VN Talk: Collar x Malice - Part 1: Overview

In which I talk (write) about visual novels from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: PS Vita
Release: 2017

I originally wanted to play Collar x Malice the day I got it, even though I was still embroiled in Persona 5. I was mostly playing Persona on weekends due to the length of its dungeons, so I thought I'd make Collar x Malice my weekday game that I could play 30-60 minutes and then go to bed. Except that after I started it, I realized that I couldn't, because thematically, there's a pretty strong overlap between the two games and I wasn't in the right mindset to enjoy a darker, more murderous version of the Phantom Thieves.

The premise of Collar x Malice is that a terrorist group called Adonis is fed up with corruption in Japan. They punish those the law did not or could not bring to justice in preparation for a mysterious event they call the X-Day. Once a month they commit a murder (or group of murders) and leave a Roman number painted in red, counting down from IX, and a unique coin that has not been revealed to the public, so a genuine crime committed by Adonis cannot be confused with a copycat.

Adonis is much like an extreme version of the Phantom Thieves, and their members are willing to kill to get society's attention.

Please be aware, since I am writing this within a year of the game's release, that I will be discussing spoilers for all routes and there is a definite spoiler screenshot later in this overview. If you're worried about spoilers, you should stop reading now.

Also worth noting, though Collar x Malice is an otome visual novel aimed at heterosexual women, much of its focus revolves around solving the X-Day Incidents. It's not a straight-up romance and characters will occasionally ask the protagonist for her opinion on cases, suspects, methodology, etc. Though the game is forgiving, messing up too often can lead to a bad ending. Attentive players will have an easier time picking through the noise, gaining information, and winning the trust of those they're working with (which includes the love interest).

When I talk about Collar x Malice in person with friends, I can rave about the mystery and solving the terrorist attacks and feel 100% genuine about it. It's a solid thriller.

However, there's no getting away entirely from the romance end of things, as the player has to be put on a romance route to complete the game. Honestly, the way Collar x Malice is set up, there's nothing that requires it to be a romantic story. From a narrative standpoint, stopping Adonis is the main plot and the romance is the subplot, so it should have been possible to do a stag route too.

But hey, if romance is what it took to get this game greenlit, I'm good. Like Code:Realize, I think Collar x Malice has the potential to translate well into an anime series, because there's a lot to chew on besides the romance and that could widen the appeal.

What kicks off the story is the kidnapping of Ichika Hoshino, the protagonist. She's a rookie police officer who gets tangled up in the X-Day events when she is mysteriously knocked unconscious and a metal collar fastened around her neck. The collar is a link to Adonis, and they can listen in on everything around her, but if she reveals its presence to anyone who doesn't already know about it or tries to remove it, it will kill her via lethal injection.

Adonis leaves her to be rescued by a group of ex-cops who are investigating the X-Day Incidents, and because Hoshino is their biggest lead, the men want to keep her around even if they don't fully trust her. Adonis tells them in a letter that Hoshino is a sympather to their cause (which she is assuredly not!) and hopes that as the team closes in on the truth they will side with Adonis as well.

I like Hoshino. Though she occasionally suffers from the usual dose of otome heroine helplessness, she has a hidden reserve of guts and insists on going into danger if she has to. (She is a police officer after all.) Hoshino's the kind of gal who likes to do practice rounds at the firing range to keep her skills sharp and considers her marksmanship to be one of her best points. In fact, despite being a visual novel, Hoshino (and thus the player) does have to shoot on occasion, which surprised me. It's a minor quick time action event, but it's still there.

Another thing I like about Hoshino is that she has a life outside of the X-Day events. She has a younger brother who she's on shaky terms with, she has coworkers, she goes out drinking after work, and we know she's comfortable enough with her drink buddy that she's taken him home numerous times. (And it's cool that their relationship is both close and totally platonic, which shouldn't be as rare as it is in fiction.)

As a result of Hoshino having a life beyond the events of the story, we often get scenes of her normal life, doing her usual work, as well as the ones where she is discretely investigating Adonis. Some of the best scenes are when the two worlds collide, because one cannot be informed about the other. Her supervisor wonders how she knows an SP (Security Police officer), her brother discovers she has a "boyfriend" she's never mentioned before, etc. It keeps her reality grounded when her coworkers are talking about each other or her non-existent holiday plans.

Branching is handled a little differently for an Otomate title. Though there is still a common route like in Hakuoki and Code:Realize, it's very short this time, comprising only a single chapter, and depending on their choices the player gets little to no notification about how their eventual route is chosen.

This surprised me since prior to route lock, Hoshino emphasizes that which case she chooses to research will impact who she works with. I really studied those case files, expecting that at some point I would be asked which one I wanted to tackle and that in turn would nudge me towards the person whose route I'd end up with. That didn't happen. When I made my choice it was in such a non-obvious manner that I didn't realize the significance of it until replay.

