Famicom Detective Club
Developer Nintendo, Mages Publisher Nintendo Format Switch Release Out now
Switch
Given the current craze for relitigating murders of yesteryear, the decision to dust off cold cases from the Nintendo archives makes perfect sense. Admittedly, these are not the salacious didtheydoits of Serial or Making A Murderer, but the cut-and-dried events of two Famicom visual novels previously untranslated in the west. Released in 1988 and 1989, the duology contributed to a wave of digital detectives (begun by Yuji Hori’s The Portopia Serial Murder Case in 1983) and pushed Nintendo down an uncharacteristically murky path. A world of stabbings, suicides and – gasp – smoking is far removed from the Mushroom Kingdom; it’s telling that Famicom Detective Club was the work of Nintendo R&D1, the home of the haunting Metroid and the chaotic evil of Wario. (If any mascot will go full Joe Exotic, it’s surely him.)
For Nintendo completists these remakes might not be as sought after as the fabled Mother 3 translation, but Mages’ lavish production will turn heads. Famicom’s simple sprites fill out into 3D models that resemble still illustrations in screenshots, only to reveal surprising physicality with a sudden flick of the hair or the faint wheeze of a monk’s pot belly. There’s an elegance and effort you don’t always see in visual novels, from its handsomely drawn flashback sequences to the simple sight of a policeman poking at bushes in the distance, helping to sell the idea of a world that exists beyond its succession of static panels. In the second game, The Girl Who Stands Behind, the artists are particularly effective at evoking the liminal oddness of being in a school after hours; that nervous naughtiness that, in this tale, provides fertile conditions for a chilling urban legend.
Mages’ revamped presentation goes some way to injecting life into writing that’s unusually straight by Nintendo localisation standards. That’s partly due to the utilitarian nature of interrogation (although Ace Attorney’s Shu Takumi managed it), but it’s also a hangover from a story born in interactive storytelling’s ’80s infancy. Certainly, the second tale fares better on this front, with a trip into a Yakuza-ish clubland adding quirkier faces and a fun running joke about the sniffy staff dismissing the concerns of the student body. With its spiralling body count, the first game perhaps has more momentum, but it makes the classic Midsomer Murders mistake of leaving too few suspects standing at the end and relies on a contrived twist that all but the doziest detective will see ambling towards them.
Given the effort made to revitalise Famicom Detective Club’s withered exterior, it’s a shame a hammer wasn’t taken to its equally unstable foundations. The figurative bones of this mystery – we wouldn’t spoil the literal ones – are lifted from a detective playbook long out of print. Solving each case is much like the investigative portion of an Ace Attorney game: you visit locations, quiz suspects and occasionally spy a clue in the environment. This is controlled via a now-arcane verb sheet that asks you to ‘call’ characters to the screen to question them and offers you the vague option to ‘think’ on what you’ve heard to push your internal logic forwards. The cold, mechanical sequencing of this makes you feel less a boy detective than a robot in a gumshoe mac being programmed to sniff out justice.
Idiosyncrasies can be mastered, but enough frustrations remain to derail both cases. The verb interface often has to be applied in counterintuitive ways to unlock the next story-furthering interaction. In the middle of a conversation you might be required – with no visual or verbal clue – to look at the person you’re quizzing to see that they are nervous and consequently open up a new avenue of discussion. Or instead of asking a question and getting a full answer you may have to repeat the question four times in a row to get the answer in four parts. In the most egregious roadblock you must look at a specific part of a character’s body – something neither game asks you to do before or after that point. Unless you cotton on to the abstruse logic of any given moment, there’s no choice but to run laps of every menu option until you hit upon a solution by accident. A few new prompting lines of dialogue could have worked wonders.
This is especially puzzling given the otherwise low barrier to entry. A few objects can be picked up and shown to jog memories, but the meat of your job is listening to gossip in location A to unlock a dialogue option in location B and repeating the process until you return to your office to recap the day. At very few points do you do any detecting with the information. Instead, facts pile up in a rudimentary notebook tab (the one screen that looks torn from an NES game) until you’re asked towards the end of The Missing Heir to type in the name of whodunnit. Anticlimactic doesn’t do it justice. The Girl Who Stands Behind adds a few question-andanswer segments where you pluck names from the notebook, but it’s still obvious stuff with no punishment for fumbling through. Placed beside the ingenuity of Obra Dinn’s nautical knottiness or Sam Barlow’s keyword sifting, you feel every one of Famicom Detective Club’s 32 years.
A lack of interaction needn’t be a problem. A good story well told is the backbone of the best visual novels – see Mages’ own Steins;Gate for a great example. And yes, there’s still charm in these grounded tales of inheritance disputes and blackmail; the kind of gentle thrillers that Nintendo would later revisit in its work with Cing (itself an alumnus of the ’80s detective boom). Why take such efforts to unearth them in a remaster that goes above and beyond in so many ways, only to leave basic flaws intact? A puzzle for future generations of podcasters, perhaps.
You feel less a boy detective than a robot in a gumshoe mac being programmed to sniff out justice