This is a midgame review as I've done before. I try not to write them because it forces me to finish the game, but I have to start with the elephant in the room: I'm not sure I want to finish this game?

Famicom Detective Club is an old series from Nintendo - as the name implies, the games originally came out on the Famicom, the Japanese NES, and didn't make their way to the rest of the world until the 2021 remasters that gave them a full makeover for the Switch. The first two games, The Missing Heir and The Girl Who Stands Behind, came out in a bundle, and were followed in 2023 by a new title, Emio the Smiling Man.

It's an absolutely beautiful remake. The picture attached (from Emio) doesn't do it justice - you need to see this animated. To me this is really the next stage of visual novel graphics. A lot of work clearly went into this, especially with how many different scenes there are (sometimes the camera even switches in a scene, showing a different perspective just for the sake of it. They didn't have to go that far!)

Unfortunately, beyond the surface, you are quickly confronted with an adversarial game.

I bought the bundle when the remakes came out, and already felt the stories were a bit... retro? Nintendoesque? The Missing Heir really wasn't anything to write home about. The game wasn't too long (as expected as it was a NES game and a cartridge back then was like 48kb of space) and the twist was long predictable. I mean, the heir is missing and you wake up with amnesia at the bottom of a cliff. I followed it up with the Girl who Stands Behind and to be honest I don't remember any of it lol, I'll have to play it again. Or maybe I never did - I have it on my switch but I legit do not remember anything about it.

The Girl Who Stands Behind though marks the DNA of the series. From then on, the games started to follow the "urban legend comes true" formula. TGWSB starts with a (fictional) urban legend about a girl who stands behind you in the school corridors and kills you or something. For context, Emio also seems to take place right after the other 3 games (there were 4 games in total before Emio, but only 2 have been translated to English. One was on satellaview and hasn't been preserved) so it's set in the 1980s with the same protags as the previous games.

Emio continues the formula with a fictional urban legend about a man wearing a paper bag with a smiling face drawn on it. He is called Emio by the children for the initials of Smiling Man in Japanese. He finds crying girls and asks them if they want to stop being sad. If you say yes, he kills you and puts a paper bag on your head with a smiling face drawn on it. I don't know, I just don't think fictional urban legends are interesting. The point of an urban legend is that you don't know if it's real or not. A fictional urban legend is obviously not real. It also lacks the memetic factor where it morphs or gets fleshed out with time, instead it all comes from a writer who simulates a legend from their room.

I had higher hopes seeing that Emio had been developed in the 2020s. Instead, it seems to want to follow the formula to a T. The themes are certainly darker - the missing heir was kinda "childish" not as a pejorative, but moreso that it really felt like I was playing detective instead of being a serious investigator. You're 17! What are you doing investigating a murder! You have math class!

Emio though puts you right in the action with the discovery of a dead 15 year old boy in the first minutes of the game. This is where the game started to irk me. I thought, does he need to be 15? Does this story need to happen with children? I'm not against exploring these themes completely, just that I didn't really trust Nintendo to handle it appropriately. That's not exactly their area of expertise. My suspicions started to mount even more when they introduced a character that's suspiciously silent on a missing girl, a student at his school. I thought that's a red herring for sure, it's too big. They want you to think he's a predator, and I didn't really like that either. Again, it needs to be handled carefully. This guy digs a deeper grave for himself every time he's asked about the girl when the only question the detectives need to ask is "stop playing around, you realize this is making you the prime suspect, now tell me what happened between you and this girl?" I'm not at the reveal yet but I'm sure it's something mundane like he was harsh to her but didn't intend to. He's the "loud guy who cares a whole lot" trope.

In terms of gameplay, the game also started to lose my interest. It's come to a point where I don't really want to play more. I don't trust Nintendo to give me a satisfying story (the whole "oooh urban legend comes to liiiiife" bit is really not doing it for me sorry, at least use a real urban legend for it like bigfoot or something). The gameplay takes place through a menu - reminiscent of Portopia again; after all, both series started out in the same era. Except Detective Club has no puzzles or thinking involved.

So it gets me asking, do you really need gameplay? I would have been fine with it as a kinetic VN with just text. That's what it is at its core and in fact it would have been more expeditive. You find yourself going through menus over and over again because you only get like 3-4 lines of dialogue upon clicking the right button. So you have to click it again and again to get the full dialogue, until the character has nothing new to say, then use Think to know what to do next, then click some buttons again and again. Oftentimes you have to Ask->Think->Ask, which is why Think is not a hint system but an integral part of the game. There's no deducing involved or puzzle solving, just tap Think to know what to do next. A kinetic VN would have removed that artificial brake.

Speaking of, there's too many protags. You have MC-kun, whom you name (so I'm not sure if he's the same MC in the remasters, legit don't remember), Ayumi, who is a staple of the series, and Utsugi, the detective agency owner - but he's conveniently always on a business trip somewhere. Again, it feels like they haven't really left the 1980s mystery game design school despite over 40 years experience gained since then. Emio was the same writer as the original games! He's still at Nintendo! Periodically, you come back to the detective agency and have to answer a quiz on the facts of the case so far, except you can't really fail it. This reminds me of Jake Hunter, a terrible detective series also from the 80s, so I have to assume the quizzes that made sure you were paying attention were commonplace back in the day. But this is a 2023 game!