It's probably for the best though as the potential love interests are somewhat dysfunctional and do not come across as good people to get involved with, except possibly Aiji Yanagi, who is annoyingly locked off as the final route. He was the one I was most interested in, and between the other four there were two that piqued my interest, though truthfully, I mean it when I say they're dysfunctional. The two I was otherwise open to were the blunt jerk with (presumably) a heart of gold and the narcoleptic weirdo who likes to come into the office through a window (on the fifth floor!).

There are only three routes available at the start, so the player is asked to make a dialogue choice with each of the currently available men. They're essentially a affirmative/negative to see whether or not the player has any rapport with them and then if they do, when they meet Sakuragawa she will probe Hoshino for her commitment to the cause. Hoshino's potential answers are how route assignment is decided. As it turns out, I'd given affirmatives to two of them (the jerk and the weirdo) and so the two dialogue options I had were "There are things that I need to protect." and "I want the details of the weapons ban repeal."

Not wanting to sounds like a blunt jackass, I answered the former. If I had hit it off with the third guy, I would also have the choice "I want to research X-Day's beginnings" which would have made it more clear that my answer was choosing what I would research, and therefore which case I would be handling.

From there Hoshino will gradually build up trust and later affection between her and the man whose route she is on as they solve the X-Day Incidents. Since there are eight incidents, not counting the one that begins in December, not all of them are addressed in any given route. Rather, each route focuses on the root causes of two of them and Yanagi's route deals with them as a whole.

The neat twist that makes the monthly X-Day crimes difficult to solve is that the people who are the likeliest suspects always have an alibi and even when the police catch a perpetrator, they're not necessarily possible to pin down as one. For instance, the July incident had to to have been an X-Day crime, because of the spray painted VI and the coin found in the victim's home, but when the victim died, it looked like he was attacking the alleged murderer and his death was in self defense. The murderer had no connection to either the victim or the woman the victim was stalking so it shouldn't have been possible for the death to have been pre-arranged.

This is possible because of what the game calls a "substitution murder."

Adonis believes that the law is not doing its job, and allegedly everyone it kills deserved to die for a crime that went unpunished. They're revenge killings, and what Adonis does, is organize a swap. Person A kills the target of Person B's vengeance, and in return Person B kills Person A's target, except on a grander scale. In most cases, the pawns in Adonis have no direct connection to their targets and are given their assignments based on their ability.

Interestingly, there are achievements tied to the the X-Day events, but they're not for catching the perpetrator of the event. They're for learning the story behind the person whose vengeance was fulfilled that day. In game they're known as the executors.

Collar x Malice looks for where the system is failing people, and the reason Adonis can be hopeful about the ex-cops on Yanagi's team is that each of them had quit for a personal reason where being a part of the police would no longer help them.

Normally I don't think much about which route is the best play order, but because Collar x Malice is a mystery thriller on top of an otome the information the player learns on each route is different, and they interlock in a way that questions raised in one storyline can be answered in another.

I played Okazaki > Sasazuka > Enomoto > Shiraishi > Yanagi and ended up very happy with the reveals, but I think Sasazuka could be moved before Okazaki or after Enomoto without a problem. I like Okazaki before Enomoto though, simply because one of the Adonis executors on Enomoto's route gets a better introduction in Okazaki's route than he does in Enomoto's and he later ends up being a critical character on Enomoto's route. Either Okazaki or Sasazuka should be before Shiraishi though, because the player should be aware of the mole before tackling his, and Enomoto never brings it up.

For an otome, there are bad endings galore, usually violent. Hoshino has been stabbed, injected, shot, bludgeoned to death, and other horrible things in my quest to unlock the trophy for getting all endings in the game. It's not particularly gory, most of the violence is off camera, but the game is not always fair about signaling which choices will lead to a bad ending. Sometimes the deaths can feel pretty random and in fact, each route will have a cameo appearance of an executor from another route, which results in player death.

Also, though switching viewpoint characters isn't unheard of in otome, Collar x Malice does it a lot; between Hoshino, her love interest, Adonis, and sometimes even the police investigation team. Because everything around Hoshino is relayed to Adonis, sometimes other characters need to relay critical information when out of earshot of her. Other times it's to cover events that happened when Hoshino is not around. There are a lot of moving parts to the story and Hoshino is not intricately involved in all of them; Adonis's infighting, deals made between other major characters, etc.

As with my previous VN Talk entries, I'll go through the routes one week at a time, in the order that I played them. A personal project of mine is getting close to the point I'm comfortable talking about it though, so the Collar x Malice series will probably be interrupted periodically in favor of writing news. In the meantime, Okazaki is planned for next week!