It’s hard to overstate how bold a choice it was for Nintendo to greenlight a new Famicom Detective Club game 35 years after the franchise’s last entry. Sure, we got pretty remakes of The Missing Heir and The Girl That Stands Behind in 2022, bringing Western audiences these obscure outliers in Nintendo’s history for the first time, but the continuation with Emio – The Smiling Man is another matter entirely. It’s what producer Yoshio Sakamoto (yes, the Metroid guy) called “the culmination of everything my most trusted colleagues and I have learned and the ideas we’ve accumulated from working on the previous games and their remakes.” In other words, its reason to exist is to tell the ultimate Famicom Detective Club story.
Emio is—for the most part—not that story. It’s serviceable enough as a murder mystery visual novel, but that alone is a disappointment given the context of this release. The game needed to be a home run in order to pay off the franchise’s dormant decades and the viral marketing campaign that had everyone freaking out over what horror-tinged “M” rated game Nintendo was uncharacteristically cooking up. Ironically, it nails that latter criterion, though not until a post-game storyline.
Emio begins two years after The Missing Heir, with our player-named protagonist and fan favorite Ayumi Tachibana—both now 19—more comfortable in their detective roles. We swap between the two characters on their quest to solve the serial murder case of a teenage boy that links back to cases 18 years prior where the titular killer left his trademark paper bag with a smile drawn on it over his victims’ heads. Their path to the truth is fraught with stories of grief and trauma (both new and resurfaced), leading to a fairly standard murder mystery plot that’s propped up by strong character writing and a moderately interesting urban legend bearing over it all.
The formula could’ve worked well enough at the roughly seven-hour runtime of Emio’s predecessors, but the team at Mages was intent on making this the biggest entry in the franchise without having enough twists and exciting beats in the story to support that length. The result is sluggish pacing that regularly engages in 15+ minute long conversations with individual side characters that ultimately only nudge the needle on the investigation. The handful of more energetic plot beats get smothered quickly beneath a story that takes way too long to get to them and immediately reverts to seemingly endless dialogues afterward.
Some plotlines and characters are all but dropped for hours before resurfacing as crucial, which makes it tough to feel particularly engaged in their plot relevance, let alone their personage. Meanwhile, we spend superfluous time with a few side characters who aren’t uninteresting (one prominent character reads as a meta-narrative on fan obsession over Ayumi Tachibana) but offer little to the overarching Emio mystery and don’t get proper payoffs. If the developers massively trimmed the fat from the game’s laborious dialogue, it would have given the story’s powerful moments more punch rather than appearing as fleeting sparks amidst our adulting detectives spinning their wheels.
There is an outlier, though: the extra chapter that unlocks upon completing the game. This hour of content is a briskly paced saga that fills in the many gaps and plot holes left by the main story. It’s filled with Emio’s most evocative imagery, highest production value scenes, and boldest writing (dark enough that the game actively warns you about the heaviness of its content; this is where that “M” rating and promise of horror kick in). And this is before a surprise I’d be loathe to spoil for potential players but can assuredly say is some of the best content in this style I’ve seen in years.
It’s content that frankly should’ve been weaved into the core narrative but works as one of the most powerful pieces of media I’ve experienced this year on its own. This alone elevates everything that came before it and proves that quality will always outshine quantity. It’s frankly shocking that Mages and Nintendo were content putting their most expensive production behind content that many players could easily pass over. If the entirety of Emio were on this level of quality, I’d be praising it as a masterpiece.
Emio does extremely well at cataloguing and recapping information. Every character and revelation becomes recorded in a notebook available to reference at any time. “Review” segments at the end of some chapters ask the player to use this notebook, multiple choice prompts, and the system keyboard to fill in blanks regarding information they recently learned. These are easy enough, and making a mistake only results in correction, but their purpose is to make sure players grasp important plot points, and they play this role admirably. There’s also an impressive optional recap when loading a save file which highlights recent plot points and the characters’ current objectives, so it’s easy to jump back in if you have to step away for a few days.
Emio’s gameplay is reminiscent of its predecessors, at least at a glance. You have a list of actions for interacting with characters and the environment or stopping to think about current proceedings. You need to swap between topics and actions in tandem with the ebbs and flows of discussions. When working at its best, it makes you feel like a proper investigator. When it’s not, the process can feel obtuse. Still, it’s never a stalling point as was common in prior Famicom Detective Club games because—save for one chapter—you’re not given the ability to freely roam between locales. There are limited options in a given moment to progress dialogue, so trial and error is kept to a minimum. While it may sound counterintuitive, going for a more linear approach proved to be a massive boon for Famicom Detective Club, even if it’s a bare-minimum shakeup to embrace modernity.
Production-wise, Emio is a slight bump above the remake duology. It retains their elegantly simple art style and full Japanese-language voice acting (no English dub here, sadly) while making characters more animated and expressive. However, there’s an uninspired sterility to the environments that makes them utterly forgettable. It breaks from this art direction in its final few hours, but up until that point you’re stuck in environments that are painfully boring. I believe this to be an intentional move to keep Emio feeling grounded, but it actually does the opposite because it’s less interesting than reality. It’s not as if character designs are picking up the slack on art direction, though at least they’re infused with personality by the writers.
The soundtrack suffers from a similar issue. The rudimentary music and sound effects are akin to those that would’ve come out of the late 1980s remade with modern MIDI tracks, which makes Emio immediately feel dated. This “old school charm” vibe worked for the remakes given that they were calling back to their NES-era counterparts, but it holds back this sequel. In the late game and especially the bonus chapter, I felt the music offered more complexity and interesting ideas, but until that point it showed a reluctance to move beyond what previously worked for the series.
I do want to give props for how easy the game is to control, something that’s easy to take for granted with visual novels. Maneuvering through the interrogation menu is snappy and the game helps guide your eye to important selections with orange text. The typical suite of visual novel features you’d expect are all present here too, such as a text log, fast-forwarding through previously viewed text, and a well-paced auto-play. My only complaint is that it’s too easy to accidentally tap the left bumper in handheld mode, triggering a forced skip of text; the inability to remap features is an oversight given the form factor of the Joy-Con controllers as I would’ve preferred to relegate this function I found obtrusive somewhere less prone to human error.
As I watched the credits of Emio role, my heart sank that I didn’t love the game as much as I’d had hoped and would need to convey as much in a review. I enjoyed both of the remakes and want to see Famicom Detective Club and other obscure Nintendo franchises thrive. Thus, I can’t overstate how elated I was with the barnstormer of a bonus chapter the game subsequently greeted me with, enough so that it single-handedly increased my opinion of the story and overall game. Still, it can’t overwrite how Emio’s bloat makes it a bit of a wet paper bag before that glorious final hurrah. Emio’s by no means a bad visual novel, but it’s also not worthy of waking its franchise from a 35-year hiatus.
