Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club Review

The Nintendo Switch has seen a lot of deep-cut releases over the past year, but arguably none slice quite as deep as Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club. A series of surprisingly-mature 8-bit visual novels written by Metroid co-creator Yoshio Sakamoto, the Famicom Detective Club games gained a certain amount of notoriety over the decades amongst hardcore Nintendo fans who like to keep up with the company’s unlocalized oddities. It certainly came as a surprise when Nintendo brought remakes of the first two Famicom Detective Club titles, The Missing Heir and The Girl Who Stands Behind, to worldwide audiences in 2021. While that was a big deal to a certain niche audience, the remakes didn’t exactly do Mario numbers, so many assumed the series might just disappear again. Thankfully, the surprises kept coming, with the first all-new entry in the Famicom Detective Club series launching tomorrow.

Is Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club a page-turning revival of Nintendo’s cult series? Or is this particular Detective Club not worth joining? Time to investigate…

Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club once again casts players as a rookie investigator (you determine your name) working for the Utsugi Detective Agency, although this time around you also get to step into the shoes of sprightly fellow investigator Ayumi Tachibana for some sections. Your latest case is set in motion when a middle school boy is found strangled to death with a paper bag bearing a creepy scrawled-on smile placed over his head. This bears resemblance to a local urban legend, The Smiling Man, who’s said to strangle teenage girls he finds crying before fitting them for a grinning paper bag so they’ll have a “smile that will last forever.” This legend was bolstered by a spate of actual murders of high school girls 18 years ago that were never solved. Is this new murder a continuation of the earlier crimes? If so, why was a boy killed instead of a girl? Is it a copycat crime? Or is something altogether different happening? It’s up to you to find out.

Even though it arrives over 35 years after the last original entry in the series, Emio – The Smiling Man sticks closely to retro visual novel conventions, with most of the game consisting of lengthy dialogue exchanges with various witnesses and other NPCs. Players have standard menu options available to them like “ask” and “show,” as well as the ability to “think” to yourself in order to spark a new line of questioning. You’ll also occasionally have to search the area you’re in point-and-click style for clues.

Despite this old-school approach, squeezing responses out of witnesses is often fairly engaging. Thankfully, Emio – The Smiling Man has been given a significantly better localization than either The Missing Heir or The Girl Who Stands Behind, which were often clunky to the point of being hard to follow. There’s no such issue with Emio, and it feels like efforts have been made to have the game’s story-progressing choices follow a more rational path than in the past. One question leads to the next in a logical way, finding new clues in the environment will spark new conversations, etc.

This doesn’t happen all the time, mind you. There are still plenty of moments when progressing in Emio just means exhausting all other options before the game presents a new line of questioning or place to go. Most irritating, there are certain points where it feels like the game is intentionally wasting your time, forcing you to click everything in a scene or jump back and forth between locations multiple times before you’re randomly given a chance to progress. And yeah, this kind of stuff was always a part of old-school visual novels and the simplicity this game means you’ll never get lost for too long, but I would’ve appreciated a better balance between logical and trial-and-error solutions (the split is about 60-40 as is).

Of course, a game like this lives and dies based on the quality of its story, and thankfully, Emio – The Smiling Man delivers on that front. Don’t go in expecting the kind of wild, fourth-wall-breaking decadence of more modern visual novel series like Danganronpa, but Emio does a good job of building a solid, absorbing mystery block by block. All this is brought to life via simple-yet-clean visuals that are a subtle yet notable step up over the Famicom Detective Club remakes. The game even offers up a handful of basic cutscenes that deliver a surprising amount of creepy atmosphere.

While Emio – The Smiling Man moves at a rather deliberate pace over its 10-hour story, it all builds to a mostly satisfying finale. No, the game’s ending isn’t going to blow your mind with a volley of wild twists and turns, but it delivers the proper tone and largely holds together. If this ending was actually the ending, I would have chalked up Emio as an entertaining, if slightly unremarkable, detective yarn, but Nintendo goes and does something kind of wild after the credits roll.

Without giving anything away, Emio – The Smiling Man expands upon and reframes much of the story you’ve just been through in a surprising, complex, and decidedly dark epilogue. It’s rare that I’m legitimately shocked by a video game that I ask, “Where the hell did this come from?” aloud while playing, but Emio got me. Granted, some of the shock was due to the fact this was coming from Nintendo, but even without that caveat, this is pretty bold storytelling. Days later, the final hours of Emio – The Smiling Man are still rattling around my head, and if this is the direction Nintendo and Sakamoto want to take the Famicom Detective Club franchise in, I very much hope this isn’t their last case.

This review was based on a copy of Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club provided by publisher Nintendo.

Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club

Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club

Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club really sneaks up on you. For much of its runtime the game is a likable, if somewhat by the book, throwback detective visual novel, but Nintendo swings big in terms of narrative in its final hours, ultimately delivering a story that’s much more daring, dark, and affecting than anything this franchise has delivered before. Whether you’re a visual novel nut or just in the mood for a good mystery with some teeth, Emio will leave you grinning.