The Famicom Detective Club games are something that I’d been meaning to get around to for a while, but have only just picked up. Having played through — and adored — first episode The Missing Heir, I was keen to follow that up with its prequel, The Girl Who Stands Behind.
Honestly, I was expecting more of the same, and to a certain extent that’s what you get with The Girl Who Stands Behind, at least in mechanical terms. From a narrative perspective, however, The Girl Who Stands Behind is arguably considerably more ambitious than its predecessor, and makes for a mystery even more compelling to unravel a bit at a time.
So let’s take a closer look at the 2021 remake from Nintendo and Mages, available as part of a double-pack with The Missing Heir — sadly, only digitally in its English language incarnation.
Although it’s the second game in the series, The Girl Who Stands Behind unfolds chronologically before The Missing Heir. It introduces the protagonist character and sidekick Ayumi — plus this time around, we actually get to spend some time with Utsugi of the Utsugi Detective Agency that both of them work for.
In practice, the two Famicom Detective Club games are structured in such a way that neither of them are actually “best” to play first; you’ll have a slightly different perspective on certain ongoing narrative threads depending on which order you play them in, but neither really “spoils” the other as such.
If you want to play in original release order, go The Missing Heir followed by The Girl Who Stands Behind; if you want to go in chronological narrative order, go the other way around. In a nice touch, if you have saved data from one game when you start the other, it will automatically import your protagonist’s custom name early in the story.
The Girl Who Stands Behind opens with the protagonist on the run from the police. Before long, he’s caught, but just before he’s dragged off to the station for questioning, Utsugi, who appears to be enormously respected by the police, rescues the player and offers to take him in.
We learn that the protagonist has been searching for his missing parents, and is apparently alone in the world without even a place to stay that he can call his own. Recognising that this is a good way for our hero to get into a lot of trouble, Utsugi offers not only to give him a place to stay, but also some gainful employment to keep him occupied.
Our hero quickly picks up a knack for detective work, with his teenage years making him ideally placed to check out situations where the older Utsugi might have some trouble blending in. Prior to the main case of The Girl Who Stands Behind getting underway, we’re led to understand that the protagonist has helped out with several other cases, but Utsugi entrusts the latest one to him directly.
The reason? It involves a high school girl who has washed up on the banks of the river. It looks at first glance like she simply fell in the river and drowned, but some initial investigation reveals strangulation marks on her neck, turning this into a murder case. And, with the protagonist being of high school age — albeit not actually studying in school — Utsugi surmises that our hero is ideally placed to find out a bit more about the victim from her peers.
Thus begins a murder mystery adventure that focuses at least partly around the local school and its titular legend of “The Girl Who Stands Behind”. As the story goes, when you’re alone, sometimes you hear a voice behind you, and when you turn around there’s a blood-soaked girl; exactly what happens next varies quite a bit as the story has, inevitably, become somewhat warped and distorted over the years. But however you look at it, it’s a fairly traditional-sounding Japanese ghost story.
The victim Yuko was, it seems, actively investigating this legend and attempting to get to the bottom of it, leading some to believe that she is a victim of a curse. Naturally, things aren’t quite that simple, though one of the great things about The Girl Who Stands Behind is that it never quite rules out supernatural involvement as an explanation for the situation that transpires.
It’s certainly a very different kind of case to the one depicted in The Missing Heir, however. The school setting gives it a completely different atmosphere to the picturesque rural village of the previous adventure, and while both games deal with public unease over the potential involvement of a ghostly spirit, the way in which high school kids react with morbid curiosity rather than irrational superstitious fear makes for a rather different feel to proceedings.
As in The Missing Heir, the second Famicom Detective Club game unfolds in traditional Japanese adventure game format, with each location allowing you to pick commands from a menu, and the game often confining you to one or two locations until you’ve triggered the next story beat. Once again, this strikes a good balance between helping you feel involved in the investigation and keeping the narrative flowing — though, again, there are a couple of situations where you’ll find yourself just cycling through dialogue options in an attempt to find the “right” one to proceed.
In a nice touch, The Girl Who Stands Behind features a few little Easter eggs for those who played The Missing Heir. For example, in both games you have the opportunity to use a phone at specific points in the story; if you call the number you need in The Missing Heir on The Girl Who Stands Behind’s phone, you’ll get a cute little reference that will doubtless make you smile.
Like its predecessor, The Girl Who Stands Behind does a good job of keeping things mysterious and unclear right up until its final moments. As previously noted, I’m generally not someone who is particularly good at figuring out “whodunnit” before the truth is actually revealed, so take my opinion on this with a pinch or two of salt, but I was certainly kept guessing as to what the actual answer to the mystery was throughout the game; I certainly had my suspicions here and there, but more often than not those expectations were subverted — sometimes in quite spectacularly shocking fashion.
There are some really interesting characters throughout The Girl Who Stands Behind, and the game wisely doesn’t confine its entire action to the school setting. Because a significant component of the narrative relates to an unsolved case from 15 years ago that Utsugi is investigating at the same time as the protagonist is looking into Yuko’s murder, you have the opportunity to interact with a number of adult-age characters as well as high school kids, and this keeps things nice and varied.
There’s also a hidden mechanic that encourages replay value. At the conclusion of the mystery, the game gives you a set of “personality test” results based on how you played the game, and rates your “compatibility” with main heroine Ayumi. The exact conditions for raising Ayumi’s affection aren’t entirely clear, but one can presume that it relates to treating her well in the scenes where she is present, and working through the case efficiently and intelligently where she is not.
The game doesn’t leave you feeling like you’ve “failed” or missed out on anything if you don’t get Ayumi to a full 20 hearts by the conclusion; all that changes is a short final scene, whereby one of the female characters from the game (or Ayumi herself if you get a full 20) will speak directly to you. I’ll leave the details of that for you to discover.
With The Girl Who Stands Behind being a narrative-centric game, I will refrain from spoiling the details of the plot any further, because this really is a game where the story is everything. Suffice to say for now, this is another excellent entry in the Famicom Detective Club series, and I have to say — I was left wanting more. Not because either The Missing Heir or The Girl Who Stands Behind left things on an unsatisfying note, but because I think there’s a lot of potential to develop this series and its core cast further.
Sadly, with the two Famicom Detective Club remakes by Mages having come out in 2021 and nothing else having happened since — with a physical release remaining disappointingly Japan-only with no English support — I suspect that’s never going to happen. But I can dream.
I want more games like this, both within the Famicom Detective Club series itself, and in the Japanese adventure game genre more broadly. While, as noted in our look at The Missing Heir, the way Japanese adventure games do things will likely be very much an acquired taste, particularly for those with no patience for lengthy conversations and primarily text-based gameplay, it’s a style of play that I think works really well on modern systems — particularly when the presentation is as polished as it is in the Famicom Detective Club games.
For now, though, I can take solace in the fact that I’ve finally got around to enjoying these excellent games — and hopefully made one or two of you reading this aware of them, too.
More about Famicom Detective Club
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