The Good Old Days

 Please Set Disk Card 

(Famicom Disk System boot-up screen)

Remasters, reboots and remakes are quite common now in visual media, ranging from every other movie released nowadays being a reboot or remake and videogames often getting a 'remastered' rerelease just a few years after the original release, and reboots/remakes aren't anything near rare either when it comes to that interactive medium. I don't think it's common in literature though, at least, I honestly can't really think of any good examples right now. It's not like we get a reboot or remake of an existing, well-known series of mystery novels every few years... 

If you have been following this blog since about earlier this year, you might have noticed me mentioning how much I was looking forward to the Nintendo Switch remakes of the first two Famicom Detective Club videogames. The original Famicom Detective Club was released in 1988 on the Famicom (The Japanese version of the NES), the sequel a year later and it was one of the earliest console mystery adventure games. While some might not immediately associate Nintendo with murder mystery, these two games brought classical murder mystery plots, where you played a teenage detective-in-training solving bloody murders in a remote village with a creepy legend about people rising from their graves (Part I) or investigating a murder on a schoolgirl and the victim's connection to the school's urban legend (Part II). The second game, Famicom Detective Club Part II The Girl Who Stands Behind, was remade as an (excellent!!) Super Famicom (SNES) game in 1998 and that was actually one of the first Japanese adventure games I ever played, so I have always had a soft spot for the series. That is also why I wrote a short article on the whole series ten years ago and more recently, I also discussed the two (fun!) choose-your-own-adventure books based on the first and second game in the series. 

When it was announced in 2019 that Nintendo would be making remakes of the first two games, I was absolutely thrilled, because the series had been dormant since 1998 and to be honest, I hadn't really expected them revisit the series again even though for the last ten years, each time Nintendo had one of their Nintendo Direct announcements, I was hoping for something, anything. Naturally, I was a bit disappointed when the games didn't make their original 2020 release, but I was there to pick the Collector's Edition of the two games when they were finally released in May 2021. Interestingly, this was also the very first time these games were made available outside of Japan, introducing a whole new audience to the (nameless) protagonist, fellow assistant Ayumi and the Utsugi Detective Agency. 

So I got the games in May, completed them pretty much right away... and then kept postponing writing a review about them. Given that I had been talking about looking forward to the remakes all this time, so readers of the blog may have been surprised I didn't write about them. Was it because the remakes were bad? No, that wasn't it. The reason was something very simple: I didn't know what to write about. Like mentioned before, I had already written about these games once ten years ago, and it was just a few years ago I read and reviewed the choose-your-own-adventure books, and they too followed the same plots. What could I write about the new releases of Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir and Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind what I hadn't mentioned before? That's one problem with remakes, if you have already discussed the original and there's a fairly faithful remake, there's not really much you can talk about besides making direct comparisons, but that's only interesting for the few people who are interested in both the original and the remake. So for a while, I was considering skipping the review completely.

As you can guess by now, the Switch remakes of Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir and Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind are, all in all, quite faithful to the original games. Yes, the graphics are completely new, fantastic newly arranged soundtrack based on the original and every single line is voiced, even the monologues (Minaguchi Yuuko returns as Ayumi!). So in terms of visuals and audio, the remakes look and sound like modern games, but the plots of the two games, and even most of the game design is still the same as the late eighties originals. Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir starts with the protagonist waking up at a beach with amnesia, only to slowly piece together he's the assistant of the private detective Utsugi and that he had been investigating the death of Ayashiro Kiku, the matriarch of the Ayashiro Clan living in the small village of Myoujin. Her butler isn't quite sure whether her death was natural, and as there's much ado about her will, which has provisions for her three nephews/niece, but mostly benefits her missing daughter who ran away many years ago, the protagonist was asked to look into Kiku's death. During the investigation, we learn of a local legend that says the Ayashiros are cursed and there are even villagers who claim to have seen Kiku rise from her grave. When one of Kiku's nephews is killed however, it's clear something foul is at play. Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind is set a few years before the first game, and has the protagonist investigating the murder on a female high school student, whose body had been dumped in the river. The protagonist is sent to her Ushimitsu High School to investigate her final movements, which puts him on the trail of a ghost story: the victim Shinobu and her friend Ayumi formed a detective club, where they investigated all kinds of stories. In the days before her murder, Shinobu had been investigating the school's ghost story about a bloody female student suddenly appearing behind people, and it's believed this is somehow connected to Shinobu's murder.

