the cutting room mirror

Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken (NES)

Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken is a first-person whodunnit mystery adventure game designed by Yuji Horii (of Dragon Quest fame) that fits in a 40kb ROM. Along with your sidekick Yasu, you investigate around the real-life cities of Kobe, Kyoto, and Sumoto in order to find who the killer might be. It was a big deal for its time and is widely considered the grandfather of Japanese adventure games.

A complete English fan translation is available, but be sure to play the "Rev. B" version of it.

Unused Text#

Japanese

English Translation

マスター『あれいらい

Barkeep: He hasn't come here

きてませんよ。 えっ?

since then. What?

ころされたんですかっ?

He's been killed?

Dialogue from the barkeeper, shown here with its original formatting. This is next to the text that is displayed when you learn about Kawamura by asking the barkeeper about Kouzou and after you show him his photo or the lighter. The problem is that this dialogue would also only trigger before the player knows of Kawamura, thus making it simply impossible to be seen in-game.

Japanese

English Translation

おこい『これが

Okoi: Is this supposed to

どーかしたん?

mean something?

When showing something irrelevant to Okoi, she's supposed to have two random responses. Due to a typo in the code, this one is always discarded.

(Translations: DvDTranslations)

Unused Graphics#

Both the original PC-6601 and PC-6601 MKII versions of the game show how a key can't fit into a lock if another key is on the other side of it (either to ease the explanation to young players or to those who might be unfamiliar with this type of door). The Famicom version was likely going to follow suit, but all that's left in the ROM is this picture.

For comparison, here's how the explanation scene looks in the PC-6601 MKII version:

(Source: DvDTranslations)