Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind

Genre: Visual Novel

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Famicom Detective Club: The Two Case Collection, along with Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir)

Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind is a Visual Novel originally released on the Japanese Famicom Disk System in 1989, and a prequel to The Missing Heir. It has been remade and re-released multiple times over the years, but until now it has stayed a Japan-only title. This release on the Nintendo Switch in 2021 remakes the game’s sound and visuals and brings it to Western regions for the first time, alongside the first game.

The Girl Who Stands Behind tells a story in contemporary (for its original release anyway) Japan about a junior investigator for a detective agency who is investigating the death of a high school girl, learning that her murder is apparently tied to the mysterious “Girl Who Stands Behind”, a school ghost story that the girl was investigating. The more your character looks into the events surrounding the schoolgirl’s death, the more it becomes clear that the mystery goes far deeper than that.

The presentation here is very good, making use of some excellent anime-style 2D art with some subtle animations for characters, as well as some nicely-detailed backgrounds. However, I’d argue the soundtrack is probably more impressive, taking the chiptune themes of the original 8-bit game and presenting what they’d sound like if performed with real instruments. Themes like Title, Lyricism (Investigation), Interviews, and In Front of the School Gate are good examples, but what really makes these themes impressive is listening to the original versions (for reference, here is those versions of Title, Lyricism (Investigation), and In Front of the School Gate, some bearing different names). At any time during the game, players can freely swap back and forth between the remade soundtrack and the original, which is a nice inclusion.

Naturally, with the first time this game is seeing release in the West, this game has also received a brand new localization, and I’d say this fares pretty well. It’s an interesting story told fairly well, and while the localization is good, it definitely retains its original Japanese flavor resulting in something reminiscent of an anime. To this end, the fully-voiced characters remain voiced only in Japanese, which works well enough, and the voice acting sounds pretty good. I will say there are a few rough edges here and there, likely more due to this game being faithful to the original release than a poor localization. Namely, asking a character about one topic occasionally gets them talking about another, and choosing “Quit Investigation” does no such thing – that’s the option to save, not to quit. There’s also one point where the game embarrassingly asks you “do you need to ear it again?”

If you’re reading my reviews of both of the games, you’ve probably noticed some similarities in those reviews, because their treatment has been somewhat similar, but in talking about the gameplay you’ll notice that the reviews begin to diverge somewhat. It’s not that these two games play differently – in fact, they’re extremely similar to one another. And issues and complaints that I had about The Missing Heir are pretty much all still present in The Girl Who Stands Behind. However, those issues are less pronounced here, and the game’s better qualities shine through a bit more.

Players are generally limited to just a few locations they can travel between at any given time, and may speak to one of a small handful of people in these locations, or move a cursor over the environment to look at anything that may provide further insight. The “memory” command from the first game is replaced here with more context-sensitive “Think” and “Speculate” commands

Much as with the first game, this game provides very little guidance for which of these options will progress the game’s story. On occasion an option will be highlighted, but most of the time you’re left searching for the option that will make things move forward, and that option is frequently nonsensical. A character might say that they have nothing to say about a topic one moment, and then suddenly remember something the next… but they won’t tell you unless you ask them about it again. Sometimes you need to ask them about the same topic multiple times in a row. And sometimes you’ll need to use the “Think” or “Speculate” command even if that doesn’t seem applicable in the situation.

In the first game, this dragged down the entire experience, but it’s less bothersome here, and it’s hard to put my finger on exactly why. If I had to guess, it would be that the commands players need to enter to progress the story are less nonsensical this time around, resulting in less guesswork for players. That’s not to say players won’t be finding themselves searching for what to do, but it’s less frequent an issue in this game.

There are other problems, though. As with the first game, when moving the cursor to look at the environment, it moves agonizingly slow. There’s no option in the game menus to change this cursor speed. Players do have the ability to press in the left analog stick to increase the speed, but they must press it in and hold it to keep things moving. This seems like it would be an ideal situation to incorporate the Nintendo Switch’s touchscreen, but unfortunately this game doesn’t support the touchscreen at all. I suppose there is one more minor quality of life addition I should note here – players who own both games have the option of reading the save from the other game to carry over information from one to the other (the name you entered in one carries over to the other).

Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind is ultimately a solid remake of an old and somewhat outdated Visual Novel, although it’s not as rough as its predecessor. The improvements here over the first game are subtle, but they result in a much smoother experience overall. Having said that, this game still isn’t quite up to par with some of the best Visual Novels available on the Nintendo Switch, but I’d still say it’s worth a look for fans of the genre, especially those wanting to see a historical artifact from Nintendo’s past finally brought to the West.

tl;dr – Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind is a remake of a 1989 Visual Novel originally released on the Japan-only Famicom Disk System. This game is a prequel to The Missing Heir and its plot follows a junior detective investigating the death of a student who was looking into a legend of a ghost at her school. The presentation here is top-notch, with fully-remade visuals and sound. And while this game still has some of the same problems of the first game, those issues aren’t quite as pronounced here, making for a better overall experience. Even though this is the second game in the series, this may be the better place to start if you’re considering trying out this particular piece of videogame history.

Grade: C+

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