I can’t say I was expecting a remake of a long-dormant film Famicom Detective Club series, let alone a completely fresh installment. Let alone how it was announced. The series lived and died on the Famicom Disk System (apart from some dabbling on the Super Famicom).
In a way, visual novels seem very representative of the genre’s heyday on early Japanese home computers. Detectives were a popular theme, and the Famicom Disk System had a few of them. Here in North America, visual novels are generally niche, and retro crime novels are a niche within a niche. So it’s refreshing not only to see these games in English for the first time, but to join the revival.
Emio – Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club seems to be a continuation of both the style and spirit of its predecessors, for better or worse. Before I start talking about it, you probably already know whether or not you’re on board to check it out.
Emio – Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club happens a few years later The Lost Heir (which is the first game released and the second chronologically). The three from the Utsugi Detective Agency are called in by the police to lend a hand them with a murder case. A student has been found strangled. More unusually, a paper bag with a smiley face drawn on it has been placed over his head.
The paper bag is referenced in a local urban legend about a man in a paper bag who promises crying girls a way to smile forever, then strangles them and leaves them in his signature smiling bag. However, more realistically, it refers to a series of murders 18 years prior to the start of the game, when girls were found strangled in a smiling headdress.
The plot gets a few wrenches in the cogs. First, the original victims of the serial murder were girls, while this time it was a boy. The boy was also strangled with a rope or cord, while the girls were strangled with their bare hands. However, the fact that the original victims were found with paper bags was hidden from the press, so the likelihood of copycats is rather low. So it’s time to hit the road.
I want to emphasize this Emi is not an investigative game. It’s purely a visual crime novel about detectives. You don’t have much say in solving the problems; you’re mostly a participant in the journey. I don’t say that to discredit the game. I just want to set expectations.
But the format gets in the way. You’re usually interviewing people, and that takes the form of asking questions, looking at things, and thinking. Sometimes you’ll get a list of questions and just click through them. You ask about one thing, and eventually the person you’re talking to starts repeating themselves. So you start asking about something else, and when you stop getting fresh information, you start thinking, and that unlocks more. It’s not far from the format of the first two games, but I’m not sure it was worth keeping for the sake of continuity.
Leaving aside the murder issue, Emi is a more cozy detective game. The subject is grim, but the story is not told with much tension. I think telling you what the story is NO have compared to what you might expect could spoil the surprise more than telling you what it does, so I’ll refrain from doing so. Instead, I’ll illustrate it this way:
There’s an early scene in the game where you’re waiting for a bus. It’s not a timed thing. It doesn’t really affect the plot. To get through it, you do the same thing you do everywhere else: search through menus to try to find options that will move things forward. It’s long, peaceful, and slightly comical. It’s not filler, nor is it significant. It’s just more time you can spend with the protagonist in a way that makes him feel believable.
And there are several scenes like that throughout the movie. Conversations with characters that really have no meaning or significance. They are writing without any significance. There’s a scene where a character is constantly wincing in pain, and when you find out why, you discover that it wasn’t anything crucial or disturbing. The whole story could have been told much more concisely, but the movie revels in introducing you to its world. Maybe a little too much.
It’s not even that it’s tedious. Usually when you’re trapped in a scene, there’s something fascinating about it. The characters that are so eagerly introduced are really intriguing and well-rounded. Suspicion falls on so many of them that it’s basic to wonder what their blind spots are and how they tie into the overall mystery.
The main problem with this story is its astonishing lack of focus. It throws threads in all directions and raises so many questions that the ending has to work really tough to tie them up. Several don’t wrap up in this knot in a satisfying way. When all is said and done, it’s a bit of a mess, but it manages to find gold where it counts.
Emi spends so much time setting up dominoes so that it can satisfyingly knock them down at the end. That works in a lot of media, but video games require a lot more time than a movie or even most novels. Expecting a player to stand at a bus stop for part of the story so that the ending hits them a little harder is asking a lot.
No matter what I think about it Emi overall, I’m glad I experienced it. In the 80s and 90s, publishers paid a lot of attention to whether a game was worth localizing. We lost a lot of RPGs in the West because games in that genre sold like boxes of bitten fingernails, and many titles didn’t stand a chance because they were too Japanese. Emio – Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club is both very niche and very Japanese, but Nintendo still thought it was worth bringing overseas. They probably aren’t even anticipating record sales; it’s just less risky to try in today’s industry.
Having said that, I’m not sure Emi will accompany me in the same way as Paranormasight: The Seven Secrets of Honjo will. If anything sticks in my mind, it’s his ending, which is so incredibly impactful, in part because you spend so much time immersed in the very human side of this mystery. It’s also impactful because it’s incredibly murky in a way that the rest of the narrative only hints at. You’ll have to do some digging before you find the body.
