I was wrong. I am very happy to be proven wrong in this instance, but there’s no getting away from the fact I was wrong.
Back when I covered the excellent 2021 remakes of the two original Famicom Detective Club titles for Nintendo Switch earlier this year, my conclusion was that “I was left wanting more… [but] I suspect that’s never going to happen.” Imagine my surprise, then, when six months later, Nintendo surprised everyone by revealing that there was a brand new Famicom Detective Club on the way.
Yes, that’s right; the latest entry in the Famicom Detective Club series, known as Emio – The Smiling Man, is a brand new game in a series that, aside from the aforementioned remakes (and a Japan-only port of one of its entries to Super Famicom), has lain dormant since 1989. And y’know what? It’s great. Join me after the jump for a closer look. I have done my best to minimise spoilers!
Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club (simply Emio: The Smiling Man hereafter) is a direct sequel to the first two Famicom Detective Club games, The Missing Heir and The Girl Who Stands Behind. You once again take control of a self-insert (and canonically male) protagonist who, as in the previous titles, can import his name from the other games’ save data, and are tasked with solving a mystery.
This time around, it concerns the murder of a teenage boy named Eisuke. Young Eisuke was found lying near a pumping station, a little way off a road and a short distance from the bus stop behind the school he attended. He was apparently strangled using a rope or cord, but the most unusual thing about his situation was how his corpse had been left with a paper bag over its head — and how the paper bag had a creepy smiling face drawn on it.
As in the previous two Famicom Detective Club games, much of the investigation concerns how the current case relates to folklore and urban legends. In this instance, the myth at the core of the mystery is that of the eponymous Emio, The Smiling Man. The rumour has it that if a young girl is out on her own, crying, Emio will appear before her, and will say that she “doesn’t have to cry any more” because he will “give her a smile that lasts forever”. He then strangles her with his bare hands and — you guessed it — places a paper bag with a smiling face atop her head.
A few things don’t add up, though, as you’ve probably already spotted. For starters, Eisuke isn’t a girl, nor is he someone who could be mistaken for a girl. He doesn’t appear to have been strangled manually. And to further complicate matters, everyone you speak to about Eisuke in the early hours of the investigation seems to agree that he was a thoroughly nice chap who seemed to have his life reasonably together. He was smart, he was popular, he was taking aim to get into a prestigious high school and no-one seemed to bear him any sort of grudge. So how did he end up in this situation?
Well, that’s for you to investigate, and the way you go about that is almost identical to the previous two Famicom Detective Club titles, with a couple of minor tweaks that very much work for the better.
For the unfamiliar, the Famicom Detective Club games are examples of Japanese-style “command selection” adventures. You can read a little more about the context and history of this type of game in my coverage of The Missing Heir (linked above), but to sum things up, you interact with the game by choosing actions from a menu, then reading text and dialogue (fully voice acted in all three of the Switch Famicom Detective Club games) to see what transpired.
This is different from a regular old visual novel in that the actions you select from the menu are mostly fixed rather than reflecting possible dialogue responses or narrative branches.
In each scenario the game places you in, you can perform a number of different actions.
“Call/Engage” is used in different ways depending on context; in some circumstances it is used to call a character over from the background to speak with you directly, while in others it’s used to shout something, and in others still it’s used for you to distinguish between speaking directly to multiple characters who are in the same scene.
The bulk of the game unfolds through the “Ask/Listen” command. Again, the exact usage of this varies by context; sometimes, if you’ve just been invited to hear what someone has to say, choosing this option allows you to just listen to the character. At other times, you’ll have a selection of topics to choose from that you can ask the character about. Sometimes asking about one thing can open up new topics to discuss, and you’re almost always able to ask characters about their general “observations” on proceedings.
In situations where characters aren’t present, the “Look/Examine” command will do a lot of work. This works in two ways: firstly, by choosing to look at specific things from a menu; and secondly, by using the “Where?” subcommand to point specifically at something in the scene. There are a couple of instances in the game where you have to manually discover clues with the “Where?” function before you can proceed with your investigation — or perhaps ask a character about what you’ve discovered.
At some points in the game, you have the option to “Show” an object to characters, but this isn’t a game with a strong focus on using inventory items. For the most part in Emio – The Smiling Man, this is used to show people a sketch of a character you’re looking for.
New to this installment is the “Use Phone” option, which allows you to make use of your in-game cellphone to call someone. In a nice touch, the phone numbers used in the previous two Famicom Detective Club games can be called from your phone, and there are some fun Easter eggs to discover if you do so. Speaking of Easter eggs, those who have played the prior two games will also be pleased to observe the recurring “middle-aged man” virtual cast member makes a return — this time, he’s a policeman called Kamada, after also appearing as doctor Kumada in The Missing Heir and art teacher Komada in The Girl Who Stands Behind.
But I digress. To return to the “Use Phone” option, the protagonist is remarkably good at forgetting to charge his phone — it’s the early ’90s and this “mobile phone” thing is all new to him — meaning use of the phone only really enters the picture at a few very specific moments and, in true thriller tradition, never when it would be really useful, such as chasing down a potentially dangerous suspect.
Finally, the other main action you can take in pretty much every scene is to “Think”. This causes your character to reflect on what’s going on, and perhaps make some deductions. It’s not used as a “hint” facility; sometimes “Think”ing is necessary to progress.
In both previous Famicom Detective Club games, you had access to an in-game notebook from the pause menu; in Emio – The Smiling Man this is instead accessed from the command selection menu, but it works in the same way. Important characters and facts you discover about them are automatically recorded, and this information can be browsed through at your leisure when something more pressing isn’t happening.
