Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club Review

Nothing can prepare you for Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club. You might think you’re ready, but you’re not. It’s a whirlwind adventure that keeps you on your seat from the opening scene to the very end, and it’s one of the best games Nintendo has ever published. 

When I say you’re not prepared, I mean it. You might think to yourself, “Hey, I’ve played the first two games, I’ve played the Emio demo, I know what I’m in for,” but you don’t, I promise. The game even eases you in, with the early game slowly and steadily building up mystery. But you’ll be left guessing the whole way through, and even when you think you’ve gotten everything squared away in your head, there’s still more to keep you guessing. 

Emio takes place a couple of years after the conclusion to the first Famicom Detective Club game — keeping in mind that the second one is a prequel, of course. Your protagonist, whose name and fate are left in your care, is 19 years old and, alongside fellow investigator Ayumi Tachibana, is a full-fledged assistant detective at the Utsugi Detective Agency. 

You’ve been called in to help solve a murder, and when you arrive at the scene of the crime, you find a poor boy named Eisuke, strangled to death and left to rot with a paper bag over his head, adorned with an eternal smile. The more you dig into this death, the weirder things get — discovering that there’s a series of similar killings 18 years ago is spooky enough, but knowing they’re connected to an urban legend, too, is downright terrifying. 

It’s a case that, like a paper bag with a hastily drawn smile on it, is completely over your head. You’re just a kid, y’know? This is really heavy stuff, and if there really is a serial killer out there, poking and prodding into their business is probably not the best idea. But you’re a detective, that’s your job, so you start digging in. 

You’ll travel all across Tokyo to find your answers. On the way, you’ll come across a host of colourful characters — rookie cops, eccentric school teachers, depressed friends of the deceased, bar owners, parents and grandparents. Each of these has a piece of the puzzle, and it’s your job to get that piece out of them. That’s not always easily done. 

Emio is a visual novel, of sorts, but it’s kind of like a point-and-click adventure game, too. It shares a lot of DNA with Ace Attorney, where you’ll spend a lot of time gathering clues and information, from both the environment and from witnesses, but there’s no grand trial at the end of it. Instead, you have to justify your evidence to yourself with a daily review of the information you’ve collected. These reviews serve two purposes: the first is to make sure you actually understood and paid attention to your evidence, and the second is to help you figure out the next steps. While no two days in your investigation are the same, the review pulls it all together, helping connect the dots and pushing you to think about the case on a larger scale. 

It’s a satisfying flow, and it’s much improved from the prior two games, which were filled with frustrations. In the previous Famicom Detective Club games, you would spend a lot of time just going down the list of options you could ask your subjects, hoping something snags but without real direction. Emio is not entirely immune to this, but it only presents when you haven’t thought things through — if you’re firing on all cylinders, the next step will be clear, but if you’re feeling a little foggy, that frustration might creep in. It encourages you to be switched on, to look at the smaller details in conversation and trust your detective gut. It also means that you should probably not, for example, take a month-long break from playing the game, because returning to it means you’ll probably be rusty, and rusty detectives make mistakes. 

Within the framework of the game, you’ve got the option to talk to someone right in front of you, take a look around the area, present evidence to witnesses, have a think about the case to get a small clue for where to go next, leave for a different area, and save and quit. These options will be largely the same no matter who you talk to, but there are a few moments where things change up, with the game logic itself being turned on its head when the time is right to do so. Sometimes, the only way to get somebody to talk is to start walking away, so while the option to leave for another area might usually only act as a way to move on with the story, here it becomes another tool in your toolbox. Conversely, you may decide to move on as soon as the option to leave appears, and that might mean you miss out on crucial information that could have been gleaned by staying and talking a little longer. Work smarter, not faster, as they say. 

You won’t only be playing as the player-named protagonist, though, with many of your days split up between playing as the protag and playing as Ayumi. The latter’s approach to investigation is a softer touch — while the protag spends most of his time on the ground, interviewing those who were close to the action, Ayumi works away in the background, collecting relevant details and exploring auxiliary interests in the case. It’s a good mix, and it’s played to great effect in some fantastic moments that feel like mini-cliffhangers as you switch between the two characters at key moments. 

It’s hard to discuss the case itself without going into spoilers, but I can say that it gets pretty dark at times. Squeamish players will be pleased to know that there isn’t a lot of on-screen gore throughout the story, but that doesn’t mean it won’t put you on edge. I, stupidly, spent most of my time playing late at night, and I can tell you that there were more than a few times where my eyes stayed firmly open for hours after I shut the game off. Bumps in the night are common where I live, but after playing Emio, my heart raced when hearing my neighbour’s door slam shut. It’s immaculately crafted to instil fear into you, even when you know you’re safe and snuggled up in a blanket. 

It kept me guessing too, as I said earlier. About halfway through the game, I was convinced I’d figured it all out — I knew who Emio was, I thought, and I knew what went down on that fateful night. Whatever safety I had in my convictions was swept away not long after, though, and whenever I settled into a groove of understanding, the game knew when it was right to take that groove away. No matter how sure I was of the facts of the case, I was never 100% certain I was right, and the game did not hesitate to pray on that uncertainty right until the very end. 

When you layer in the art style and graphical presentation, which is gorgeous and limited at the same time, it all starts to come together in a way that feels like one of the most deliberate expressions of art in video games. Throw the incredible soundtrack into the mix too – and it is absolutely phenomenal – and you’ve got something unimaginably good. I don’t know if this kind of game would click for everyone, but it certainly clicked for me, and if it clicked for you too, I probably want to know you, if only to discuss that ending. 

Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club is one of the best games I’ve ever played. It’s got an incredible story, stunning presentation, and plenty of bone-chilling moments that will stay with me for as long as I live. It’s the first step on a fresh new path for Famicom Detective Club, and hopefully the first of many for the newly revived series. 

Rating: 5/5