Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir

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 Girl Who Stands Behind)

Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir is a Visual Novel originally released on the Japanese Famicom Disk System in 1988. 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 its direct sequel, Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind.

The Missing Heir tells a story in contemporary (for its original release anyway) Japan about an investigator for a detective agency suffering from amnesia and trying to get to the bottom of a case involving the death of a matriarch in a wealthy family, hoping that his research into the case may help to stir his own lost memories. While deemed to be a death by natural causes, the circumstances surrounding it are suspicious enough to warrant a closer look – the death occurred shortly after the reading of a will and the naming of a long-lost daughter as the heir to both the estate and the matriarch’s family company. Clearly there are people who stand to gain by the matriarch’s death, and some who may have been brought to anger by the contents of the will. And of course there are numerous potential suspects, and plenty of secrets about the family to uncover, including a macabre legend about the dead returning to seek revenge.

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, Utsugi Detective Agency, and Investigation are good examples, but what really makes these themes impressive is listening to the original versions (for reference, here is those versions of Title, Utsugi Detective Agency, and Investigation, 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.

While the visuals, sound, and localization are all modern and new, the gameplay seems to be stuck in the past, and this makes for some of this game’s worst problems. 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. Players may also make use of a “memory” command to try and spur a memory.

The problem is, the 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 “memory” command even if there doesn’t seem any reason your character should suddenly remember something new.

There are other problems as well. 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).

In the end, Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir may be the least fun I’ve had playing a modern Visual Novel. That’s not to say that it’s the worst one I’ve played – certainly there are far worse Visual Novel games on the Nintendo Switch, but with those I could at least laugh at their absurd plots while I breezed through ridiculous conversations. Here, the plot is more enticing, but the game makes the process of working your way through it an agonizing one where you must constantly check every possible action you can take to see if it’s the one the game wants you to do. While I love this game’s modernized presentation, I wish the terrible gameplay was also modernized, and while I’m glad this game has finally seen release in the West, and in fine form too, I think the way these gameplay elements have aged so poorly makes this worthwhile more as a historical artifact than as a great game by today’s standards.

tl;dr – Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir is a remake of a 1988 Visual Novel originally released on the Japan-only Famicom Disk System. This game’s plot follows an amnesiac detective investigating the death of a wealthy matriarch while trying to regain his lost memory. The presentation here is top-notch, with fully-remade visuals and sound. Unfortunately, the gameplay remains infuriatingly locked in the past, forcing players to repeatedly try every menu option to find the one the game wants you to pick. It’s so frustrating that it’s hard to recommend to anyone other than those curious about this game’s history.

Grade: C-

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