At numerous points in the game — usually towards the end of the chapter — you’ll be invited to “Review” your investigation up until this point. This takes the form of a short quiz where you have to demonstrate your understanding of the new information you’ve learned — and perhaps remind yourself of some of the things you’ve known for a while now.
Rather than simply being multiple-choice questions as in similar sequences from the previous games, though, in Emio – The Smiling Man the review questions can take several forms. The multiple-choice questions are still there, yes, but also sometimes you have to manually input important names or terms using the Switch’s on-screen keyboard. At other times you’ll have to pick a relevant person from your notebook — and in some instances you’ll have to highlight a specific phrase from your notes that is relevant to your current ponderings.
There’s no real consequence to getting these things wrong other than the protagonist’s long-suffering assistant Ayumi (whom you actually get to play as for a few short sequences in Emio – The Smiling Man) giving him the stink-eye, but they give you a sense of being involved and that you’re actually coming to some conclusions. This helps mitigate one of the core problems with adventure games of this type: the feeling that you’re not really “solving” anything yourself, rather you’re just finding the right “triggers” to move the plot along. At least with the “Review” sequences, you’re outright demonstrating that you know what you’re talking about and you’ve understood what has been shown to you so far.
The biggest criticism of the first two Famicom Detective Club games stems from this same issue: the fact that the next trigger might not always be obvious, meaning there would be scenarios in which you’d wander back and forth between a few locations, repeatedly trying every possible command to see if something happened. Emio – The Smiling Man all but eliminates this problem with a simple (and optional, but enabled by default) addition to the formula: highlighting important phrases in the text which almost always give you a good idea of what you should be doing next.
For example, let’s say you’re talking to a character and you seem to have exhausted all the things you can ask them about. Hit the Think option and your character might comment that “Hmm… he looks uncomfortable. I wonder why that is?” The emphasis on “looks uncomfortable” is your signal to pop up the Look/Examine command and stare right at your conversational partner’s face until they crack. Or until you notice a nervous tic. Or… you get the idea.
This small addition to the formula makes Emio – The Smiling Man much less frustrating than its two predecessors, and keeps the narrative flowing along nicely. While the game is a very wordy affair overall, and there are a few scenes around the midpoint of the investigation where it feels a bit like you’re treading water until something out of your control occurs, for the most part things are kept constantly moving, with each new in-game day revealing new information and often sending you to brand new locations rather than, as in the previous two games, going back and forth between the same two or three places repeatedly, speaking to the same characters each time.
This greater scope, of course, stems from the fact that Emio – The Smiling Man is not a remake of a Famicom Disk System game and as such is not constrained by the same limitations of the original games. The game doesn’t go overboard with things, though; there’s always a good reason for the places you go, the things you do and the characters you interact with, and the latter in particular keep things thoroughly interesting.
As you might expect from a game of this type, interacting with characters is of absolutely critical importance to the overall experience. And, as your investigation proceeds, it becomes clear that you’re involved with a wide variety of characters who all have their own complex motivations, priorities and outlook on life. No-one falls into tropey stereotype territory, and even the visual appearances of the characters give them plenty of diversity and interest.
I found it particularly noteworthy that the game very much resists the temptation to make every single character “anime beautiful”. While I wouldn’t say anyone is ugly as such (with one exception I will refrain from mentioning for the sake of spoilers), it’s quite refreshing to see, for example, schoolkids depicted as just fairly normal-looking, plain individuals rather than exaggerated “anime characters”, and their behaviour reflects this, too. They’re just kids, not “anime kids”. Not that there’s anything wrong with anime kids, of course — remember what site you’re reading! — but it is quite refreshing to see a game treat teenage characters with a certain amount of restraint and respect.
The game tackles some fairly heavy themes, too. I won’t get too much into those for now for the sake of those who haven’t yet played Emio – The Smiling Man, but suffice it to say for now that this is a properly mature game whose PEGI 18 certificate is well justified, especially in the latter hours of the main narrative, and in the interactive “epilogue” sequence that unlocks after the main case is solved.
Again, I don’t want to say too much about this because it will give a lot away. But I will say this: when the case was solved and the credits rolled, I felt a certain degree of dissatisfaction that a host of narrative threads seemingly hadn’t been resolved. Then the epilogue started, I played it through and everything was tied up very nicely indeed. So be sure to keep going once you roll credits for the first time — just also make sure to heed the warning of your detective mentor Utsugi; the epilogue is exceptionally dark and bleak, so be prepared for some serious unpleasantness.
I shouldn’t sign off without saying what a beautifully presented game this is, either. Like the previous two Famicom Detective Club remakes, Emio – The Smiling Man is presented in a much more elaborate manner than most other visual novels, though its exceptional presentation will be familiar to anyone who has experience with developer MAGES.’ other work.
The game frequently changes camera angles to frame scenes differently or focus on particular characters, and those characters are more than just static bust shots. They move, they emote, they change expression — while they’re not quite as lively as the incredible E-Mote sprites in Nekopara and Love Cube, the fact they’re presented in many more contexts that simply chest-up, staring directly at you gives the game a pleasingly varied visual presentation, making it as fun for anyone who might be watching you play as it is for you playing it yourself.
At times, it resembles an animated movie as much as anything — and indeed, a significant chunk of the aforementioned epilogue is just flat-out anime. It really is a beautifully presented game, without a polygon in sight, and is further proof (if any more were needed) that a cracking art style and a consistent artistic vision for the complete work as a whole will always trump “photo-realism” and motion capture.
I’ll refrain from saying too much more because anything else I say from here will be getting into spoiler territory. And it really pays to go into this one as blind as possible. So I’ll just say if you’re up for a good mystery, nab yourself a copy of Emio – The Smiling Man now. You won’t regret it.
More about Famicom Detective Club
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