When Nintendo first announced that the Famicom detective club games were coming to the West, I really was not sure what to expect. I had seen people playing the games before and I knew of their existence but only at an elevated level, so getting to go hands on and experience the games that was something I was looking forward to. the big question though is the games made over 30 years ago stand the test of time with new graphics or should these have remained as iconic pieces of history?

Here in Australia, you will only be able to obtain both games in a single package through the eShop, but they are two distinct titles, just with the same main character in both. For the first title ‘The Missing Heir’ you start out waking up on a small cliff and when you come to, you realise you have no memory of who you are, nor what you are doing. It is revealed after returning to the scene of your discovery, that you are a detective for the Utsugi Detective Agency, and you were tasked with solving the mystery behind the death of Kiku Ayashiro, the head of the Ayashiro company. The second game ‘The Girl Who Stands Behind’ is a prequel and has you starting out running from the police, before you are saved by Shunsuke Utsugi, the man behind the Utsugi Detective Agency and after working for him for a while, the murder of schoolgirl named Yoko Kojima takes place and they are called in to assist.

As far as the stories go, they are quite detailed and offer a lot of information, with your character being on the hunt for their parents, how you meet Ayumi in the prequel title and how she plays into the first game, even the fact that The Girl Who Stands Behind leads right into the events of The Missing Heir. There are characters that are charming and fun to talk with, others that are real pricks at times and some who just want to have a chat. While some characters are given the less than wonderful name of generic position a or b, the characters with names all have real personality and learning about them is a genuine blast. There are characters that you will speak with in each game, far more than anyone else and you cannot help but feel connected to them by the end, thanks in part to how well they are voiced, but again, just because the characters are so easy to invest in.

Gameplay revolves around asking questions to get information, in order to proceed to the next part of the investigation, I say it like that, but it is not that simple. Some characters will actively refuse to help you for a while, either until you prove you can help, or unless you have some sort of evidence that they did something wrong and while there is not any way to be wrong, asking a question and having a character storm off can feel disheartening. This sadly leads into the games biggest issue, you will have to select the same option countless times, before the game is ready to move on, sometimes it feels a little natural, like asking someone if there is anything else you should know, but those moments are rare. Sadly, the rest of it comes down to the game needing some specific moment to be ready, but it never tells you when that is, meaning you can get stuck and not realise what you can do. In The Missing Heir, I was looking over a body, watching as the Forensic folks took photos and such and I couldn’t get out of that view and having manual inspected every single aspect of the body, the wall it was against, the floor it was on, the police nearby and everything else I could think of, nothing seemed to work, until it just decided that another look was the right one.

For that one, I think it was needed for the Forensic guy to be looking at the body when I selected the right thing, but the game didn’t chime to tell me I was right with that, it just moved on. The problem with that, is that there is no way to know what is important, or what you need to ask, or in what order you might have to ask things in, unless you just go about trying everything. There was a sequence where I was in a location and thought I had selected all the options and as the game let me move onto another one, I went there, but there was nothing to do, so it was back to the first one again and it became a repeating cycle. This wouldn’t be much of a concern, except for the simple fact that the game does randomly tell you when something is important, by highlighting the text in yellow and of course, to bad if you have issues seeing colours, there is no way to change that highlight colour. There are times when you obtain an important item, that it highlights, so you know to talk about it, but even that doesn’t happen all the time and if you get stuck, the game just lets you waste time, until you stumble on the right option.

Now the game does give you a notepad, which is accessed via the pause menu, where you can read up on the facts you have learnt about the various characters you encounter. Given that each game has a few dozen folks, that is quite a handy option, the catch is that there is no way of marking things as important, so if you read something on the 11th page of a character’s bio, you either must remember it, or make a note elsewhere. Sticking with the notes, you don’t really need to read them, because the game doesn’t make you take advantage of them, as in you never have to consult them to get a clue, your options are always provided for you. Of course, there is an exception to that, when the game requires you to enter the name or names of the people behind the mysteries, but again, unless you have been paying attention, you might not realise is the bad person is, not that they are hard to work out, but it just seemed like a bit random to through up towards the end of the games.

Speaking of random things, lets talk about the presentation, because there are moments when it shines and times when it feels like it is incomplete, so let’s talk the bad first. The incomplete isn’t because things are missing or half done, no it is more about the fact that there are no movement animations to characters, so when someone storms out in a huff, they don’t storm out, they just Star Wars wipe away. The same can be said if someone is in a panic, they don’t move around like someone would, instead the drawing of them just shakes, or the inner monologue of the protagonist is meant to explain that they think the person is panicking. The issue with these is not because they are bad, but there are times when there are subtle animations to things, trees blowing in the wind, clothes moving and so on, so getting those small details and not someone moving off screen when they leave a room is weird.

The good side of the visuals is that both the character designs and locations, are wonderfully drawn, there is so much detail in each shot. Even locations that have no relevance to anything being done in the story, except to be a welcoming sight to a different venue, the front of the school or mansion for example, are detailed that if you take a screenshot of them, you will be impressed. As I said before, each of the characters are wonderfully drawn and there is just enough details in some of their clothes or hair, to bring them to life, they still however don’t fully move.

On the audio side of things, we get a bit of a mixed bag of sounds, but not in a bad way, the games when they first released and even when they the second had its Super Nintendo revamp, were text only, for obvious reasons. Now though the games are fully voiced and while they are only in Japanese, I loved hearing the voice work, bring these characters to life and part of me thinks that if they were in English, that it would lose some of the charm. The downside to the voices, is that when you select an option from your list of choices, if it is one where the character has nothing new to say, you will hear a generic sound no response and then you will hear it a dozen more times. Where the mixed results come in, is the music, the game does allow for you to select from the historic versions of the tracks and sound effects, but they just don’t match the visuals enough to be worth it. The newer versions of the tracks are well suited for each game, however there isn’t enough here to make it something to have on repeat and that again comes back to the gameplay, not being intuitive and letting get stuck in scenarios, means that you will hear the same tracks a lot. One upside is that when you complete each game, you unlock a music playback option, letting you enjoy the tracks you didn’t hear enough of during the game.

Famicom Detective Club are challenging titles to recommend to those not already familiar with the visual novel genre, the stories are interesting, and it is fun to try and guess who the baddies are. The catch is that you must deal with game design that is at time frustrating and other times stuck in loops of selecting options and hoping for the best. The lack of options for button configuration, or accessibility is a let down as well, I mean the game has a log of all the things you hear but doesn’t tell you that exists at all. While the modern visuals and soundtrack are highlights, antiquated game design makes it hard to endure for even the most devout Nintendo fans.