You switch between Ayumi and the MC but it's not really a perspective switch, since they always meet up later to discuss what they each learned, thereby repeating what you just played through. It also seems like everything happens to them, a pitfall I wrote about before. They don't really investigate so much as people tell them stuff. If you want a real character-driven story, play Dynasty Warriors: Origins. It's literally a retelling of Romance of the Three Kingdoms but there you go, that story structure was perfected 600 years ago already.

In terms of other characters they're kind of caricatures. It's expected and even useful to exaggerate their traits a bit but they're all kind of "too much". I can't help but think obviously one of them is hiding their true motives and this will be the big reveal. "You thought I was the calm quiet one, but I'm actually the killer hahaha" or if not the calm one, then the energetic go-getter. It's just too obvious.

The games are also very linear, another part of the Com Club formula. It's not like Ace Attorney where you have to move between locations and investigate hotspots; you are presented with a single screen (though again it looks gorgeous all the time) and have to use the right menu buttons on it, that's it.

All of this gameplay slows things down a lot. Some chapters really don't add much and I think the game could have been condensed more, probably. I'm only midway through, so maybe there's gonna be some funky perspective switch down the line or something.

It's come to a point I don't really care about being spoiled. Yes, it does remove part of the fun - being told "it was like this" just doesn't have the same impact as getting invested in the story - and this is why I wouldn't say too much about ever17 either in my review. I could give the plot twist away and what the story is really about, but then it wouldn't have the same impact to you as it did to me. You'd say "oh, okay". But it also feels like Emio does its best not to get me involved in the story. I mean the game gives you a cellphone and the first two times you have to use it to progress, it's out of battery. Can we focus?

(Paranormasight screenshot; you play in a first-person perspective and can look 360° around you).

Instead, I can't help but think Paranormasight did it much better - Square Enix finally made a good game again. I seriously loved that game. It has similar themes - it starts with the 7 urban legends of Honjo, a fictional town (I think?), except there's actually up to 15 legends, but the people refer to them as 7. It was also a VN. It takes places in the 80s. But wow, that game was great. In fact, I thought it was too short. The urban legends were actually real in that game, which I think elevates the story. That is, it wasn't "oh the supernatural is fake it was just a normal murder" (which why even have that dimension in your story then?), no, the game literally gives you the power of one of these legends at the beginning to tell you all of this is happening. It's also a superpower that basically lets you kill anyone, and so you think damn, if I have that power from the beginning, what else is out there that's even worse?

It's not that I like supernatural stuff particularly, it's that if done correctly it introduces a new dimension to your story. Famicom Club has the same roots, but no supernatural - this isn't a plot twist or anything, it's the formula. At the end of the day, it's a routine police case. Some feathers get ruffled and people move on.

Instantly the scope feels large in Paranormasight. You have a codex with info about the 7 mysteries (or more, remember) and you can't help but think you're gonna get to the bottom of it by the end of the game. But then other stuff happens outside of the 7 mysteries. So we have to solve that too. It feels lively.

Paranormasight also looks gorgeous, though the art direction is very different. It features a non-linear story through the eyes of various characters (narrator switching), unlocking chapters in a flowchart as you progress through each narrator's arc and perspective. And it makes you think to figure it out, especially the 7 mysteries of Honjo which are delivered through clues that you have to solve. It also has tragic stories with high school students, but it handles them with care - I was very happy with how they handled the subject matter in fact. It literally uses game mechanics as part of its storytelling. It recontextualises things you thought you knew in its own mini-twists.

Paranormasight also has SEVERAL protagonists, but they are different enough that you never get lost on who did what, they all have their connection to the events (what's the connection of ayumi and mc-kun aside from the fact their agency was hired to help investigate? Utsugi, the only one with some connection to the case, is almost never around), and they are mostly split into groups so that it's easier to keep track of. The game has a flowchart mechanic with each protag/group on a different line, and you can switch at any time. I never felt lost.

The flowchart mechanic can also be used greatly for pacing, like it did in Virtue's Last Reward. It can put a lock on the next chapter of the story to force you to go play another part, discovering important information before continuing. It feels less forced - Det Club switches you between MC and Ayumi's investigations linearly, and it feels like "why do I care about this meeting in a café I didn't even learn anything". But if you "choose" to play it so you can unlock the next of Ayumi's chapter after the café, then it becomes less grating.

The paranormal is not a stand-in for deus ex machina if you want to use it in a story; it's here to bring your down-to-earth parts of the story to a higher level and give them deeper meaning. Paranormasight is ultimately not about investigating the 7 mysteries of Honjo but about fixing the errors of the past. I don't trust Detective Club to achieve that because you are literally 19 year olds on the case of a dead teen. It's also not a game for children; the rating is M and it will traumatize children if they play it. So why are we playing as a kid? He would barely be old enough to play his own game!

I especially liked the prologue in paranormasight. I guess I'll put it in a spoiler

All good horror is about family drama at its core, or at least human conflict. My only complaint of Paranormasight is that it was too short - it's still a solid 12 hours, but I would have wanted 12 more.

Play Paranormasight.