Review: Famicom Detective Club – The Trilogy (Switch)

I’m still in disbelief, myself. Nintendo suddenly announcing and quickly releasing a brand new Famicom Detective Club game is still a total surprise to me. Sure, they did release remakes of the first two games back in 2021. I maybe only know like two other people who played them, while everyone else shrugged on. I guess I get it. Remakes of visual novels from the 1980s are probably not appealing to the average modern gamer. But with how many old games are absent from modern platforms due to neglect, it is very exciting to see Nintendo revive some titles that never even got released outside of Japan. And grisly grounded M-rated story-first games are also not something you see Nintendo ever release either.

If you’d like to know the full history of the Famicom Detective Club series, I highly recommend you check out The Nintendo Chronicler retrospective available here on the Source Gaming YouTube Channel. But to briefly summarize it, Famicom Detective Club is a series of detective visual novels that started 36 years ago in 1988 with The Missing Heir for the Famicom Disk System. The second game, The Girl Who Stands Behind, was developed in succession and released the following year. That second game, which is a prequel by the way, would be remade and re-released for the Super Famicom in 1998. Both would later get various Wii, 3DS and Wii U Virtual Console releases but only in Japan. When the remakes for the Switch were announced in 2019, the announcement was only in the Japanese Nintendo Direct. In 2021 Nintendo announced the remakes would be releasing worldwide, and they did, albeit only through the eShop. And of course this year after releasing a cryptic teaser online, something they never do, they announced and released Emio: The Smiling Man.

I’ll be covering both the remakes of the first two games and Emio as despite the large gaps between releases, all the games are structured extremely similarly. Although some changes were made for Emio, but we’ll return to that later. So what even is a Famicom Detective Club, and what do you do in these games? Well, you play as a protagonist who should really have a name, but instead you name him, and he’s an orphan looking for his parents. You work for the Utsugi Detective Agency as a junior private investigator alongside series sidekick Ayumi Tachibana. The agency is called in to investigate a murder or several murders, where the victims have some sort of connection to a local urban legend. In The Missing Heir, there’s a family seemingly haunted by the dead of their past generations. In The Girl Who Stands Behind, a blood-soaked ghost haunts the students of Ayumi’s high school. And in Emio, there’s a serial killer who places a bag with a drawn smile on the heads of his victims.

I will be refraining from talking too much about the stories as to avoid spoilers, but there is a spoiler-filled discussion of Emio‘s story available here (link coming soon) on the Source Gaming YouTube Channel. But as these are visual novels, it is important to note that these games are story driven above all else. Like, the only way to lose at a Famicom Detective Club game is to just give up playing altogether. Since the majority of the runtime is reading text, the gameplay is rather simple. Each new environment is a detailed backdrop with usually one or more characters available to interact with. You can call or engage with these characters by talking to them, and the game gives you a little list of topics to ask about. You’re also given the option to look around the backdrop and focus in on certain items or details. There is a Think or Remember option, which essentially activates the protagonist’s inner-monologue (if he’s feeling like it). And last there is a Quit Investigation option which brings up the save game menu. During your investigation, you’ll learn more and more about the ongoing case and find new evidence and details on everyone involved. The most important details are auto-logged in a Notepad, which is always readily available as a sub-menu. One thing I really like about these games is that they’re very good at making sure you can easily catch back up with the story if you ever need to have something re-explained. When you load a saved game, it asks if you want a brief synopsis of the events leading up to that save. In gameplay, you can hit X and bring up the entire script of the current scene you’re in. And the previously mentioned Notepad has everything you’ll ever need to know at any moment. If you’ve ever played any entry in Capcom’s Ace Attorney series, you’ll be familiar with most of these gameplay concepts and mechanics.

