The Surprising Return of Nintendo’s Famicom Detective Club

By Marc Normandin | August 30, 2024 | 10:05am

Video Games Features Famicom Detective Club

The Surprising Return of Nintendo’s Famicom Detective Club

Unless you’re a very specific kind of games enthusiast, the existence of Famicom Detective Club probably eluded you until Nintendo released a pair of remakes on the Switch in 2021. It’s one of Nintendo’s older series, but one that, until that point, had never received a release outside of Japan, with the only evidence directly from Nintendo that it even existed to international audiences coming in the form of a trophy in Super Smash Bros. Melee.

Things have changed, however. Switch remakes of The Missing Heir and The Girl Who Stands Behind—both a sequel and a prequel to The Missing Heir—performed well enough for Nintendo to greenlight a surprise sequel, in the form of Emio — The Smiling Man. Maybe you saw various message board denizens grumbling since Emio’s announcement, saying that Nintendo is wasting time and developers on a series that loses money, since the two remakes combined did not sell one million copies. But consider that (1) adventure games have a smaller budget than, say, an action game using the latest and most powerful technology, and therefore need to sell fewer copies to be profitable, and (2) who cares? Nintendo can afford to lose money to make a game they want to make. Let them cook.

Not to delve too far into the commercial aspects of things here, but there’s a segue here. Visual novels, a close cousin of adventure games like those in the Famicom Detective Club series, have historically been an easy source of income due to the low costs and high returns on investment, in the same way every independent studio in Japan felt they had to make a Mahjong game or three to pay the bills for the original games they wanted to make. Which actually makes the disappearance of the Famicom Detective Club games for so long the real mystery here; it’s not that the games are back that’s odd, it’s that they ever left at all.

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Part of it has to do with the trends of the industry at large. Adventure games and visual novels—”sound novels,” as they were called when Chunsoft moved into that space following their exit from Dragon Quest development in the early ‘90s—became more niche over time after an eventful run in the 1980s and 1990s. LucasArts moved more into action games, as did rising stars in the development space like Hideo Kojima, whose teams at Konami were responsible for adventure outings like Snatcher and Policenauts. Visual novels, for their part, got a lot hornier for a while there, shrinking the potential audience further, and let’s say, away from the one Nintendo was courting.

Nintendo didn’t end up fully exploring either genre in part because they were busy chasing and setting other trends in their quest to maintain console dominance, and then they were clawing their way back from the middle and bottom after Sony’s arrival, which meant their focus was elsewhere. Nintendo has always been a massive company that acts like a much smaller one, which probably helps more than it hurts, but it also means that you’re going to see a Famicom Detective Club or two get lost in the shuffle when you’re not already on top and in a safe place to branch out like that. Everyone in development, and all the partners being contracted out to, had been focused on games that are going to draw more attention. It’s the same thing, on another scale, as when Nintendo shied away from role-playing games that weren’t Pokémon for a while there.

There was a bit of a shift as touch screens and motion controls came into play in the aughts, though. The DS and Wii both helped to open the door once again to visual novels and point-and-click and adventure titles, and we’ve slowly stayed on that trajectory not just on Nintendo platforms, but everywhere else, as well. Spike Chunsoft remains at the forefront, a fitting place for the forerunners of both genres, and now you’ve even got Nintendo coming back to a series they had not made a brand new entry for in decades, one they’ve mostly produced remakes for since it first arrived in 1988, and are even giving it the international spotlight this time around.

