same city again. And it is deliberately not a sequel: 428 was not made to milk a success, but to offer a new original work in the same city while keeping the good parts of the old one.

The producer, 中村光一なかむらこういち, put the ambition more bluntly. He wanted something like 24 — ten hours of one day, played in real time — except that the day is a real place rather than a television control room, and the choices are yours rather than the clock’s.

Written sideways

Here is the part worth stealing. Machi was written vertically: each writer took one character and wrote that character’s story top to bottom, like a column in a newspaper, and the writers’ work was later linked together into a game. 428 was written horizontally: the team expanded a rough plot hour by hour along the clock, and one writer, 北島行徳kitajima yukinori, essentially wrote the whole thing across the timeline, revising the team’s outline into the script that the game’s five-minute ticks then had to fit.

Ishii spelled the contrast out in a 2010 interview with 4Gamer: Machi had been written character by character, vertically, and 428 was written along the clock, horizontally, essentially by one person.¹

Vertical writing is the intuitive way: one mind, one character, one long swim. Horizontal writing is the disciplined way: you cannot let a scene be beautiful if it costs you three hours you do not have, because the clock is the story’s spine. If you have ever tried to make a story out of simultaneous events and watched it sprawl, the reason is usually that somebody wrote it vertically.

The production method followed the same logic. 428 is a sound novel shot with live actors, but almost every frame is a still photograph, and the stills were not taken as illustrations — they were taken as performance. The actors delivered their lines while shooting, at the suggestion of the director of photography Yasutaka Mōri, because Ishii had assumed a still image would not need dialogue and Mōri argued that a face photographed while speaking is a different face. The result was 120,000 photographs over two months of shooting, followed by three months of choosing which few thousand to use. A game about ten hours was assembled from a mountain of hours that never made it into the game.

KEEP OUT

And then the system does something that no novel and very few games do: it stops.

Somewhere in the middle of a chapter, the text simply refuses to continue. A panel appears — KEEP OUT — and the player is told, in effect, to go and look somewhere else. You have to find the name of the character you are currently playing, printed in red inside another character’s chapter, and select it. The game jumps you there. Only then does your own story unlock.

This is a very old trick — a locked door and a key hidden two rooms away — but the sound novel makes it textual in a way that matters. The player is not searching a room; the player is searching a body of text for a proper noun, and the reward for finding it is not an item but more text. The game teaches you, without ever explaining itself, that in this world a name is a handle, that a red word is a promise, and that you are allowed to be interrupted.

It is also, quietly, the most interesting answer I have seen to a question every reading tool eventually has to answer: how much of the text should be available at any moment? The naive answer is all of it. 428’s answer is: a chapter at a time, plus whatever you can go and find yourself, plus a glossary that only opens when you tap a word that has been coloured for you. The same argument appears in Japanese reading aids, where furigana is shown for a while and then, as the reader improves, taken away again. Help that never leaves is indistinguishable from no help at all.

If you want to feel how much of reading is directional, the vertical and horizontal preview on this site’s Tools page sets one sentence both ways. Japanese writes in two directions and the two feel like different languages to the eye; 428 took the metaphor literally and wrote its own script sideways.

A virus called flower

The conspiracy underneath the kidnapping is a virus called ウーアうーあ. The word is Swahili; it means flower, and it also means death, and it was named for the way it blooms under a microscope. In the fiction it is airborne, kills everyone it infects, and has been quietly weaponised. The researcher Ōsawa developed a treatment, the treatment was delivered by a nanocapsule that stays in the body for a week, and the plot is what happens when somebody decides that week of medicine inside a teenager is worth fifty million yen.

All of that is plot, and plot is the least interesting thing about this game. What is interesting is that the same story was also published as four paperbacks, one for each block of the morning — 10:00–13:00, 13:00–15:00, 15:00–17:00, 17:00–20:00 — issued by Kodansha in 2009, written by Kitajima, set three years earlier than the game. A story that is about simultaneity gets re-told in a medium where simultaneity is impossible, and the medium’s only tool is to give the reader one volume at a time.

