Operation Backlog Completion 2026

Celebrating All Things Mysterious: Mato Anomalies

 Celebrating All Things Mysterious, Reviews, Video games  6 Responses »  Tagged with: ,
May 292024
 

A couple months ago, I saw the physical Switch copy of Mato Anomalies was on sale for such a good price that I decided to take a chance on it despite its mixed reviews.

Mato Anomalies is a turn-based RPG about a private detective named Doe who is called upon to investigate a mysterious substance being sold on the black market.

His investigation, however, leads him into an alternate dimension, where he comes under attack by monsters. A mysterious man named Gram saves him and says it’s his mission to destroy those monsters. Since Doe’s case appears to be linked to them, the two form a reluctant partnership.

That sets up the core gameplay of Mato Anomalies. You’ll explore the futuristic, cyberpunk city as Doe, with some areas being full 3D environments to explore (including cats and dogs you can pet) while others are 2D backgrounds used just for storytelling purposes. Once the main quest or a side quest reveals the presence of supernatural involvement, you head into the dungeon and play as Gram and other party members who join you along the way.

Dungeons are fairly straightforward, with occasional simple puzzles and side paths to follow to find items. Combat can be tough and required me to think about strategy instead of just attacking. Health is a shared pool, while other stats are individual, which took a little getting used to. Each party member has two different weapon types, as well as a skill tree, so there’s decent room for customization.

And if you really like the combat, there are also random dungeons to explore for extra rewards, as well as a challenge area for tougher battles.

While this gives Gram the bulk of the gameplay, Doe actually has a unique gameplay mechanic as well. Certain quests will require you to get information from a character’s mind, at which point Doe can perform a Mind/Hack.

Mind/Hack is a card game in which you must pick a deck, each of which has unique properties, and use it to defeat your opponent. I found it difficult at first, but it was a lot of fun once I got used to it. However, it feels somewhat underutilized. There’s no actual deckbuilding, and side quests lead to dungeons far more often than Mind/Hack sequences, so it feels almost like an afterthought.

At a glance, Mato Anomalies looks impressive for a game from a small team. However, the Switch version at least suffers from major performance issues. I came to expect a slight delay any time I opened a menu or talked to an NPC, and the game crashed frequently enough that I learned to save as often as possible.

I also have to admit I had trouble following the story. This is partly because the game throws a ton of terminology at you, and it’s not always clear if it’s something new to the characters or if they already know what it means. The plot is also somewhat… esoteric. It has a high concept story it wants to tell, and so while the moment-to-moment beats might be clear enough, it’s difficult to keep a good grasp on the overarching mystery.

(Speaking of which, I felt like the “detective” aspect of the story was increasingly diminished as the stakes got higher, but I was committed to playing it for mystery month by that point.)

Despite my confusion about what exactly was going on, it has some genuinely great moments and cool ideas, especially near the end. The party members are likeable, and each has some good personal scenes that you can see if you talk to them in the city, as well.

Update: Sadly, the final boss has such a difficulty spike that I put completing the game on hold, at least for the time being.

Mato Anomalies is not a game for everyone. It’s not especially polished, it has some frustrating parts, and it’s easy to get lost in the story. At the same time, it’s much better than I expected for the bargain bin price I found it for. This is one of those games where it left me interested to see what the developer might do with a similar game in the future.

Celebrating All Things Mysterious: Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind

 Celebrating All Things Mysterious, Reviews, Video games  6 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
May 272024
 

Last time, we talked about the remake of the first Famicom Detective Club game, The Missing Heir.

Now let’s continue on and talk about the second.

Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind is actually a prequel, and they’re set up so that you can play them in either order. (If you play one, you can carry over the name you used for the protagonist to the other, too.) I went with release order and played The Missing Heir first, but I can see how playing the prequel first might increase the tension at times. It’s up to you.

From the beginning, The Girl Who Stands Behind is the creepier of the two games. While The Missing Heir had slight hints of potentially supernatural occurrences, they’re much stronger in its prequel.

The case begins with the discovery of a murdered high school girl, and it isn’t long before you learn that before her death, she was investigating the school’s urban legend about a ghost that will appear standing behind you. With that as your one lead, you begin digging deeper into the origins of the legend and what the victim might have learned about it.

For the most part, the gameplay is identical to that of the first game. You’ll still be picking commands from the menu, inspecting backgrounds for clues, and running through a list of dialogue options and other actions to figure out how to progress. Progression didn’t feel quite as opaque in this one, although there were still a few times when I was stumped until I found the action I needed to try or re-try to make things happen.

Sadly, there aren’t any parts where you have to type your answer. Instead, there are a couple parts where you’re asked questions and have to choose the correct answer from a list.

The story was interesting, and I loved the creepier tone, although it lacked some of the excitement of The Missing Heir’s story. It also didn’t feel quite as tight, with more loose ends and aspects that should have been explored in more detail, plus the odd choice to add ambiguity right at the very end.

Click for The Girl Who Stands Behind spoilers
The implication at the very end that the girl died from being hit by the car and therefore might have been a ghost after all when she was seen at the window was interesting… but if they wanted to take it in that direction, I think they should have explored the supernatural aspect a bit more thoroughly so it felt earned.

I also feel like we should have learned the connection between Hibino and Urabe during the investigation, instead of just having it told to us at the end.

But while I’d say I enjoyed The Missing Heir more overall, The Girl Who Stands Behind was still a good mystery with a lot of excellent points. If you like one of the Famicom Detective Club remakes, you’ll probably like the other.

Now, when can we have a third Famicom Detective Club game…?

Celebrating All Things Mysterious: Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir

 Celebrating All Things Mysterious, Reviews, Video games  6 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
May 242024
 

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!

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