Review: Shuten Order Is Fantastic, But With a Glaring Issue

Like Tookyo Games’ The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-, Shuten Order is a wild and ambitious project that knocks it out of the park with a unique, multi-genre approach and gripping mystery. It’s a bombastically colorful adventure full of intrigue that’s hard to put down. But, while I enjoyed Shuten Order and its innovative structure, its localization was equally novel in a bad way.

In Shuten Order, you play as Rei Shimobe. At least, that’s her alias. She was the beloved founder of the Shuten Order, an organization touting apocalyptic ideology that formed its own country. But someone killed and dismembered her. Thankfully, God revived her with a side order of amnesia. If she can clear God’s Trial, she can fully come back to life. If she doesn’t within the time limit, she’ll die for real. With the power of God and the help of her guardian angels Himeru and Mikotoru, Rei needs to figure out which Shuten Order minister killed her, get them to confess, take back her soul, and save the world.

Though I would classify Shuten Order as a visual novel, each route plays and resembles a different genre. For example, Teko’s route is a multi-POV text adventure where you advance the story through the perspectives of an ensemble cast. The UI here looks like a traditional visual novel, compared to the default The World Ends With You-like layout. Manji’s route, meanwhile, transforms the game into a stealth horror with an aerial view.

Despite how distinct and unique each route looks, the bright and Studio Trigger-esque art style ties them together. From a layman’s eyes, the game still looks cohesive, whether you’re looking at a screenshot of Honoka’s route or Kishiru’s. The gameplay concepts are obviously not as fleshed out as they would be in a proper dating sim and whatnot, so they can get tedious. (Especially Manji’s route.) Around ten hours per route is more than enough time for you to have fun without getting too tired of each style, while still learning plenty about the world, characters, and story.

After Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, I was apprehensive about the Switch version of Shuten Order. The action and exploration segments, which I had been the most worried about, were surprisingly smooth. The loading times are still rough, though. Many times, I thought the game straight up froze on me because of how long it loaded and how awkward the scene transitions were. Sometimes I experienced audio stuttering and bizarre lag in cutscenes, but I don’t know if that’s just because my Switch is old.

I hate to say this, but there’s one major issue with the English version of Shuten Order, and it’s the localization. It needed way more time and care. Aside from objectively inaccurate translations or awkward wording, there are blatant errors like: punctuation issues, extra lines, missing spaces, line overflow, typos, inconsistencies between the text and the UI, misattribution of speaker, strings that make no sense in context, mistaken nuance, and so on. Human error is a thing, and Shuten Order isn’t unique with these little oopsies. But I’ve never seen a game contain so many in such high concentration.

Yugen’s route stood out to me. A lot of lines read like they were translated completely divorced from context, even within the same scene. Mikotoru talks about things Rei did as if he did them. Right after Yorunosuke talks about something he did, Yugen’s line makes it read like he was the one who did it. The Japanese lines lack indicative pronouns, yes, but that doesn’t impede understanding. All the context is in the script, which the translators can read over as they work. So, I don’t understand the confusion.

I get the impression that the localization team was racing against the clock to put this together. The translation for Shuten Order feels like a rough draft with how many basic and unbelievable errors there are. It doesn’t feel like anyone read over the script or even previous lines after putting down an initial translation, even though they desperately needed that second pass. Please allow time and budget for LQA of some sort!

The story, characters, and gameplay of Shuten Order are genuinely enjoyable, but the translation doesn’t match the game’s innate quality. I’m not trying to discourage anyone from buying Shuten Order. It’s fantastic. I hope it’s as successful as Hundred Line. But I also sincerely hope that a patch comes out to fix up the English script. Blessed be the Shuten Order.

Shuten Order will come out on the Nintendo Switch and Windows PC on September 5, 2025. Nintendo Switch version reviewed. A copy of this game was provided by the publisher for review.