The adventure game genre has never really gone anywhere in the US console market, but most of the efforts that have made it have been impressive. Games like Hideo Kojima's Sega CD classic Snatcher had a devoted following on both sides of the Pacific, thanks to its excellent atmosphere and excellent use of the day's technology. Lamentably, July does none of this.
July 7, 1999: Six years after a mysterious terrorist bombing, two Japanese youths start out on a bizarre quest to get to the bottom of a mystery that only begins with the mysterious bombing. Makoto Takamura, a bare-chested college student, lost his parents to the freakish bus bombing. Joshua, a rebellious youth often wanted by the law, uses his connections to Tokyo's seamy underbelly to track down the culprits behind that same bombing. As their paths cross, the two uncover a plot by an evil race of genderless beings to bring about the prophesied end of the world through their secretive puppet corporation, NAX. With all of this said, it should be apparent that July requires near fluency in Japanese in order to truly understand the story.
While the story may sound interesting enough, moving through it is not. July's "gameplay" simply involves making choices from a variety of menus, selecting where the player will go, and being in the right place at the right time. Both Makoto and Joshua operate complete independently of one another, going about their lives in different chapters. You can advance each of the stories as you please - once both character have completed their respective chapter, they move on to their next chapter together. Unlike many adventure games, everything is done through conversation and not through inventory - when Makoto locates an MO disc, just finding his friend Eriko sets off all the appropriate events. As a result, there are no puzzles and no real decisions to be made - you are forced through the story without ever having to make any real decisions or choices of your own. Most games of this type are linear, but few are as noninteractive as July.
What Shogi was to Japan's N64 launch, July is to the Dreamcast's - unexplainable and released just to make the number of titles seem a tad less negligent. If July has any polygons, they're well hidden - a majority of July's graphics are nicely hand-drawn anime-styled stills pasted over rendered backgrounds. Scattered throughout the game are snippets of nicely produced and compressed MPEG video. Many of these types of games, such as the aforementioned Snatcher, garnered a lot of their success from excellent use of voice and music. July's music is largely mellow mood music and largely understated in its use, ending up just being there rather than enhancing the experience. Sound effects are almost nonexistent, as is any speech. With little interactivity, nothing but stills and occasional FMV, there's no reason July should exist beyond its story. Without knowledge of Japanese, there's nothing left but the chance to click through an endless string of text, chance your way through the game's many locales, and occasionally see a few seconds of FMV.
July probably isn't much of a game to the Japanese, who can understand everything that's going on, and it's even less so for most anyone on these shores. Hopefully, FortyFive's next title will learn from these mistakes and combine an interesting game with an interesting story. For now, though, July is a disturbingly bland choose-your-own-adventure book that just happened into a Dreamcast port.