One detail in those books is worth a Japanese reader’s attention. The novelisation prints the reading of the surname 大沢すおざわ in ruby, the first time you meet it — even though Ōsawa is a common enough name that most adult readers would not need it. The game had no way to show a reading, because a game shows you a face. The novel, which is nothing but text, took the opportunity to teach a reading, and then got out of the way.

Blunt kindness

Japanese dialogue in 428 has one line that the production team kept talking about afterwards, because it says what the game is for. Achi, the ex-gang leader who picks up litter, is asked why he helps people who are in trouble.

死にそうな人がいたらしにそうひと、牛丼ぎゅうどんぐらいおごってやる。

If someone looks like they are dying, I’ll buy them gyudon. That is all. The line is written in rough, masculine speech, and it is one of the kindest sentences in Japanese popular fiction, which is a combination that English can render (“If you look like you’re dying I’ll treat you to beef bowl”) and Chinese cannot render at all — 牛丼 has to become something like 牛肉盖饭 and the whole register goes with it.

The screenwriter was aiming, in his own description of the work, at a theme where love may lose but kindness wins: being kind does not require love, and it does not require eloquence, and it costs about eight hundred yen. A game in which a bioterror plot is stopped, in the end, by a chain of people deciding to be decent to each other one small errand at a time, is not as rare as it should be.²

What the morning was worth

The reception was immediate and, by Japanese standards, enormous. Famicom Tsūshin’s cross review gave the Wii version a perfect 40 out of 40 — only the ninth game ever to score full marks — and the adventure genre poll of 2017 put it second, behind only STEINS;GATE, with Machi fifth. It won the Japan Game Awards’ 2008 Future Division, an excellence award at the 2009 Japan Game Awards, and a CEDEC award in 2010. The 2018 PlayStation 4 and PC version was released outside Japan as 428: Shibuya Scramble and held an 85 on Metacritic and 88% on OpenCritic, with reviewers reaching for crime-novel language: the Verge called it the best crime novel you could read on a PS4.

Where	What it got
Famicom Tsūshin cross review (Wii, 2008)	40 / 40 — perfect score, ninth game ever
Japan Game Awards 2008	Future Division
Famicom Tsūshin genre poll, 2017	2nd in adventure, behind STEINS;GATE
Metacritic, PS4 (2018)	85 / 100
OpenCritic, PS4 (2018)	88% critics recommend

None of this survives by nostalgia. Chunsoft went on to use the same people and the same method for Time Travellers, set roughly twenty years after 428 and pointedly leaving a ten-year gap in the middle where Machi would fit. The TYPE-MOON bonus scenario became the anime CANAAN. And the shots themselves have aged exactly as badly as 2008 digital photography should have aged — the 2018 remake was released at the same resolution, so the motion scenes are as soft as they ever were. The writing is why people still argue about this game; the photography is why they do not argue about the photography.

Where to start

Version	Released	Note
Wii	2008-12-04	The original, by Sega
PlayStation 3 / PSP	2009-09-03 / 2009-09-17	Interface and audio upgrades
iOS / Android	2011 / 2013	Both delisted; no longer purchasable
PS4 / Windows	2018-09-06	Sold overseas as 428: Shibuya Scramble
Novelisation, 4 vols.	2009	Kodansha BOX, one volume per block of hours

If you can only do one thing, play the original or its 2018 remake and resist the temptation to read the guides. The one thing worth looking up beforehand is the official guidebook (428 オフィシャルガイドブック, Enterbrain, 2009), because it explains the timing structure that the interface only implies.

And if you want to feel what the story was built on, read Machi afterwards. It is the same city, the same technique, eight viewpoints instead of five, and it never quite converges. Seeing the two side by side is the clearest way to understand what 428 actually invented: not a plot about a city under threat, but a way of making a text behave like a city.

Footnotes

1. Ishii on the writing method, 4Gamer interview, January 2010. On the same occasion he described Machi as written by eight separate authors, one per character, and 428 as written along the time axis, with the scenario team expanding an hour-by-hour outline that Kitajima then rewrote into the script. ↩

2. In the Famitsu interview the screenwriter is quoted on the line as the direction of the whole work: kindness wins even when love loses, and the cheapest possible kindness — a bowl of gyudon — is the one anyone can perform. ↩