Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories (Switch)
It’s easy to imagine a video game based around a natural disaster to focus on the same kind of exciting and flashy action you’d find in a movie with such a premise, and even the first game in the Disaster Report franchise attempted that as you were constantly up against a crumbling artificial island. However, Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories, the first game in the series since the first to even use the Disaster Report title after the second game was renamed Raw Danger and the third never got an English release, is a surprisingly more layered look at the aftermath of a disaster. This game isn’t just about the earthquake that rocks Hisui City but the relief efforts and scarcity afterwards, although this more mature examination of life after a disaster is also held back by less inspired choices for how it can unfold.
The game begins with you choosing your name and whether you want to be the male or female protagonist, the game very quickly starting to ask you questions to essentially construct the idea of this person you’ll want to be playing as. You’re asked hypotheticals about what you think you’d do in a crisis situation, you’ll be asked why you find yourself in Hisui City on the day of the earthquake, and at many times during the plot, there will be moments where you’re asked to pick from a multiple choice menu of possible thoughts after an event to not only continue to tailor your character’s attitude but make you as the player reflect and ruminate on what you just witnessed. However, the answers you give in-game are often just for color, your character’s personality not influencing things and you can abruptly decide to go from someone kind to a fault to a self-centered jerk with the only repercussion being points in a morality system that doesn’t seem to impact much of anything.
Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories is pretty focused on its human interactions over the action and survival elements, but beyond a few junction points it doesn’t really seem to effect the course of the story as most of the major events appear to be pretty set in stone. This is despite the fact that you can often be provided a quite an array of responses to many situations, the dialogue choices running the gamut from serious replies to deliberately silly ones to a preoccupation with being able to hit on almost any female character you encounter. On some level it is nice to be able to have the small little choices, in a moment you can help people out of the kindness of your heart or request some sort of reward for doing so, the actual influence on events minimal but helping you construct that persona for your character based on how you want to reply to the events going on. On the other hand, you will sometimes be asked to compromise your character path as an upstanding moral person will be forced into lies to keep the narrative on its predetermined path and even a callous character will be be made to provide aid to someone they’d likely ignore otherwise. Some of the comedic choices are at least funny to see in the menu even if sometimes the responses to them are underwhelming, the game in general having some issues with certain dialogue choices where it might have expected you to pick the obvious choice and so a person replies with knowledge they shouldn’t have. Other times you can spring for a more interesting line for your character to say and it gets brushed aside or barely responded to, but the more unusual dialogue choices are actually a bit harmful because they seem to crop up even during some of the game’s more serious moments.
After the earthquake rocks Hisui City you’ll be spending the next few days trying to survive and help those in jeopardy. In a cute touch the game tells you once you find a safe park to rest in that you did the right thing for a disaster scenario but need to go out into danger for there to be a story, and there are many small tales to be told in the aftermath of this disaster. Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories provides many small windows into how people might respond to such an event, some of them far more serious than others. Good people will sometimes die, you can’t save everyone, and some people will take advantage of the chaos to attempt despicable things, a focus on harsh realities sometimes undermined by the dialogue choice box including comedy bits and flirtation as your response to it all. Many of these vignettes are interesting enough when you do stick to the more reasonable dialogue choices though, the player meeting some endearing if often simply defined characters they can try to help out in different ways. Two neighborhoods that dislike each other have their preconceptions tested as the disaster forces them to interact more, a shelter with limited supplies has begun segregating people as tensions rise over dwindling resources, and at one point you might find a person trying to drum up prices at the convenience store to exploit the situation when at another you can provide aid to the injured. These situations sometimes want to tell bigger stories then they have the time for, one section about uncovering an arsonist culminating in a rapid fire explanation of someone’s back story so a reveal related to it can happen immediately after, but the more grounded and realistic situations tend to work better as you rub up against the rough social situations one could conceivably encounter in the aftermath of an earthquake rather than a contrived bit of fiction that doesn’t fit the game’s grounded presentation.
Much of Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories’s strengths lie in those narrative moments, the procession of dire situations or more personal moments where people cling together and cooperate resonating despite some of the odd choices surrounding your interaction with them. Were it a visual novel it could have kept its attention on them better and perhaps actually made your choices matter much more, and while you will sometimes encounter a familiar character later on and reap what you sow a little, the need to stay on the plot’s path restricts that some. If the focus was on these fully it would have been an uneven but interesting ride, especially since the game actually starts looking at reconstruction efforts after the earthquake where there are still issues that need addressing around town despite things settling down some. An epilogue even tries to give you some closure as it’s set further in the future so you can see the city and its people after the recovery’s really taken hold, but when you’re actually playing Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories, you’ll often be denied more meaningful and deep storytelling because the game has to jam some gameplay into moments that often drags out or drags down those experiences.
