Famicom Detective Club | Review, the rebirth of two mysteries

Famicom Detective Club | Review

The first impressions that the new Famicom Detective Clubs gave us were more than positive, and it's nice when an already promising product of its own turns out to be an even shinier pearl. We don't even want to skimp on terms: if you love mystery, visual novels or investigations a la Phoenix Wright, Famicom Detective Club in its entirety will please you regardless of what we can tell you to convince you of this statement. Not surprisingly, the original titles for Super Famicon are the parents of a much loved trend, and we had well underlined how their settings were precisely the most classic cast of many stories of the Japanese-style paranormal.

Famicom Detective Club is that episode of Detective Conan set between folklore and harsh reality, it is that trip to a rural city that turns into a series of murders hidden in superstition, the company of people with secrets, loves and stormy pasts. Famicom Detective Club is a bit Higurashi, a bit Western and very engaging. The mix of all these elements is as beautiful as it is particular, we cannot deny that we have been lulled by familiar tones from so many shows in our hearts and which at the same time seemed foreign, disturbing and unique in their exposure.

The genesis of a Detective

Before leaving, our advice is to play The Girl Who Stands Behind before The Missing Heir, the latter being a prequel to the original chapter. Not much changes between one or the other, but we have found this solution more congenial to the narrative flow for new generation players. We don't want to go too far into the stories due to the fact that these are titles that make history their one and only boast, and being a mystery even just revealing some important details could compromise that feeling of being the deducers of the case.

Famicom Detective Club, as the name suggests, is in fact a couple of games that puts you in the shoes of a budding detective with the typical features of the standard protagonist of an anime. A fairly evident change from the original version, however retaining the first person despite wanting to find a strong identity for the young detective with a new face. However, even with this consideration, you will be the one to go down in the investigation and take the steps in the two cases available, interacting with people, looking for backgrounds as a point and click and thinking from time to time. The game will often ask you to pull the strings of the case, produce hypotheses and accusations. A good step for what is to all intents and purposes a visual novel and which all in all manages to keep up with the fast pace of a serious investigation like that for a murder: crime protagonist of both stories.

But it is perhaps this is where Famicom Detective Club shows its side and the years a bit: interacting with the different options such as Speak, Think and Observe, you will often find yourself stumbling upon seemingly dead-end dialogues. Although ingenuity is an ideal trait for any detective, there is no measure for a system of advancement in the bars of history that jams like a bicycle wheel with a branch inside it. Sometimes, indeed, the game forces you to insist on repeating a choice of Speak in order to move forward even if the sentence repeats itself with the same line of dialogue, or it does not provide you with enough clues to be able to understand which option can come up with you. from an interrogation made up of only silences.

Famicom Detective Club, not being static for a variety of reasons, and therefore abandoning the air of a visual novel, promising constant interaction with anyone you meet, Famicom Detective Club gives itself a little the club on your feet trying to lead you where you want only through your decisions. He would have benefited from a perhaps more guided track, or at least with clear options to proceed as happens in some situations, but apart from this one flaw, the Famicom Detective Club is full of mysteries suitable for both veterans of a thousand solved cases and for newbies looking for a story. between high school students and the seriousness of a mild horror scenario. Everything balances on the constantly tense atmosphere on the razor's edge, with voices and mysteries that start out as legends and end up being the perfect cover for heinous acts of evident brutality.

In short, if its protagonists are young from childish air, the events entrusted to them are anything but the stuff of kids playing detective among the school desks: there are moments of high tension and serious danger, in which Famicom Detective Club drops all its aces for making sure that you as the player are extremely involved in their performance. And it is on those occasions that the built crescendo clue after clue ends up pulling you in by the collar and making you understand that yes, Famicom Detective Club has really captured you so much.

Modernity in the narrative

Most of all though, Yoshio Sakamoto's stories have taken a new and glorious life thanks to Mages' mammoth work in making Famicom Detective Club not only a pair of games faithful to the original feeling, but also a concentrate of new ideas in the terms with which visual novels are created and developed. From the beginning Famicom Detective Club, each of the two chapters, appears as if it were an anime of which you have total control of the scenes. The shots change often, there is no border between dialogue and the main scene in some moments and the backgrounds come alive all the time. The feelings we had in our preview found confirmation in the long duration of the two murder cases, surprising us more than once.

In addition to being nice to read and play, because of the cases we will be part of , the Famicom Detective Club duo is today one of the best demonstrations of how it is possible to revitalize the VN genre and make it attractive even for an audience never approached it, maintaining qualities such as excellent writing (here even with a partial narrative that allows you to recap the cases between one session and another) and a respectable Japanese dubbing (with the possibility of cutting the protagonist's voice or restoring the original music) and at the same time using modern techniques to make those elements stand out. br>
Part of the charm of Famicom Detective Club is its detailed beauty in a game system that is all in all simple, linear and friendly towards those who wants to try new experiences without juggling three narrative paths, various romances and all the trinkets of the most classic visual novel / eroge. On the other hand, this simplicity, also due to the original material, can be felt all too special in The Missing Heir: the first real chapter in order of release and less rich in interactions to fathom. However, it is the mixture of all these factors, influential in their field, that makes Famicom Detective Club such a satisfying experience regardless of its - however small - flaws.

Too bad for the absence of Italian localization , understandable considering the niche to which the product appeals but which due to its super accessible nature would have benefited a lot from a translation to involve even more users in a constantly evolving genre.