Game

Oookuki

2008 · PlayStation 2 · Adventure

About this game

The chronicles of the Oooku, the women's quarters of Edo Castle, is remembered infamously in Japan as a classic kusoge, slang for a very bad video game. The story revolves around discourse between some of the women in the Oooku over the current shogun, which eventually leads to the player needing to endlessly search around a huge amount of empty rooms and withstand annoying load times as you interview people for their testimonies. There's spelling errors throughout the entire game, as well as typographical errors that have the Edo era characters speaking very modern at unexpected times. The graphics were criticized as especially ugly in 2008 when the PS3 was gaining popularity, and the narrative is hard to follow as the text moves automatically with no text log. Everything is timed, and knowing what to do next is very difficult without a guide. After gathering all your information throughout the year, you have a trial, which can result in different endings.