Media in Review: Famicom Detective Club - Emio, the Smiling Man
The madmen actually did it. After the remakes of the first two FDC games a couple years ago, Yoshio Sakamoto and MAGES are back with a completely original game, the first in 35 years. And it's...good! It's got some quirks that some people aren't going to jive with, and the ending is definitely going to be controversial, but by and large it's a good murder mystery that anyone who has interest in the genre should check it out.
The premise is pretty straightforward, at least at first: a boy has been murdered, and found with a paper bag over his head. This matches an urban legend called Emio - The Smiling Man. He appears before someone crying, and if they don't laugh at the goofy smiling face drawn on his paper bag, he strangles them and leaves them with "a smile that lasts forever." But the game quickly introduces a few wrinkles - The Smiling Man of legend only targets girls, and may have been based on a series of actual murders that happened 18 years prior to the story. There are a few people of interest from those cases that have since gone missing; do they have anything to do with the current case? Are they even still alive 18 years later? Once it has all its cards on the table, it's a genuinely neat story, but it should be said that the ending is pretty abrupt. After 8-10 hours of fairly slow-burn investigation, the game just kind of...ends. Sure, it does its best to wrap up the loose ends, and there's a roughly hour-long epilogue to help flesh things out (things that probably should have just been in the main plot, to be clear), but if you're a "Destination" over "Journey" kind of person, it'll probably leave a sour taste in your mouth.
As for the game itself, it's an extremely faithful retread of the FDC remakes, which were themselves basically unchanged from the NES originals. There's much better tutorialization this time around, but this is going to be the largest sticking point for most people. If you approach it like you would, say, Phoenix Wright, you're going to find it arbitrary and annoying - how was I supposed to know I had to stop talking and "think" or look at something in the background to continue the conversation? But if you approach it as something closer to a conversation simulator rather than expecting the game to just dispense all of its information after picking each dialogue option until it repeats, it works a bit better. Sometimes you have to change topics, or take a moment to breathe and reflect on what's been said before things continue and yeah, it's arbitrary as fuck! But it's not so bad once you get into the game's flow, and if you have any doubts, check out the demo to see if it clicks with you.
The other main thing that struck me is how extremely...un-Nintendo this game is. Emio is a dark game, openly "going there" on a lot of topics that you would never expect from a first-party title. The main story openly talks about a middle schooler committing suicide and pretty much every character in the plot is drenched in survivor's guilt of some kind, but the epilogue is a whole different beast. It opens with a warning that it's going to cover some darker stuff, and then almost immediately hits you with a pretty direct depiction of child abuse, patricide, and self-mutilation. Like, not "oh yeah this happened and it was tragic," we're talking "the game flashes white and makes a real chunky splat sound every time you advance the text box while he's bashing his father's skull in." Hell, at one point, there's a character who literally turns to the camera and says "Don't trust the cops. They won't help you." And she's proven right not once, but TWICE. The vibes are wild, and for a company as fundamentally conservative as Nintendo is, this is a very strange piece of fiction.
If I had to rank them, I'd probably say Emio is in the middle of the three FDC games, although certainly closer to The Girl Who Stands Behind than The Missing Heir. But the fact that it got made at all is incredible, and I really hope the series gets to continue. I'm sure it's going to bomb (or at least underperform) because...well, it's a 35 year old Japanese adventure game at its heart, retails for $50, and the remakes didn't exactly set the world on fire when they came out in 2021. But who knows! No one ever thought the remakes would amount to anything either, and yet here we are. So here's to another adventure with these kids, hopefully one with a slightly more complete payoff.