Famicom Detective Club

Another thing, though, is that the Famicom Detective Club games are the baby of Yoshio Sakamoto, and he’s had just a slightly eventful career with Nintendo. He designed Metroid and Kid Icarus. He was the director of X, the Game Boy title whose impressive 3D tech (yes, you read that right) led to Argonaut Games and Nintendo partnering on Star Fox on the SNES. He wrote the scenario for another game that’s been stuck in Japan but you should know about, The Frog For Whom The Bell Tolls. He directed Super Metroid, directed, designed, and wrote the scenario for Trade & Battle: Card Hero, supervised Wario Land 4, directed and wrote the scenario and story for Metroid Fusion, worked on both Wario World and a whole bunch of WarioWare entries, directed Metroid: Zero Mission, produced and/or designed various Rhythm Heaven entries, supervised Picross DS, did his usual thing for Metroid: Other M, and produced MercurySteam’s remake of Metroid II, known as Samus Returns. That’s not the full list, either. He’s been busy, is the point, with his hands in a million other ventures that you know the names of, and ones you should know the names of.

The game that influenced Sakamoto was Chunsoft’s The Portopia Serial Murder Case, which was just five years old at the point of The Missing Heir’s release, and with its first-person perspective and menu-based play that allowed you to explore a world and solve the mystery of the titular murder, would end up inspiring a whole lot of others besides Sakamoto, such as the aforementioned Kojima. It cannot be stressed enough how different games were in 1983 when Portopia hit. Sakamoto himself is on the record as saying that, “I was blown away—I thought that feeling of progressing through the story was really captivating. Before that point, my entire thinking was ‘game = action’.” Sakamoto certainly has an appreciation for action games still, given he’s best known for his work with Metroid, but there’s another side to games, and he helped to explore it in the still-early days of the industry: his first attempt at writing scenarios came by way of Famicom Detective Club.

Nintendo hasn’t wholly ignored the Famicom Detective Club series so much as they released the initial two, which ended up being influential given how early in the adventure genre timeline things were, and then moved on from creating new entries for the most part. A Satellaview game was developed and released—BS Detective Club: The Past that Disappeared in the Snow—for that short-lived platform that Nintendo has practically ignored in the years since, and everything else has been remakes. The Girl Who Stands Behind was remade for the Super Famicom in 1993. Both titles in the duology were re-released for the Game Boy Advance, like so many of their peers from the Famicom. The original versions were released on Nintendo’s various Virtual Consoles, and the Super Famicom remake of The Girl Who Stands Behind got the same treatment. This isn’t a Metal Slader Glory situation, where there was one little shot at reviving it and then it was shut down and forgotten about for decades. Nintendo has kept this franchise alive, only in re-release form, and only in Japan.

Until now, where Emio has not only revived the creation of new Famicom Detective Club games, but has also brought back another bit of the series’ history: it’s rated M. Nintendo has had some M-rated games published by them before, but they’ve been developed by third-party studios like n-Space (Geist, 2005) and Silicon Knights (Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem). Even those Rare-developed M-rated games from Nintendo’s past like Perfect Dark were actually published by them and not Nintendo. The re-release of The Girl Who Stands Behind on the Game Boy Advance was Nintendo’s first ever CERO 15 rated game in Japan—the Computer Entertainment Rating Organization was all of two years old at that point, but still. First! Now, game ratings are a funny thing—things can be very cute and actually sort of horrifying, as anyone with experience playing Pikmin can tell you—but it’s still a positive to see that Nintendo didn’t try to hold Sakamoto back in his return as the scenario writer for the series he originated nearly 40 years ago. Emio might not be the horror game some were hoping for, but it can still have mature themes like its predecessors.

Adventure games aren’t for everyone, sure, but like with so many other genres, they don’t have to be. Nintendo is back on top, with the Switch one of their greatest successes, if not the greatest, in their long history, and they obviously feel comfortable going back to this space now in a way they simply were not during the era of the Nintendo 64 and GameCube. Maybe Emio will be a one-off continuation of the series. Maybe this will be for adventure games what Xenoblade became for the company’s RPGs, in that they know they have a reliable team to turn to when it’s time for the next one. Or maybe Sakamoto will feel like he’s completed his journey here, or is able to hand off duties to someone else, in the way that he stepped back into a producer role for Metroid Dread. Who knows? At least we get one more go at Famicom Detective Club, though, however this all plays out in the end.

Marc Normandin covers retro videogames at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Twitter at @Marc_Normandin.