I’ve been curious about the Famicom Detective Club Switch remakes ever since they were announced.
Remakes of two visual novel adventure games developed and published by Nintendo back in 1988 and 1989 respectively, they were quite unexpected and also resulted in the games being available in English for the first time.
Sadly, there’s no physical version with English, so you can only get them digitally (and they never go on sale). This year, I decided to finally stop waiting and pick them up. So let’s talk about the first game in the series, Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir.
You play a young man with amnesia who soon learns he’s a private detective and was investigating a suspicious death before the accident that led to his memory loss. And so, without even knowing all the details he should have known, he resumes his investigation into a case that soon spirals into something much larger.
It’s a type of game I generally describe as a visual novel / adventure game hybrid, where you’ll spend a majority of your time reading but have adventure game gameplay as well.
In this case, most of the gameplay is handled through a menu that lets you choose to move between locations, call out to someone, talk (which then brings up a list of available topics to ask about), examine things by inspecting the background or picking key things to look at from a list, and a few other commands that show up depending on the situation. In general, your goal is to question witnesses and look for clues as you progress through the story.
That might sound simple, but it’s not always clear what you need to do to progress. I wouldn’t call it hard, since there’s no fail state, but it often comes down to a tedious process of trying every option and then trying every option again.
For example, you might need to exhaust a character’s dialogue, then look around, then talk to another character and exhaust all of their dialogue, then look at the first character, and then choose one of the dialogue options again to finally get new dialogue.
The “skip read” option makes it a bit less annoying, although it took me a while to figure out how to use it. Not to be confused with the force skip option, you can skip read dialogue only if you’ve both turned it on from the options menu and have the dialogue set to auto-advance. That speeds things up to make those trial-and-error conversations faster to get through, but it still started to wear on me after a while.
On the other hand, there are also a few sections near the end where you have to type in your answer, which I thought was pretty neat! It made sure I was actually paying attention to what was going on and understood the clues.
Now let’s talk about the story. The story is what kept me invested despite the occasional tedium of the gameplay. It’s a murder mystery that gets more complicated as it goes on (with hints of the paranormal as the local villagers insist a curse is responsible), and while at first I was just mildly curious about it, it had my full attention by the end. There were several points where I intended to take a break, only for the chapter cliffhanger to keep me reading through to the next one.
A few parts felt underutilized, without a clear explanation, but the majority of the mystery came together in a satisfactory way in the end. I really enjoyed it, and I’m glad I finally played Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir.
I’ve already moved on to the second game, and – if all goes as planned – we’ll be closing out this mystery month celebration with three mystery reviews next week instead of just one on Friday! Don’t forget, you have until the end of May to leave comments on any Celebrating All Things Mysterious and earn points toward a prize at the end!
