Although Japanese-style adventure games are a bit of an acquired taste for some, I’ve become rather fond of the format over the years.
While the more “pure” visual novel format is considerably more commonplace these days, it does always make me smile when a new game comes out that makes use of those classic Japanese adventure game conventions rather than simply being “click to advance, perhaps with occasional choices”.
As such, I had been meaning to get around to the two Famicom Detective Club titles on Switch for quite some time. And, having played through the first of the duology, subtitled The Missing Heir, I feel compelled to talk about it at some length. So let’s do just that.
For the unfamiliar, the two Famicom Detective Club games have their origins, unsurprisingly, on the Famicom, also known as the Nintendo Family Computer. First released in 1983 in Japan, the Famicom would form the basis of what we came to know in 1985 as the Nintendo Entertainment System.
But the Famicom is very much its own distinct beast, for a variety of reasons. One of the most distinct and unusual of these is 1986’s Japan-only Famicom Disk System addon, which bolts on to the bottom of the base Famicom unit and provides it with a rewritable disk drive and enhanced sound capabilities, among other benefits.
This was a big deal at the time because it meant that developers for the already-popular Famicom could start exploring more ambitious games. The random-access nature of disks meant that games could feature considerably more content than was practical to fit on a ROM cartridge of the time, since the game could simply load in more data as it was required, and the rewritable nature of the media meant that players could save information to them.
This, in turn, enabled the creation of longer games that weren’t intended to be beaten in a single session. Battery back-up systems to save games on cartridge simply weren’t a thing until the 1987 North American release of The Legend of Zelda (which began life in Japan as a Famicom Disk System launch title), so prior to that saving to disk was the most practical option for console players.
This sort of setup is, of course, ideal for adventure games, which often feature relatively elaborate visual presentation, a whole lot of text and enough “game” to keep you busy for at least a few days.
Famicom Detective Club’s first installment, The Missing Heir, was released in 1988. It was written by Yoshio Sakamoto, who today is probably most well-known for his heavy involvement in the Metroid series. In fact, it was Sakamoto’s first scenario writing job, given to him after the legendary Nintendo game designer Gunpei Yokoi claimed that they “needed” to make a game called Family Computer Youth Detective Group.
The game wasn’t initially intended to be an adventure game; in conversation with the dearly departed former Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata, Sakamoto explained that all they had to start with was the title, and the project initially ran into problems because “the company [they] were working with hadn’t thought about creating something which focused on the development of the story”.
Sakamoto had an idea, though. He had recently played through Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii’s enormously influential Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken (The Portopia Serial Murder Case), an adventure game which had first released for home computers in 1983, and which is commonly cited as one of the earliest games that adopted the conventions of what we today know as visual novels.
Specifically, it was the 1985 Famicom port of Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken that Sakamoto played which is picked out as being especially influential, since that swapped the original computer version’s text parser for a menu-driven interface. This not only made the game eminently practical to play with a simple controller, it also made it much more accessible to those who weren’t yet comfortable or familiar with using computer keyboards — or indeed the rather idiosyncratic way in which one typically communicates with text parsers in early adventure games.
“My reaction when I played [Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken] was… ‘games are capable of things like this,'” Sakamoto told Iwata. “I thought the interactive part was really fun — choosing a command to elicit some kind of reaction — and there were parts where it felt like my emotions were really being controlled. I started thinking ‘I’d like to try making a game like this’.”
So what is “a game like this”? For the benefit of those less familiar with the distinctly Japanese approach to adventure games, let’s spend a bit of time talking about that.
The term “adventure game” has become rather more amorphous than I might like in recent years, but in the earlier days of gaming it had some quite specific meanings.
When the genre first appeared, it was used as a catch-all term to describe a long-form game (as opposed to a short-form arcade-style game) in which the player, in control of a character that often (though not always) represented “themselves”, went on some sort of journey and attempted to accomplish a long-term goal.
This initial definition encapsulated what we now recognise as two distinct genres: adventure games and role-playing games. The latter often included an element of tabletop gaming-style abstraction through the use of statistics and randomised elements, while the former focused on exploration, atmosphere and narrative.
