Congratulations!

You Passed

The Portopia Serial Murder Case

(or you cheated and found this page some other way, shame on you...)

In the original PC-6601 version of the game, Mr. Sakurai was the man who yelled at you if you incorrectly deduced that Hirata or Kawamura are the ones who commited the murder. He's probably Boss's boss, aka Big Boss. Also, we think he is the person that tells you that Kawamura is in the Sumire apartments.

In looking at the screen shots of the walkthrough for the PC-6601 versions, it is interesting to note the number of changes between the PC-6601 versions and the Famicom one. Most notably is the lack of any shots of the reception room or the maze! In fact, in the PC-6601 version, at the end, the character simply goes from Sumoto to looking at the birthmark! This means that the safe key, lighter, diary, safe, and I.O.U.s probably don't exist either.

Here is a translation of the story from the PC-6601. I'm not sure where I found this...

Suddenly, Detective Yasu's expression changed, and he jumped to his feet.

"How horrible, Boss! That Kouzou Yamagawa guy, the one that they said was murdered? It was suicide!"

"Wha- What!?"

I'm a detective, a first-rank investigator. Being first-rank, I naturally deal with murders. If we really thought it was suicide, of course, it'd have nothing to do with me.

Nevertheless, I was surprised at the suddenness of Kouzou's suicide. Kouzou Yamagawa... President of the local savings and loan. I guess his horrible management style could drive a man to suicide, but Kouzou himself? No way he would commit suicide.

I just couldn't believe it.

Even without the memories from my years on the force, I knew a murder charge is a powerful thing, and so did everyone else.

"But Boss," Yasu said. "Boss, Kouzou died completely out of view."

"Tell me what we've found," I said.

"Ok, well, the body was discovered by a woman named Fumie, Kouzou's private secretary. When Kouzou didn't show to work, she went to see him at his apartment, and that's where she found him."

"Huh. Well, even if no one saw it, something happened."

"Yeah, that's true. She called up to his apartment on the intercom, but didn't get any reply, so she opened the door with a passkey, and went inside, but......"

"Wa- Wait just a second, she had a passkey!?"

"She is his private secretary, so she had it just in case Kouzou forgot something, or she had to go pick up a document from his house or something like that..."

"Ah, okay. Continue."

"Well, she went inside, but Kouzou wasn't there. She tried to look in the study, but for some reason the study was locked. She thought that was strange, so she immediately called the apartment manager, Komiya."

"Wait, she thought it was strange that the study was locked?"

"Yeah, it seems the study's only locked when Kouzou is inside."

"Oh. Well, of course his private secretary would know stuff like that..."

"So Komiya went to the apartment, and when he busted down the door, something made a tinkling noise."

"The door key?"

"Well, probably the strike plate... Something like that, anyway, the way apartment buildings are designed these days."

"So, that's when we discovered Kouzou's corspe?"

"Yeah, plus, there was a key in the door from the other side when they broke it down." Yasu said, drawing up a rough sketch of the apartment. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye, absorbed in lighting my cigarette.

"Was this really a suicide, I wonder......"

Here is the one screen that exists in the Famicom ROM, but you don't get to see in the game:

famicom unfinished door lock screen

The code that shows the key doesn't show the rest of the sprites that are normally shown on this screen. Thus, the books, matches, drawer, handles, broken doorjam, and corner of the head of the chalk outline are not shown.

The fact that you can't put a key in an old fashioned door lock while a key is in the other side of the lock might not be obvious to young people. This picture of an old fashioned key and lock (or 2nd key in the lock) may have been used to demostrate this. The reason that this is important is that the fact that the key was found in the lock on the inside of the door would make this seem like it had to be a suicide.

This screen exsits in the PC-6601 version of the game, but I don't have it, so here it is from the PC-6601mkII version.

mkII door lock screen

They either ran out of room for the remaining graphics or text to actually display this screen in the Famicom version. They probably ran from using up tons of code and graphics to make the maze, safe, and secret room!

When you show Okoi a piece of evidence that isn't important, there was a typo in the original code that would only show you the second of her two random responses:

Okoi:This doesn't mean _____anything to me.

We fixed it so you now can also see:

Okoi:Is this supposed to _____mean something?

Here is the one piece of text in the ROM that you still can't hear in the game:

2 of 2: (Bar) Question Someone -> About Kouzou
(have done (Bar) Show An Item -> Photo -> Kouzou
AND don't know of Kawamura)
Note: The first condition causes the second to be false!!
05A

Barkeep:He hasn't come here ________since then. What? ________He's been killed?

In the ROM, this is next to the text that is displayed when you learn about Kawamura in the bar by showing the Barkeep the lighter or Kouzou's photo. It's strange that they never noticed that this piece of text could never be seen in the game. Still, this part of the game is pretty messed up, probably due to this involving a lot of changes from the 6601 version, which I don't believe had the lighter or I.O.Us. Finding the I.O.U.s in the safe which talks about Kawamura and Hirata doesn't actually let Kawamura or Hirata be suspects! In fact, it doesn't do anything at all! Clearly, the game must have been designed so that players didn't need to find the safe if they restarted the game, as it would take a long time to do this every time the game was restarted.

An annoying bug in the game came up if you Investigated Kouzou's Job after you Arrested Toshi. If you did this the game would return to the state that it is before you arrest Toshi. Everything would act like Toshi hadn't been arrested. To continue, you simply would need to re-arrest Toshi. This made the game very confusing and might have made people think we messsed the game up in the translation, so we fixed it.

Check out our walkthrough for how to get all the items in the game and how to use them.

Rozen Maiden gives a funny, major spoiler to the game. Notice it incorrectly says "Super" Famicom.:

Page Last Modified: December 14, 2015