Review: Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club

I can’t say I was expecting remakes of the long-dormant Famicom Detective Club series, let alone a completely new entry. That’s to say nothing of how it was announced. The series lived and died on the Famicom Disk System (excluding some dalliances on the Super Famicom).

In a way, the visual novels feel very representative of the genre’s heyday on early Japanese home computers. Detectives were a popular subject, and the Famicom Disk System had a handful of its own. Here in North America, visual novels, in general, are niche, and retro detective stories are a niche within a niche. So, it’s refreshing to not only see these games for the first time in English, but also get to join in the revival.

Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club feels very much like a continuation of both the style and spirit of its predecessors, for better and worse. Before I even start talking about it, you probably already know if you’re on board to check it out.

Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club (Switch [Reviewed])
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: August 29, 2024
MSRP: $49.99

Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club takes place a few years after The Missing Heir (which is the first game released and the second game chronologically). The trio at Utsugi Detective Agency gets called into action by the police to help them with a murder. A schoolboy was found strangled. More unusually, a paper bag with a smiling face drawn on it was placed over his head.

The paper bag is referenced in a local urban legend about a paper bag-clad man who promises crying girls a way to smile forever before strangling them and leaving them wearing his signature smiling bag. However, more realistically, it harkens back to a series of murders 18 years prior to the start of the game, where girls were found strangled in the grinning headwear.

The plot gets a few wrenches thrown into the gears. First, the original serial murder victims were all girls, whereas this one was a boy. The boy was also strangled with a rope or cord, while the girls were bare-handed. However, the fact that the original victims were found wearing paper bags was kept out of the press, so the likelihood of a copycat is rather low. So, it’s time to pound the pavement.

I want to stress that Emio is not an investigative game. It’s purely a mystery visual novel about detectives. You don’t have much agency when it comes to figuring things out; you’re mostly along for the ride. I don’t say this to disparage the game. I just want to set expectations.

However, the format does get in the way. You generally go around interrogating people, and this takes the form of asking questions, looking at stuff, and thinking. You’re sometimes given a list of questions, and you kind of just click through them. You ask about one subject, and eventually, the person you’re talking to just starts repeating themself. So you start asking about something else, and when you stop getting new information, you think, and that unlocks more. It’s not a far cry from the format of the first two games, but I’m not sure it was worth keeping it for continuity’s sake.

Murder aside, Emio is kind of a cozier detective game. The subject matter is grim, but the story isn’t told with much tension. I think telling you what the story doesn’t have in comparison to what you might expect could ruin the surprises more than telling you what it does, so I’m going to refrain from doing that. Instead, I’ll illustrate it like this:

There is an early scene in the game where you wait for a bus. This isn’t a timed thing. It doesn’t have really much impact on the narrative. To get through it, you do the exact same thing you do everywhere else: you poke through the menu to try and find the options that move things forward. It’s long, quiet, and somewhat comical. It’s not padding, nor is it significant. It’s just more time to spend with the protagonist in a way that makes them relatable.

And there are a few of these scenes throughout. Conversations with characters that don’t really have any meaning or significance. There are characters without any meaning or significance. There’s a scene where a character keeps wincing in pain, and when you find out the reason for it, you discover that it wasn’t anything important or concerning. The whole story could have been told much more concisely, but it relishes in bringing you into the world. Perhaps a little too much.

It’s not even that it’s boring. Usually, when you’re trapped in a scene, there’s something fascinating about it. The characters that it’s so keen on showing are legitimately interesting and well-rounded. Suspicion is cast on so many of them that it’s easy to wonder what dark spots they have and how they tie into the overall mystery.

The main problem with its storytelling is its astounding lack of focus. It throws threads in all directions and raises so many questions, that the conclusion has to do a lot of scrambling to tie them together. A few don’t really wind up in that knot to any satisfying extent. When all is said and done it’s a bit of a mess, but manages to find paydirt where it counts.

Emio spends so much of its runtime setting up dominos just so it can satisfyingly knock them down at the end. That works in a lot of media, but video games take a lot longer to get through than a movie or even most novels. Expecting a player to stand at a bus stop for a portion of the story just so the ending hits marginally harder is a big ask.

Regardless of how I feel about Emio overall, I’m happy to have experienced it. Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, publishers put a lot of thought into whether or not a game was worth localizing. We missed out on a lot of RPGs in the West because the games in the genre sold about as well as boxes of pre-chewed fingernails, and many titles didn’t have a chance because they were too Japanese. Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club is both very niche and very Japanese, but Nintendo still found it worthwhile bringing it across the pond. They probably aren’t even forecasting record sales; it’s just less risky to attempt it in today’s industry.

With that said, I’m not sure Emio is going to stick with me in the same way that Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo will. If anything does cement itself in my mind, it will be its conclusion, which is so incredibly impactful, partly because you’ve spent so much time immersed in the very human side of its mystery. It’s also impactful because it’s incredibly dark in a way the rest of the narrative only hinted at. You’ll just have to do some digging before you find the body.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}