The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story is a 2022 Murder-Mystery FMV Game released by Square Enix on PC, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, and Playstation 5 platforms. It's released on Android and iOS phones on April 25, 2023.
It follows Haruka Kagami, a mystery novelist, as she visits the Shijima family. The family has studied agelessness for generations, across several different murders, covering 100 years, and Haruka takes it upon herself to find the link between the cases.
This game provides examples of:
- And Now for Someone Completely Different: While most of the game is an Interactive Movie, Chapter 5 is instead mostly a Room Escape Game.
- Big Bad: Megumi Kiryu/Towako Nagahama is the mastermind behind all the Shijima killings for the past fifty years.
- But You Were There, and You, and You: At the suggestion of Akari, Haruka imagines the characters in the 1972 and 1922 stories as being played by the characters in the present.
- "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Much of the 1972 murder revolves around a cruel version of this. After losing much of her voice, the singer Saya plans to give one last swan song before committing suicide live on stage. Her apprentice Kanako, the one responsible for the vocal damage, insists on taking the stage in her place and accidentally poisons herself in the process. Even before Kanako's harassment, Saya was already disillusioned with her career and looking to retire. Kanako's impatience ultimately seals her fate.
- Despair Event Horizon: The Scarlet Camellia crossed this when she learns what happens to those who swallow the Tojiku.
- Generational Saga: There are multiple cases, following the Shijima Family across three generations.
- Greater-Scope Villain: Eizan Shijima. They're the Big Bad of the 1922 mysteries, but their actions create ripples throughout the century.
- Historical Detective Fiction: As Haruka investigates the 1922 and 1972 cases, the scene shifts to the relevant time periods (though the cast remains the same due to Haruka's imagination).
- Interactive Movie: The entire game is essentially a single live-action J-Drama with occasional interaction from the player.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Detective Josui Kusuka is stoic, lacking in humor, and is even downright cruel by refusing the Last Request of Chapter 3's culprit. However, it's all for the sake sake of the truth, and one could make a compelling argument that the culprit doesn't deserve to make requests after committing murder by inaction.
- Literary Agent Hypothesis: In-Universe, most of the cases set before the present day are relayed to Haruka via in-game novels published as fiction, but which those knowledgeable about the Shijima family's history recognize as fact.
- Samus Is a Girl: Detective Josui Kusaka is a woman, disguised by selectively ripping all her gendered pronouns of the historical records before handing them to Haruka.
- Saying Too Much: Fit for any detective story.
- In chapter 2, the killer Yayoi boasts about their strong sense of smell to create an excuse for evidence pointing their direction. This ends up directly contradicting their alibi that they passed by the corpse without noticing, since they would have clearly smelled the stench of blood.
- In chapter 3, Kanako bemoans the cruel threats Saya has been receiving, revealing far too many details about those threats than Saya had told her.
- "Scooby-Doo" Hoax: In the first case, a supposedly cursed mummy holding a bloody sword chases the heroes away from the crime scene. The misdirection this adds to the case turns out to have been a total coincidence: The victim was the one in the mummy disguise, having destroyed all of the other auctioneers' offerings and then disguised as the mummy to lend credence to the curse, thus increasing the mummy's value. When the culprit goes back to the scene before she's had a chance to finish changing and rejoin the others, they get into a scuffle while she's still holding the sword and...
- Two Aliases, One Character: Megumi Kiryu is actually Towako Nagahama, Yayoi Kasuga is Yoshino Shijima, and Akari Yamase is really Josui.
- Revenge by Proxy: The Big Bad's goal. Even if all the current Shijimas are unaware of the family's horrific history, Towako has determined they all deserve to suffer.
- You Killed My Father: Josui Sakaki, alias Josui Kusaka pursues the truth behind the cases in order to figure out who killed their entire family. It was Towako, on the orders of Eizan Shijima.
