Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir (Switch)
Nintendo developed games are often renowned for their excellent gameplay, narratives sometimes sidelined in favor of superb action elements that allow people to play some of their games even if they aren’t translated. However, a visual novel hinges almost entirely on the writing, so even for those willing to import Japanese games, the Famicom Detective Club series had a few more barriers to properly experiencing it, and even then, its story focus made it seem unlikely Nintendo would ever release it abroad. However, the two tales from 1988 and 1989 would not only get translated, but prolific visual novel developer Mages remade the two Famicom Detective Club titles so they could be easily purchased on the Nintendo Switch.
Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir was the first of the two mystery games created, with Metroid creators Gunpei Yokoi and Yoshio Sakamoto involved in getting it off the ground, Sakamoto even being the game’s writer. When The Missing Heir begins, the player awakens as a young detective who has just fallen from a seaside cliff and finds himself with amnesia. Rather than this being used to obfuscate certain details until they can be conveniently revealed later, the game starting with an amnesiac allows for the game to have the central investigation already underway so certain key events can have already happened, opening things up for a few dramatic reveals down the line. Since you don’t have to experience certain important moments until the protagonist is able to jog their memory, you’re able to start a little deeper into the tale than if you were investigating from the reasonable point where a detective would normally start their work.
The young male detective you get to name yourself was working on a case involving the wealthy Ayashiro family, their family head Miss Kiku having recently perished under suspicious circumstances. The night she revealed the contents of her will to her family, she ends up dying of an oddly timed heart attack, the butler calling on the player to look for evidence of any wrong-doing. At the same time though, the Ayashiro family has an old legend hanging over them, the people of the nearby village believing Miss Kiku will rise from the dead to protect the Ayashiro family’s fortune. While Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir seems to take place in a realistic version of 1980s Japan, with the testimonies you find and suspicious events, it does feel possible this supernatural element may have some truth to it, the player wondering where the game might turn as the plot progresses and new murder victims crop up along the way.
The missing heir in the title though refers to the Kiku’s estranged daughter and other abnormalities are seeded early on for you to have things to ponder during your investigation. Much of your time will be spent interrogating relevant characters such as other members of the Ayashiro family, the doctor and police officers examining dead bodies, or people in the nearby area to try and form a better picture of what could have happened, and Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir has a few conveniences in place if you need to put the game down for a while. A notebook keeps track of all the characters and is added to over time for each new important detail you learn about a person, and if you accidentally skip the text when someone is talking, you can just press a button to review everything that’s been said. There is voice acting, only available in Japanese though, but it can help to add some emotion to an otherwise heavy focus on reading through text boxes. Also helping with parsing character emotions is the game’s approach to visuals, characters colored and shaded so they can look like illustrated art and yet they are 3D models that can move and emote as well. They are still mostly still beyond things like breathing and blinking, mostly shifting poses rather than doing anything too animated, but the game manages to look clean and less stiff because of this measured approach to breathing life into characters.
Besides some fairly loud cicadas at parts, Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir also has good aural accompaniment thanks to a soundtrack where you can choose between the original Famicom chiptunes or more modern arrangements. With some lovely backdrops as well, a lot is working in favor of creating a space for this story to take place in, but things start to get a little rough when the most important parts are evaluated. You’re unfortunately not the most proactive detective, the player sometimes waiting multiple in-game days to meet with characters with crucial info and retiring for the night early, the game leaving certain obvious points for investigation up in the air so they can only finally be utilized when it’s time for a reveal. This feels especially strange on days when your characters is just puttering around hoping for a lead, choosing to do things like talking with superstitious villagers near the train station instead of waiting at the offices of the Ayashiro family’s lawyer for him to be in. There are characters who reasonably withhold information for their own interests, but at other times even a cooperative character will just spontaneously remember something crucial after you press them on something innocuous.
Interaction is generally poorly handled in Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir as well. The player’s action appear in a box in the upper left with actions like Travel, Talk, Look/Examine, and the forebodingly titled “Quit Investigation” which is usually just the save menu. Sometimes a character responds to a topic or action in a way that sounds off, but it’s mostly easy to extrapolate that conceptually you asked a more robust question than just saying a name and thus got a response to that. Usually the story will move you along to an actions or topics of importance by highlighting them in yellow, and there are usually no ways to fail, the game just a process of asking the right questions and looking at the right things to progress the plot. There are a few moments you need to type in a response that feel more like tests to make sure you were paying attention, the player often even just needing to say back the topic that was being discussed or strongly hinted at. One major puzzle exists that could have done with leaving out a hint or two to make it require some more thought, but otherwise the focus will be on reading what your character thinks when examining things or how people respond to your questions.