As mentioned earlier, The Missing Heir and The Girl Who Stands Behind are both remakes of games from the late 1980s, and these are very particular remakes. Gameplay and progression from the original games is fully intact here but in presentation, it’s a whole new videogame. A very tasteful combination of 2D drawn backgrounds and 2D characters augmented with some 3D animation. The art of these games really evoke a mystery novel cover kind of vibe. Some of the character art does look a little plain, but I think it suits itself well. Unlike some other remakes of games, there is no option to switch to the original 8-graphics, but you can change the soundtrack to the original Famicom score or the Super Famicom score in The Girl Who Stands Behind. I personally stuck to the new arranged soundtracks as I like those arrangements more, but I really appreciate the decision to include the originals, too. The game also features full voice acting too, although only in Japanese. Even the protagonist is voiced with a separate toggle to mute him for extra immersion. I can’t really say the retained original gameplay of these games feel aged because, well, it’s all mostly reading text. Progressing through these games’ various scenes usually just requires hitting the right few topics during a conversation and occasionally spotting a semi-obvious background detail. I never felt like I really had to ever defer to a play through guide. However, progressing through conversations and scenes can feel a bit confounding just due to the sheer number of options that the game gives you to interact. By chapter three you’re talking to characters with about 12 topics to choose from when only a few are actually going to progress you. These get made a little more complicated by the fact that a lot of conversations continue by repressing on certain topics repeatedly with no visual indication that said topics should be pressed on again. Of course, the game wants you to follow the script and what the characters are currently discussing, but it’s not always entirely clear. Since the game is essentially on rails and kinda designed around pressing everything and interacting with everyone, it’s never a total hindrance, but it does get a little overwhelming. Especially in scenes where the character(s) you’re interacting with are being difficult.

One of the most remarkable things about Emio: The Smiling Man is how closely it sticks to the remakes in both presentation and gameplay. Like, despite being a whole new videogame, it still feels at its core like it’s a remake of a lost third game from that era. But that doesn’t mean the gameplay did not see a few welcome upgrades. While there’s still no visual indication of topics that have to be repressed, certain important words and phrases are now highlighted in yellow, making it more apparent what you should focus on next. To add to this, the Think/Remember option is now essentially a hint button, which is very welcome. You also now have a cellphone, and you can call the other characters nearly whenever you want outside of conversation. And, for the first time ever, playable Ayumi Tachibana. Her segments don’t play any differently from the protagonist, but it’s cool! But the biggest change to progression is simply that the first few chapters of Emio take things a little slower and mainly focus on longer, focused conversations. If you play Emio first before the remakes (which don’t do that), the remakes are going to feel significantly more difficult and slower by comparison. In visual presentation, Emio also sticks closely to the previous remakes, but there are some minor upgrades and improvement to character animations. Plus, scenes are now a little more dynamic in introducing different angles or perspectives to some scenes and conversations, so it never feels too static.

As mentioned before, no spoilers, but I do want to touch on the stories of these games as they are the most important aspect of these titles. Series creator Yoshio Sakamoto’s favorite film is Dario Argento’s Deep Red (1975) and has stated that it was a huge influence on the series (especially for The Girl Who Stands Behind). I also happen to love this film and have been a fan for a long time. Recently I decided to give it another rewatch with these games in mind, and oh my is the influence obvious. Even the basic plot of a sort of unassuming protagonist turned impromptu detective investigating the clues left behind of a alleged paranormal serial killer is how you could describe the premise of each game, too. And in the games, when a grisly murder is revealed to the player, the soundtrack even mimics Deep Red’s grimy psych-rock score (by Goblin, of course). I don’t bring any of this up to slight the games, far from it. Sakamoto and team have done an awesome job interpolating Deep Red’s strengths as a story and the film’s aesthetics into the medium of games and blending it with their own original characters and stories. As stated before, much of this game is talking, but the characters you interact with are incredibly defined. New revelations and twists are around every corner and by the end of the game you really feel like you got to talk to and map out the lives of, like, a whole village’s worth of people. By about Chapter 9 of Emio I was feeling like Charlie Kelly from the Pepe Silvia bit from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Just manic and crossing so many connections between everyone and every story and detail. Each game ends very satisfyingly, too. Especially Emio (Don’t skip the credits). And if you’re wondering how long these games go, The Missing Heir and The Girl Who Stands Behind are about 8-to-11 hours each, and Emio: The Smiling Man is closer to a solid 12 hours. Chapters in the first two games tend to vary in length, but each chapter of Emio is about 50ish minutes.

If you couldn’t already tell, I really adore these games. It’s awesome that the first two have been finally made available worldwide, and they still hold up oh so well. Emio: The Smiling Man is probably my favorite game of the year. Mainly because I still cannot believe it’s actually real, but it’s also a damn fine experience. If you’re reading this, you’re either mildly interested in these games and wondering if you should play them (YES!) or you already love these games and want a bit of vindication (HERE!). I don’t know if I should end this like, hi Nintendo and MAGES, could you make more of these? But, if Sakamoto and MAGES have more ideas, I’d be at the ready to investigate once more.

Final Scores (if you love numbers):

Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir & The Girl Who Stands Behind (2021) – 8/10

Emio: The Smiling Man – Famicom Detective Club – 9/10

Thanks to Nintendo of  Europe for supplying codes for all three for review!

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KawlunDram

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