As time went on, these genres became more distinct — and both evolved. Adventure games went from requiring the user to type simple commands such as “GO NORTH”, “TAKE GOLD”, “KILL THORIN” to making use of less ambiguous control schemes, where players could select commands from menus or point at things in a visual representation of the game world.
Japanese adventures, which we’re concerned with today, adopted both of these elements to varying degrees. A typical Japanese adventure game shows you the game world from your own perspective as a participant in the narrative, and allows you to interact with each scene by selecting commands from a menu. Sometimes you will be tasked with pointing at a specific visual element — for example, an “Examine” command often allows you to point at things in the scene that you’d like to get more information about — but the emphasis tends to be on selecting commands.
An important distinction between Japanese and western adventure games is the matter of freedom.
Many western adventure games have an element of “openness” to them that, in the early days, often necessitated making a map as you stumbled around a large environment room by room; this often went hand-in-hand with a non-linear nature, allowing you to accomplish objectives and solve puzzles as you came up with the solutions, rather than in a specified order.
For example, in Colossal Cave, the grandaddy of all text adventures, the titular cave requires you to hunt down a variety of treasures in order to complete the game, but the order you pursue said treasures is up to you — and will likely come down to which directions you decide to explore first.
Even as the emphasis on text declined with the introduction of more visually focused “point and click” adventures, the non-linear aspect tended to remain intact. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis from LucasArts, for example, often presents you with multiple objectives to complete at a time, but doesn’t prescribe the order in which you need to accomplish them — and in practice, the paths you need to take to achieve those goals tend to intertwine anyway.
Japanese adventure games, meanwhile, are more rigid; rather than freely exploring the game world, your aim is simple: discover the next story trigger, then continue enjoying the unfolding plot. You’re often outright confined to a single location until you discover said trigger; many Japanese adventure games take away your option to move to other locations until you’ve seen a particular story beat.
This approach is not for everyone. Some see this style of gameplay as little more than systematically picking every option in the menu until something interesting happens — and indeed when a game is poorly designed and unclear what the actual trigger points are, it can be somewhat tiresome. Erotic adventure game Ring-Out!! Pro-Lesring is a good example of this; progress in that game often involves simply clicking the same menu options multiple times until dialogue starts repeating itself.
But when it’s done well it can strike a good balance between making the player feel involved in the unfolding narrative and keeping them well and truly on the rails. Particularly good examples from (relatively) recent years include Capcom’s widely beloved Ace Attorney series — which, tellingly, has had plenty of mainstream success despite being a textbook example of this particular style of adventure game design — and Kadokawa Games’ Root Letter.
Western adventure game veterans from the pre-Internet era will almost certainly have at least one tale of getting “stuck” in a game, with the narrative grinding to a complete halt as they struggled to determine exactly what it was they needed to do in order to progress. That very rarely happens in a Japanese adventure game by nature of what we’ve just talked about, meaning the story always keeps flowing at a good pace.
And this is where Famicom Detective Club’s 2021 remakes by Mages fit in. In both games, you’re presented with a mystery, and while in practice you’re not really doing much of the actual “solving” yourself, the interactive element does help you feel like you’re more involved in the situation than you might otherwise feel if you were playing a visual novel in which the story is delivered more “passively” to you.
So let’s look specifically at the remake of the first Famicom Detective Club games: The Missing Heir. The original Famicom Disk System version was the first in the series to be released, though its follow-up The Girl Who Stands Behind is actually a prequel. In practice, it doesn’t matter which order you play the two games in, but they are connected. And at the time of writing I’ve only played The Missing Heir, so that’s the one we’re going to talk about.
In Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir (just The Missing Heir hereafter) you take on the role of a self-insert (but canonically male) protagonist. The game begins with you waking up having apparently fallen off a cliff; while your fall was broken by a soft patch of grass, you were knocked out hard enough for you to have no memory of what happened, why you were atop the cliff and even, really, who you are.