Unfortunately, trying to concoct a reasonable flow to questioning isn’t really the key to success. The player will sometimes have to ask about the same subject repeatedly to pry out more information. Even after a character starts repeating lines for a subject you may then need to ask them about something else before asking again about an unrelated topic. There are times you can travel between multiple areas even though only one is relevant, but when you’re being stonewalled by a moment where some unexpected topic of conversation is the key to progression, you can have very little direction on what you’re even meant to be doing. Too often it can feel like your only choice is to go back down a fairly long list of potential interactions, and even the examination option can sometimes expect for you to click some precise regions that aren’t labeled differently.
Repeating actions or going down the list of all available ones could be tolerated if there was a compelling enough mystery at the game’s heart, but Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir sadly squanders parts of its premise. While you’ll run into amusingly eccentric characters like Dr. Kumada who believes he’s an equally capable detective and your actual investigative partner Ayumi Tachibana is a kind and helpful sounding board for putting together clues at the end of an in-game day, but the members of the principle cast you encounter are few and some are eventually murdered, thinning a pool of potential murder suspects to ones you can’t reasonably predict are responsible until revelations that come too close to the actual reveals. You’ll guess the true murderer before you actually have any supporting evidence simply because you don’t have many options beyond looking at the few members of the cast it could be and shrugging as you say it might be them. Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir is not structured much like a detective game because your actions are less to compile evidence for making deductions and conclusions and more to move things along so more people can be murdered and eventually the culprit can come to light. This can make the moments your detective is adrift and investigating small things on the side instead of committing to the truly promising leads frustrating too, the narrative sometimes crawling slowly as it is more interested in generating suspense than hashing out a mystery you can try and figure out personally.
THE VERDICT: Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir is a lovely remake in terms of its visuals and music, but the parts that weren’t changed from the source material are what hold it back. Progressing the plot sometimes hinges on asking the right question or looking at the right thing even when you’ve done so before or it doesn’t reasonably stick out in a list of plenty of available options, and even if you push through the sometimes tedious investigative elements, it feels like few of the clues you scrounge up are working towards solving the game’s core mysteries. Your role is to mostly say the right things to trigger the next part of the plot, the story less satisfying because you’re too often waiting to be told crucial things rather than having room to deduce them yourself.
And so, I give Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir for Nintendo Switch…
A BAD rating. Playing this game has helped me appreciate Retro Mystery Club Vol.1: The Ise-Shima Case much more in retrospect. That game was inspired directly by the Famicom Detective Club series and even carries over some of its problems with it being a somewhat passive detective story, but it also putters around less, gives you more meaty clues, and develops its cast a bit more. It’s faithful sometimes in the wrong parts, but unlike Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir it structures its mystery much more cleanly to hook you and hold you. Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir drags things out more often, the player repeatedly told case-important characters just aren’t around and not always for strong reasons beyond denying you vital information. Without the obvious points of investigation available, it too often throws you to places where you’re just going down a list trying to trigger the exact right reaction from the random villager or right memory from the butler you speak to time and again to be able to move on. There are moments of intrigue and suspense, surprises that work and some clues that serve as actual leads, but it’s hard to remain invested when the game slows down or starts to reveal its hand on how most important details are going to be put at your feet rather than them coming as a result of some intelligent deduction.
Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir suffers most from its structural issues, and perhaps some of the problems in arranging reveals is why we had an amnesiac detective to start with. This is primarily a game about learning things to understand a plot rather than helping a mystery unfold, the interactions feeling a little hollow because picking the relevant subjects or actions isn’t even always the way onward due that issue in structure. The plot isn’t even necessarily bad, some more clues to point you in directions beyond “they’re one of the few people who could be the culprit left” could help, and some moments where you need to actually link together clues to determine your next action would help things feel involved. This is, for good and for ill, the story that was written for the original 1988 video game, so while it’s nice to see this story finally retold to a worldwide audience, a skilled editor could have made it one worth reading.