The remakes of these two games are on the whole very faithful remakes of the originals, with most of the dialogue lines completely the same as the original (the remake of Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind is based on the 1998 Super Famicom remake by the way, which added some extra features: these are also intact in the Switch remake). There are a few minor scenes changed a bit, but you can basically use a walkthrough for the original Famicom versions and still navigate your way through the remake without any real problems. The gameplay is also rather familar and traditional: you use commands to guide your character to for example talk with someone about certain topics, or to show them evidence you have obtained, and by for example talking about topic X to witness Y, you're able to move to location A to talk with Z about topic X, which leads to another story development, etc. Famicom Detective Club was one of the earliest games to use this format for adventure games and it's been a staple since, so no surprises here. In the original games, finding the right commands to proceed in the story could be a bit frustrating because sometimes you have to ask a person the same question multiple times or sometimes a story flag is activated by finishing an action that seems completely unrelated, but fortunately, the QOL change from the Super Famicom remake of Part II can be found in both Switch remakes, which highlight some commands if something significant has changed. So while the stories are still the same as the originals, these remakes are definitely easier/less frustrating to play (this holds especially for Part I). The games aren't long though, each game probably won't take even ten hours.

As specifically mystery games though, these games are more about atmosphere than really making the player solve a mystery themselves. You're just brought from one story development to another and the best the games do to "challenge" your mental skills is basically just to ask you a question once in a while to check whether you have been paying attention. So don't expect to be actually solving the case yourself by going over the evidence, you're just there to enjoy the ride. Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir is interestingly strongly and obviously influenced by Yokomizo Seishi's work: the story set in a remote village, about a missing heir, convoluted wills, a cursed clan and a legend of corpses rising from their graves doesn't even try to hide its inspiration. So if you like the Kindaichi stories, this might be a fun game to try out as there are few videogames available in English that go for the same vibe (Higurashi: When They Cry I guess...). Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind is interesting now I think about it as it's a murder mystery set at a high school, but the original game was released long before Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo and Detective Conan made the setting popular. So as a school mystery, it predates the big titles with 3, 4 years. But if you like those titles, you'll be right at home with Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind. I'd say The Girl Who Stands Behind is by far the best game of the two, with a story that is also presented with more confidence than the first one, but The Missing Heir definitely has its charms too due to the unique setting and a better set-up to the final confrontation with the murderer.

Just speaking of these games as remakes, I have to say I like the effort poured into them to preserve the original spirit. The V-tuber-esque characters can look a bit weird, especially when compared to the phenomonal sprite artwork in the Super Famicom version of Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind, but the overall design is good. The original games were set in the period of release (the late eighties). This is of course reflected in the story, where nobody has a mobile and you have A LOT of scenes where people use the phones of whomever they are visiting or that people have to tell others where they can be reached. But the artwork of the backgrounds also do a fantastic job at invoking this eighties vibe (the shopping streets especially!) and I'm glad these games still like games from the eighties, even though they are made thirty years later. The remakes also have a very welcome option to use the old soundtracks (so Famicom music for The Missing Heir, and both Famicom and Super Famicom soundtracks for The Girl Who Stands Behind). If they had also included the actual original games too in these remakes, it would have been perfect, but that's perhaps too much to ask.

So as a fan of the original games, I did enjoy the Switch remakes of Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir and Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind, but I can't really call them surprising. They are really just 'what if we gave the original games a new coat of paint' remakes, and in terms of story and gameplay are almost identical to the originals down to the scene and line. For a lot of people this will be the first time they get to play these games though, and they might be a bit disappointed in learning how eighties they really are, and I do think it's best to be aware that as remakes, it's mostly the visuals and audio that changed and that the core is still an old-fashioned, eighties adventure game. I for one hope that these remakes pave the way for more Famicom Detective Club, be it a remake of BS Detective Club or a brand-new sequel, but regardless of what may or may not follow, I had fun with these two games.