One immediate issue with Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories is how poorly the game runs in the first place. Even rotating the camera can sometimes be an uneven affair where the game sometimes experiences slowdown even with graphics that feel a few years behind what the Nintendo Switch is capable of rendering. This is apparently an issue even in the PlayStation 4 version though even on the higher end versions of that system, and in areas with interesting sights or many characters you start to notice the sluggishness more or how some characters in the background freeze in place to ease the processing load. Some destroyed areas of the city are actually very effective visually in displaying the damage and at right angle some of them having that haunting beauty of an urban space turned to ruins, but even during more mundane moments the performance is poor and simple activities are made a bit rougher to complete.
Exploring the city is similarly a mixed bag. Early on when there are still plenty of tremors around the city, there is a genuine sense of lingering peril and uncertainty. The ground shaking may pass after a bit, or maybe an entire building near to you will start collapsing in your direction. You can get on the ground and brace yourself to avoid tripping and hurting yourself during a tremor, but sometimes you will need to bolt forward or risk being crushed. Save points are placed liberally so you can avoid retreading too much ground, although with the sluggishness caused by technical problems and your own character’s movement limitations it can still feel a bit painful to retry a section after a death. However, these tremors do really inspire a bit of fear, capturing that sensation of being up against the unknown effects of a disaster and just hoping you picked the right response for it. A Stress meter exists for your character that often crops up when you do something like having to swim underwater or when you trip during an aftershock, this cutting into your max health until you can find some time to relax. However, other survival mechanics almost seem to have no impact on you. You can get hungry, thirsty, or need to use the restroom and this could have been used to good effect since there are times where you will inevitably be unable to meet those needs, either preparations beforehand paying off or the character conceivably suffering because you are in a dire situation. However, not meeting these three needs seems to impact you very little and you can go without food, drink, or a bathroom break for a considerable amount of time. Things like a shopkeeper trying to fleece you on high prices for food feel less effective because you can just wait until you find a reasonable food source, the immersive element not quite there.
It is fortunate in a way they don’t impact you though, as quite a few moments in Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories could be described as needlessly tedious. The emphasis on realism can mean you’re stuck very slowly walking around with the old lady you agreed to help on your back, this of course true to life but the game is already too ponderous to layer in such imposed slowness over top it. If more interesting interactions happened while she was on your back it would be fine to take your time, but much like rowing the raft past flooded apartments it seems like it could have been sped up without anything lost. That flooded apartment section has you going back and forth between areas slowly as well that test your patience more than they test your problem solving or pose a danger to you, not very many puzzles existing so much as needing to go find the exact right item or speak to the right people at the right time. If the focus was more on the stories being told then this wouldn’t be a problem, and some segments like one where you need to sneak by some people are surprisingly forgiving. A lot of optional outfit pieces, compasses, and bags for items can be found around areas to add some incentives to poke around more, but it feels like the game would have been better off trimming the fat and focusing more on the quick and interesting stories it wanted to tell rather than struggling to make the action entertaining.
THE VERDICT: Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories could be a decent string of stories of people surviving during an earthquake and coping with its impact afterwards, and it certainly has a range of vignettes that cover an interesting selection of possible stories for the scenario it presents. However, the game runs poorly and that in turn drags out many of its ill-conceived ideas for how the interactive side of this disaster situation should unfold. It has a decent idea or two like the uncertainty of the tremors actually instilling that fear in the player, but then many actions are slow or dragged out for too long. While its many tales of human survival cover interesting topics, the rough mechanics and unusual dialogue system impede the experience too much to justify trying to see those stories unfold.
And so, I give Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories for Nintendo Switch…
A BAD rating. Cleaning up a lot of the technical problems the game really has no business having with its outdated graphical presentation would do much to push Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories closer to acceptability, but there are still quite a few little ideas scattered throughout that do the game no favors. Even though some dialogue choices can be completely ignorant of the tone of a situation and harm some of the serious sections for it, the focus on your responses to all of these little dilemmas around Hisui City is a compelling concept and there is a chance to get invested in some of the plights of the people you have brief brushes with in this disaster scenario. However, then the game has you going back and forth to find items to progress and it feels less like being resourceful and more like finding the prescribed item needed to open the way forward. There will be times you are asked to find torn sheets that are floating underwater rather than raiding the many bedrooms you pass through for the materials you require, or you’ll grab tools like a crowbar and car jack that could conceivably do each other’s work but they only help in one specific scenario nearby. One thing that was done well is that uncertainty surrounding the tremors that do feel like they could have remained present even if the game devoted itself more fully to just the personal side of things, that truly adding a sense of immersion better than needing to slowly lug an old lady around a boring neighborhood without much to do in it.
The writing could definitely be cleaned up at points like in that earlier mentioned arsonists scenario, but the surprisingly mature presentation of many of its situations tells of a game aching to be more poignant. It has a few less serious moments to balance it out and it handles those better than the sometimes underwhelming comedic responses, but it feels like even elements of the plot are as undercooked as its survival mechanics. Making survival more pressing but the action less demanding would be a fitting complement to the story and the themes it tries to address, but there is quite a bit you need to slog through if you want to see where Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories succeeds. It’s hard to brush it all away as just some rough edges as well, but at least you’re given something with a bit of substance to it if you do push through the many little problems that obstruct your ability to see more of the stories of survival being told.