Thankfully, you’re found by a man named Amachi, who takes you back to his apartment and helps you recover — physically, if not mentally. After leaving Amachi behind, you head back to the cliff in an attempt to discover what happened to you and why, and it’s not long before you’re embroiled (again) in the mystery that landed you in your current predicament.
It seems you were commissioned by the butler of the wealthy Ayashiro family to investigate the death of the family matriarch Kiku. It is assumed that Kiku died of natural causes, but the timing is a tad suspicious: it was almost immediately after she read her will, for which her nephews and niece (all three of whom are thoroughly shady characters) were in attendance.
Things aren’t helped by a local legend about the Ayashiros, which is if a family member dies “in vain”, they will return from the dead to seek vengeance. And, indeed, after Kiku’s surviving relatives start turning up dead one after the other, one would be forgiven for believing old ghost stories passed down by highly superstitious country folk.
It’s a complex mystery that reveals its layers one by one, and just when you think you’re starting to get a handle on things, something else happens to keep you guessing. Now, I’ll be the first to admit I’m generally not all that good at figuring out “whodunnit” when reading mystery stories, so perhaps take my feelings with a slight pinch of salt, but The Missing Heir definitely kept things interesting for me throughout its entire runtime; I never felt like it was getting bogged down or drawing out its plot points for too long.
In fact, while playing the modern remake of The Missing Heir it’s honestly very easy to forget that this originated as a Famicom Disk System game from the late ’80s. The narrative is elaborate and well-written, the characters are well-defined, interesting and multidimensional, and the way that the core mystery gradually reveals a cascade of supplementary things to get to the bottom of is thoroughly compelling.
At the time The Missing Heir was released in Japan, the graphical adventure game was just starting to find its feet on home computers in the west, with titles such as 1987’s Maniac Mansion from Lucasfilm Games and Sierra’s various Quest games starting to push the boundaries of interactive narratives beyond simple treasure hunts.
But there was very little like The Missing Heir available on western consoles at the time, and even those well-regarded home computer adventures had relatively simplistic storylines compared to the multi-layered mystery Japanese players were enjoying with The Missing Heir. One can’t help but wonder how western gamers might have reacted to Famicom Detective Club had we had the opportunity to play it back in the day; I know I certainly would have been fascinated by it.
The reason I bring this up is because The Missing Heir isn’t “good for a 1988 game on an 8-bit platform” or “good for a video game” — it’s simply a good mystery story. And while you can honour the game’s 8-bit heritage by switching its soundtrack to the original chiptune compositions, the modern visuals (which incorporate a lot more animation than your typical game of this type), excellent (Japanese-only) voice acting and atmospheric music all combine to create a game that, were it not called Famicom Detective Club, you’d never know it was composed in the late ’80s.
Yes, The Missing Heir is prone to all the above-mentioned quirks of Japanese adventure games, meaning that there may be times when the most efficient means to proceed onwards is to try asking every character available to you about every available topic, but these are few and far between.
For the most part, the story flows onwards at a good pace, with enough interaction required from you to keep you feeling involved with the unfolding case. And there are a couple of fun mechanical surprises along the way, too; I’ll leave those for you to discover.
It’s probably telling that although Sakamoto acknowledges Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken as being an important influence on The Missing Heir in terms of showing him how video games could be used to tell stories, the other influences he cites are from more “traditional” narrative media: specifically, the movies of Italian horror director Dario Argento, and the Japanese mystery novelist Seishi Yokomizo.
It really shows that Sakamoto did his homework on how to present a compelling, suspenseful mystery by looking at work from masters of their craft — and this is a big part of how and why The Missing Heir doesn’t feel dated to play in the 21st century. Sure, the modernised visuals and audio help make it feel more like a “new game”, but I bet the Famicom Disk System original translated into English would be just as compelling.
Anyway, being a narrative-centric title I’m loathe to spoil The Missing Heir too much from hereon, so I’ll leave that there for now and just say that, so long as you are on board with the distinctive way Japanese developers make adventure games, you will have a wonderful time with this game.
I can’t wait to see what The Girl Who Stands Behind has in store for me — so y’know what, I might just go and make a start on that right now.
More about Famicom Detective Club
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