Karifean's Blog of Visual Novels

Kara no Shoujo, or Girl in the Shell, is a visual novel developed by Innocent Grey and localized in English by MangaGamer. Primarily, it's a very dark and suspenseful detective story.

The title screen music, simply titled "Kara no Shoujo", is quite beautiful.

Overview

The story of Kara no Shoujo follows Reiji Tokisaka, a private detective, as he investigates a series of bizarre murders in Tokyo. The victims of these serial killings - exclusively young adult females - are mostly found in rather unusual states, such as having their foot on fire, or having had their uterus extracted from their body and replaced with an eggshell. Reiji is hired by Kyozo Uozumi, a friend of his who works as a police detective, to help solve the mysteries surrounding the case and find the culprit.

On a related note, Reiji is also hired to work as an undercover detective posing as a teacher at his sister's all-girls school, whose principal is troubled by the disappearance of two of his students, who may or may not have been caught up in the serial murders. And finally, Reiji is also approached by a curious girl called Toko Kuchiki, who asks him to "find her true self".

Having lost his wife in a similarly bizarre case six years prior, Reiji is determined not to fail this time. As the body count keeps rising, it's up to him to put the pieces together and bring it to a stop before it goes too far.

Structure

The usual story flow is sometimes supplemented by Investigation Phases, where you can investigate crime scenes, and Inference Phases, where you have to draw conclusions based on the evidence you've collected. Failing Inference Phases often results in either a quick or a slow torturous Game Over, but usually they're not really difficult, and quite forgiving. There's even a handy-dandy notebook feature which automatically keeps track of all characters, evidence, points of interest and character relations.

Now as for the actual structure of the story, there's a lot of freedom. Quite often you're prompted to decide a place to spend time at, and you're limited to picking two of the 4+ choices, so you'll have to replay the game a few times to see all possible scenes. Thankfully, there's almost no instances of where plot progression can be hindered by picking the wrong places.

There are quite a few Bad Ends, almost all of which are a direct consequence of screwing up a critical Inference Phase. Beyond the Bad Ends, there are several actual endings, and which of them you get is determined by a select few choices in the final stages of the game. If you get 100% CG Completion (across multiple playthroughs), the 'regular' end is extended to include two additional scenes, forming the 'True End'.

Characters

There are a lot of characters in Kara no Shoujo. Compared to its moderate length, the cast really is quite huge. And I have to say that most of the characters are well-developed. The game does a very good job not having one-dimensional boring characters, and instead having everyone be its own individual. Any character death really felt like "a person died" rather than "a plot device died".

Would not have expected to ever see the name "Celes" in a game other than FF VI.

That being said I didn't care for most of them. Reiji, Toko and Uozumi are the three characters I actually came to like, and all the others are just kinda there. This is especially frustrating with the culprits, who end up not being all that interesting as soon as their identity is revealed. There are some exceptions, sure, but there was so much potential there.

Reiji was a pretty cool protagonist, though.

Story

Story-wise Kara no Shoujo is pretty damn good. I have little complaints here. The suspense and sense of urgency to solve everything before there's another victim is always there and it works very well, especially thanks to the occasional Bad End showing how horrible things can turn out if you do fail.

The plot is very intricate and the twists keep things interesting for the entire duration of the visual novel, especially its second half and towards the end where everything comes together. I would've loved for it to go on longer, because by the time I reached the end I was so into it that I just wanted more.

A big reason as to why the suspense worked so well in my opinion was the occasional interspliced scene where you get a first person perspective of the murderer as they commit a murder. These scenes tend to be very graphic and brutal, but they do so much to help set the tone.

One large negative for me however was the abundance, and I mean abundance, of H scenes. Not counting dead characters you can probably count the female characters that don't have an associated H scene with Reiji on one hand. And remember that the cast is quite large. At least you have to go out of your way for most of them, but some are mandatory, and as far as I'm concerned they just about always broke the immersion. There's one notable exception in a bad end where it arguably actually fit well, but that's it. If you want 100% CG Completion and the True End, you'll have to track them all down.

Soundtrack

This is a difficult one. The OST of Kara no Shoujo, for the most part, is pretty good. The title screen music is great, and the tracks used during the story really helped build atmosphere.

However, the soundtrack is sadly rather short. There are not that many tracks and with a visual novel that takes about 30 hours to finish they start getting repetitive before long. The lack of variety especially hurts the high points of the game, where a particularly strong standout track would've made the scenes in question so much more memorable. Kinda unfortunate.

Summary

Pure poetry.

Kara no Shoujo excels in its thrilling storyline that keeps you in suspense as to what's going to happen next. I was taken by surprise at quite a number of twists and the plot reaches a degree of complexity I wouldn't have expected, but still manages to avoid being confusing.

Some of the bad ends really hit hard and even the regular endings aren't all sunshine and happiness. Kara no Shoujo really is a dark story, and if you like your stories bright, this may not be for you.

It has its share of flaws, but was overall still a very enjoyable experience. Its few loose ends will, I hope, be tied up in the sequel which - at the time of this review - is still in the process of being localized but is due for release this year.

Overall I give Kara no Shoujo a score of

8.5 / 10

Definitely try it if you like dark detective stories... so long as you don't mind a few unfortunately placed H scenes.