Adventure Corner ~ Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club

Welcome to Adventure Corner, a column where members of the RPGamer staff can give their thoughts, impressions, and pseudo-reviews for various adventure titles that don’t come under our usual coverage. Adventure Corner is aimed at delivering opinions on a wide range of titles including visual novels, point-and-click adventures, investigative mysteries, and so forth.

In this edition of the column we take a look at Nintendo’s continued revival of the Famicom Detective Club adventure series with a brand new title in Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club.

Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club

One of the more unexpected entries into the Nintendo Switch library was 2021’s Famicom Detective Club duology, remakes of the 1988 and 1989 Japan-only Famicom adventure titles, which saw them finally make their western debuts. The releases were strong enough to encourage Nintendo, in partnership with renowned visual novel developer Mages Inc., to create a brand new third game in the series, Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club.

Emio – The Smiling Man takes place after the events of the previous games, putting players in the role of the same young assistant investigator at the Utsugi Detective Agency. However, the story is fully standalone and doesn’t require any knowledge of the previous games. It sees the Utsugi Detective Agency called upon to assist with the investigation of the death of a middle school boy, only to uncover that it bears striking similarity to a series of unsolved murders eighteen years prior where each of the victims had paper bags over their heads and relate to an urban legend known as Emio, the Smiling Man.

Players dive into a disturbing set of murders.

It follows the same gameplay structure as the other titles, with the player character — and sometimes fellow assistant Ayumi — advancing the story by interacting with the various persons of interest and witnesses across a mixture of locations. Progressing events is generally a simple matter of pressing the correct conversational triggers from the menu on the left, with a few point-and-clicking elements when players might need to look at something in particular. There are also a few more hints than the previous titles, with the “think” option offering a bit more direct guidance and certain words being highlighted.

There are a few places where players might get a bit stuck, but usually only briefly as it never takes too long to run through all of the various options available. Each chapter ends with a review session to test players on what they have learned during the investigation, which makes use of the extensive notebook that gets filled out as players learn more details about the case, however minor. There’s nothing that blocks progress if players answer incorrectly, though the player’s answers and previous actions are rated in a bonus post-game report card.

The Emio case is on the whole an engaging mystery that may not have a huge number of surprising twists and turns, but the game greatly succeeds in its emotional storytelling. There’s a good mix of characters all operating with their own situations in mind, and the impacts of the events both past and present are very keenly felt. The investigative relationship between the protagonist and Ayumi works well, though it’s worth stating that their personal character development is covered in the previous two games. There is an epilogue chapter including a fully animated sequence, which dives into what led the culprit into their actions. It is heartbreaking, and thoroughly yet thoughtfully sobering in that it does not attempt to excuse their action, but shows what led to such tragedy.

Gameplay is much the same as the Famicom Detective Club remakes.

Takeshi Abo’s music lends a strong audio backing to the game, with a good mix of catchy tracks during investigations and more haunting pieces as the darker moments come to light. The piano over the end credits in particular adds to the sobering conclusion. Meanwhile, the title is fully and solidly voiced throughout in Japanese, which aids the levity and emotion where appropriate. Carrying on the same style as the remakes, Emio – The Smiling Man features crisp backgrounds and character art that helps distinguish each character without trying to do too much, and the mostly first-person view and small character animations are used to decent effect.

Famicom Detective Club clearly gained plenty of much-deserved fans with the release of its remakes, and Emio – The Smiling Man is a worthy continuance of its revival. It offers an engaging story with appropriately speedy pacing that engages the brain without overtaxing it and there’s no bizarre leaps of logic required. Newcomers to the series can happily jump in at any point, but after the remakes showed that there’s plenty of modern appeal from its classic gameplay design, it’s great to see another title carrying the legacy on.