Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club Review

Emio – The Smiling Man is the third localised entry in the relatively unknown (at least in the West) Nintendo detective adventure series Famicom Detective Club and an interesting Pheonix Wright-adjacent visual novel to see out the last year or so of Switch-exclusive releases. Its story is told up to two lines at a time, fully voiced, from the perspective of a player-named boy who works for the Utsugi Detective Agency alongside their fellow teen sleuth from the previous games, Ayumi Tachibana.

Set during the 90s in a Japanese town bordered by rice paddies and woods, Eisuke Sasaki, a 15-year-old student, is found strangled to death in the rural outskirts. Covering the face of the deceased is a paper bag with a crudely drawn smiling face on it. The local police call in the Utsugi Detective Agency to help investigate the possible links between this mystery and a string of cold cases 18 years prior involving strangled young girls also masked with smiling paper bags. 

The gameplay has the player follow the unfolding investigation from the perspective of the two young detectives. The player is effectively taken from one still scene to another, observing dialogue between characters as the player chooses to prompt certain questions or query possible evidence. Semi-animated character art and details that undulate in the outdoor breeze add life to the otherwise still but gorgeously vivid scenes. A menu loaded with prompts and a cursor to brush over the scene for interactive objects constitutes the ‘gameplay’ alongside the standard visual novel presentation of patiently parsing hours of dialogue. Choosing the correct prompts in the menu initially requires a bit of squinting as the pixel-thin white menu text was difficult to make out on the handheld OLED, but fortunately, these options barely change once the player is quickly onboarded. 

Attractive framing and glossy presentation make following the evidence a breeze

This core menu drives the game almost exclusively. So much gameplay boils down to repeatedly inputting the same menu commands until the responding text begins to repeat, like exhausting the dialogue with a non-player character in a Souls game. This signifies that the line of enquiry is exhausted and now you should to try another, such as “thinking” or “looking” at the environment before the game triggers the next line of new dialogue. Then it’s a matter of repeating the process. Opportunities for genuine deduction are few and far between, the puzzles boiling down to rinsing all your menu options over and over until the game moves onto its next scene. It’s fine that the game openly lets you fumble around inspecting and asking characters questions about the limited available topics. On paper, and during the first hour or two, it almost feels like you have some agency in your deductive approach. Unfortunately, this design betrays itself as merely a visual novel cosplaying with a magnifying glass and Sherlock cap. 

And that’s great, I love visual novels! But they’re an acquired taste, especially so when they’re masquerading as other genres with unconvincing results. If you can look past the UI tricks pretending to reward your curiosity and reasoning, the visual novel underneath is unusually sincere and heartfelt, never leaning into those cringier aspects of incel horniness or uwu affections that I smilingly endure for the sake of this specific genre’s different and often artistic approaches to storytelling through a medium that blends sparse animation and a novella’s worth of text delivered two lines at a time. 

This mixed approach to telling a murder mystery is elevated by the professionally acted Japanese voice acting, which when paired with the lovely visuals, lends a premium feel to this title. It is also well-written, edited, and translated. I didn’t see a single instance of a spelling mistake or syntax error, a major achievement in these types of games where it’s normal for a scant few to slip through.

This VN also has a complex buffoon you’ll have feelings about

With no touch screen or cursor sensitivity options available, I found investigating the details on-screen occasionally painful. The cursor is moved via the analogue sticks at a speed incongruent with any momentum that this visual novel tries to maintain. To speed the cursor up to minimum efficacy, you must also hold in the same stick you are navigating. Holding the Switch’s analogue sticks in this manner is only suitable if being held in one direction, as it requires a not insignificant amount of pressure to maintain the input. Holding the analogue in while also waving the cursor up, down and around quickly becomes painful with the joy-cons, made worse by the fact these analogues constantly deregister your input if widely manoeuvring its axis while depressed (relatable). Much less a problem for those using the Pro or another controller, though none of the available settings adjust controls or interactivity. 

The strait-laced tone and slow-burn pacing may immediately turn off some players not accustomed to Japanese storytelling. Without much competition in the Western market for this kind of detective visual novel, I was comfortable indulging in its glacial mystery. A linear experience throughout, the vast majority of the game effectively has the player interviewing characters by asking the same prompts over and over. After switching up the order of those prompts and exhausting them all over, the conversation will glean its inevitable clues that neatly appear in your handy notebook. It quickly becomes predictable and automatic in its flow, with the player more of a passenger in this narrative rather than having any meaningful input. But that’s okay, this is primarily a visual novel first and foremost, having more in common with Ace Attorney than, say, Frogwares’ Sherlock Holmes games.

Chapters typically clock in around an hour or less and never outpace the player as the mystery unfolds. To help keep the player abreast of all the developments around persons of interest and the urban myth of the paper-bag-wearing killer Emio, both of the player’s detective characters will debrief at the agency to close the day and chapter. This involves conducting a “review”, where the player will reference elements of their notebook as well as using the virtual keyboard to manually input some evidence and clues. It’s less an exam and more a soft recap, as failure is met with a gentle correction and the game keeps moving forward.

The notebook is elegant and perfectly keeps the player in step with the investigation

Alas, despite taking a tidy dozen hours to wrap up, Emio – The Smiling Man never lives up to the potential of its thrilling mystery. Although it teases the player with unreliable characters and a building sense of panic as the urban myth threatens to take on a life of its own, nothing really develops in the murder mystery. The moment the game finally establishes stakes long, long after the brisk opening, it all concludes with an insultingly rapid third-act exposition dump that didn’t serve any of the gameplay, tone or story until that point. By the credits, the story felt frustratingly rushed despite the slow-burn pacing seemingly giving the narrative space to breathe.

Final Thoughts 

Most notably, Emio establishes a surprising amount of heart and sincerity in its brief runtime. Strangely, though, it achieves very little in the way of thrills or chills. More a small-town crime procedural than a dark murder mystery, players will find their best experiences driven by a genuine care for these characters and how they process the impact of tragedy in their insular community rather than sensationalising their trauma for our entertainment. The serial killer thriller lurks on the furthest edges of this story, only ever coaxing the player along with the threat of its darkly exciting carrot. This long-awaited entry in the Famicom Detective Club series is clean, well animated and voiced, and has some seriously good visual novel writing. Despite this, I wouldn’t be in a hurry to recommend this to fans of either detective games or visual novels unless their backlogs are running low.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch // Review code supplied by publisher

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