There are a few game genres that only work in Japan, and the rescue & disaster games are probably one of them. The Zettai Zetsumei Toshi is an excellent example of this particular genre and always revolves around a colossal disaster. The last entry I played was the one on the Wii, which was reviewed as ‘decent’ in the West. In Japan, it received a 34/40 by Famitsu. So, are we dealing with a cultural difference in what we perceive to like? Perhaps. Let’s take a closer look at Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories.
Cultural History
Back in 2002, the series first saw the light of day, released on the PlayStation 2 as The Disaster Report (Zettai Zetsumei Toshi). It became a cult hit, and each following game revolves around surviving in a city suffering from a massive natural disaster. Fast forward to 2020, and we get Disaster Report 4: Summer memories, a game that should have been released on the PlayStation 3. The game was announced on the Tokyo Game Show in 2010 and was scheduled for a 2011 release. Summer Memories was canceled a year later in March, a few days after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami (known in the West as Sendai seaquake).
Not only suffered the game from some unfortunate timing but the series creator Kujou Kazuma has also gone on record to detail trouble between the development team and Irem. The month after the cancellation, core staff members of Irem’s game department left and formed a new company, Granzella, which later obtained the rights to the series in 2014. In November 2015, Granzella announced that Zettai Zetsumei Toshi 4 would be remade for the PS4, and the game was finally released three years later, on 22nd November 2018. And now it’s ported to the Nintendo Switch, for better or worse.
Disaster Report:
So, when we first boot up the game, you’re thrown into a character creation-modus in which you can create a male or female protagonist with a specific moral code. This moral code is provided by answering a few basic questions. After creating my representation of the Japanese Nick, my character arrived in a city that they have never been to before. For review purposes, I went with a default name and went with the fresh-out-of-school student on its way to a job interview with a big company (manga-cliche much). While riding the bus, an emergency earthquake alarm drops on your phone (and that of the whole bus). Moments later, the city is rocked by a massive earthquake, large enough to cause buildings to collapse and to make the ground break open like the gates of hell-spawned like it’s Diablo’s reawakening. Of course, it also cuts off ground access to the city, which delays the arrival of aid. The player has to find some way to survive and escape – which is the basic gist of the type of game.
And let’s pull off the bandaid in one go – the game did not age well. Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories feels like a dated port from the beginning of the 2010s. I spent most of my first hour wandering around the starting area since there’s no such thing as a tutorial. To give you an example, in many cases, the triggering of multiple events is required to advance in-game. Yet, the circumstances are entirely independent of each other, meaning that the player cannot logically guess what the next step will be. Neither is there any pointer that hints at which route you should take. My first mission was searching for some standard Japanese high-school students, which were apparently in a shopping mall – on the second floor of a building – unharmed. The whole city is destroyed, and I’m off, searching for some puberty-vested high schoolers that don’t care about being safe. To top it off, you are given the option to hit on them.. just why? After fetching the students, I was asked if I had seen a man with a black shirt passing by. The man asking looked like a loanshark-yakuza type with leather jacket and scars on his face. You’ll be given the moral choice of lying or pointing in the right direction, all up to you.
Trip down memory lane?
When clearing the first few areas, you are thrown in a new random situation (while taking the highschoolers and teacher with you for some reason). You walk into a convenience store with a massive queue in which you find a man on a toilet, with no toilet paper. To tackle this, you ask the convenience mart employee, who’s too scared to help angry customers, about the toilet paper. In exchange for toilet paper, you volunteer to become a cashier for the convenience mart, after which you obtain the toilet paper and can hand the toilet paper to the man in the toilet. While talking to the man, you figure out that he’s a con man and not the convenience mart’s manager as he claims to be. Luckily neither are you nor are you a store employee. To make it worse, the con man charges 30.000 yen for a bottle of water to a woman with a baby. After this, the real manager enters the store and thanks you for handling the store the way you did. You could have robbed him blind if wanted. Luckily for the story, a new earthquake hits the area, which opens the path to the next area. Continue this sequence for about 10 hours, and you finished the game.
Another problem I faced was the tone of the game. It’s wildly dissonant, with cartoonish characters and situations massed onto the horror setting of a massive natural disaster. Death is also treated nonchalantly. When walking close to a highway, under which dozens of people are for some reason marching in a circle, an aftershock causes the roadway to collapse, killing everyone under it. This leaves the road filled with corpses, but the protagonist and everyone around seems to pay this no heed at all. Same goes for a lot of other people buried by rubble during the game in general. One aspect I liked about the game was the inclusion of the in-game glossary about real-life information on what to do in the case of a natural disaster. These stories and notes give Disaster Report a far more chilling feel than anything the game does itself.
Conclusion
To conclude, Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories, or Zettai Zetsumei Toshi 4, remains true to its predecessors. It’s a peculiar cult game and not a particularly good one. I did find some enjoyment in the game and had fun at some of the scenes I described above, but the route towards the events was too much of a hassle. When it was released on the PS4 in 2018, it was described as “a time capsule from an age where small game companies would release weird games on the PS1 and PS2, that feels completely out of place on the PS4”. And this still holds on the Nintendo Switch. Anyone who enjoyed the previous titles in the series, or is looking for something decidedly out of the ordinary might find some value in this game. Regular gamers, however, should at least take a very close look before they leap and only pick this up at a lower price point. The full game is out now for a total of 60 bucks, which seems a little bit too steep for what you get. You have been warned.
