This summer, Nintendo dropped a super eerie teaser video for a new project, which they would announce later on. Never could I have imagined it would be a brand new Famicom Detective Club title: while 2021 brought us Switch remakes of the first two Famicom Detective Club, originally released on the Famicom Disk System, I never expected those remakes to do well enough to warrant a new game, especially relatively so soon. 1997's BS Tantei Club: Yuki ni Kieta Kako was the latest title in the series and while Satellaview games are not likely to see any remakes, I had actually sooner expected a remake of the third game, rather than a completely original game. But here we are in 2024, with a new Famicom Detective Club game, released on the Nintendo Switch.
Famicom Detective Club: Emio starts with a call from the police to the Utsugi Detective Agency, as Inspector Kamada is working on a case that might have ties to an old case he worked on in the past, and one Utsugi too knows about. The crime scene is a pumping station outside the town, where Eisuke, a 14-year old middle school student, was found strangled. However, what made this crime scene bizarre was the fact the boy was found with a paper bag covering his head, with a creepy smiling face drawn on it. The unnamed protagonist learns that 18 years ago, there was a serial murder case that followed the same pattern: all the three girls found murdered had been wearing such a paper bag with a smiling face on it. Because the police had kept this detail of those murders a secret, it is not likely it's a mere copycat who's behind Eisuke's death, and the people at the Utsugi Detective Agency are asked to look into the connection between the two cases. When fellow assistant Ayumi hears about the circumstances of the two cases, she's reminded of the urban legend of Emio, the Smiling Man, who looks for crying girls in the night, strangles them and puts a paper bag with a face over their heads. What is the connection between Eisuke's death, the series of murders 18 years ago and the story of Emio?
It probably helps the remakes of the first two Famicom Detective Club are relatively recent, but the moment you start with Emio, it feels exactly like a late 80s/early 90s command-based adventure game. The story itself is also still vaguely set in the late eighties like the original games (though with a few time anomalies), though I don't remember seeing something that put this game firmly before or after BS Tantei Club: Yuki ni Kieta Kako. Gameplay-wise, there are no real surprises: you use commands to guide the protagonist to for example talk with someone about certain topics, or to show them evidence you have obtained. Bringing up topic X to witness Y might allow you to move to location A to talk with Z about topic X, which leads to another story development. In the original Famicom 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, they introduced a QOL change from the Super Famicom remake of Part II where they highlight newly changed commands in the Switch remakes of Part I and II, and it's back again in Emio. And in order to suit modern gaming conventions even more, this gameplay loop is streamlined a lot more than in previous games, often locking you at a location until you have done everything there. I found this a bit disappointing, as it made the game more on rails than the previous games (and it wasn't like the previous games were offering you that much freedom in the first place), but I guess most modern players would find the old adventure conventions too cumbersome. While the 'detective' gameplay is fairly minimal and there's no real difficulty, as in, you can usually just advance in the story by talking to everyone about everything, the story occasionally asks you questions to check whether you have been paying attention, and at times, you have to manually input answers, so it's not a completely passive experience. But all in all, Emio is very similar to the Famicom Detective Club titles preceding it and in that sense it feels like a familiar place.
On the audio and visual side of things, Emio is developed by the same team that worked on the Switch remakes of Part I and II, retaining the same art direction and once again, the game is fully voiced, which is a nice touch, with Ogata Megumi (Hinata from the Danganronpa games, Kyuu in the Tantei Gakuen Q anime) returning as the protagonist and Minaguchi Yuuko as Ayumi There's even a rather surprising something awaiting you at the very end of the game, something I honestly hadn't expected and it was a very welcome surprise indeed. The game might play like an old Famicom adventure game (though more streamlined), it certainly doesn't look or sound like one, and I mean that in a good way!
As a mystery story though, I think Emio has some nice moments, but for some reason, it didn't quite manage to capture me as much as previous games. With this being the first brand-new title in 35 years, and with all the developments we've seen in those three decades in game storytelling, especially when it comes to mystery games, and the scale of stories, I found it a bit disappointing the story is actually fairly compact in cast and overall scale. And I understand it's intentional, but I had hoped we'd see a 'bigger' world with a larger mystery, rather than the more human drama-focused approach Emio took. While the game starts out promising enough with the creepy circumstances surrounding Eisuke's mysterious death and the ties it might have with the series of murders committed eighteen years ago, as well as the urban legend of Emio, the first half of the game is very slow, with few story developments going on. There are moments where something interesting seems to come, especially when Ayumi first notices the connection between the urban legend and the murders and Utsugi starts musing about how real-life events could have led to the creation of the urban legend, but then Utsugi disappears to investigate this super fascinating 'reality and folklore' angle of the case, while the player is left to do other things. The game didn't have to go full Hayarigami on me, but it was here where I would have hoped that they'd play up both the horror angle of the urban legend, as well as allow you to dig into the rational background behind the urban legend, in a way for example the first Famicom Detective Club partially did with the curse of the Ayashiros: that game of course had the limitations of the hardware, so I had kinda hoped we'd see that fleshed out more here, but Emio intentionally moves away from that. You are mostly talking to a surprisingly small cast about the same topics for a long time but with little new developments: a lot of the dialogue is there to flesh out the characters, but as someone who's more into these games for the mystery, it feels like a lot of the story just moves around the mystery because there's not enough of that. It's only around 70% of the story, it finally feels like things are moving and a lot of that feels unearned: a few of the most crucial hints are obtained from persons who completely coincidentally happen to be in possession of those hints, and whom the narrator just happens to come across by chance.
For people who are into the human drama behind a mystery story, or for example Higashino Keigo's work, I do think Emio might be exactly what they are looking for. It's the most dramatic Famicom Detective Club to be released, building on themes of previous games like the importance of friendship and family in the wake of tragic deaths, but in a way you wouldn't immediately expect of a Nintendo-published game. On a sidenote: while they did something different with the culprit this time and I can see why people find this memorable, I do have to admit I like the previous culprits more.
Overall though, I am more than grateful we finally got a new Famicom Detective Club after more than 35 years, and while it isn't my favorite one, it's still a very competently developed game that mostly succeeds in presenting itself as an eighties adventure game, while also being a game created for a 2024 audience. In that sense, I think this is a succesful product. Now I hope we finally get that BS Tantei Club remake...
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