We know why you’re here, so I’m going to get this preamble out of the way quickly, so you can just have the answer. At one point in Emio �The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club you n?eed to write in what Mama Shoko’s real na??me is.

It’s Michiyo Miyashita.

You’re probably only here because the question comes up fast and then is replaced by the on-screen keyboard. Once the keyboard is up, you can’t bring up the dialogue history to see it again, meaning you have to memorize the name and its spelling in ?advance before you can answer the question. It’s a bit of a design problem.

On the other hand, it does present one of Emio �The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club’s rare “Game Over�screens. It tu??rns out? to be a gag, and if you could easily look up the name (like you maybe just did), then you’d miss it entirely.

The question comes up after Kamihara introduces you to the bartender, Mama Shoko. She apparently knows everything about the area, but she doesn’t trust police, and while you’re not a police officer, you’re close en?ough, and she doesn’t ??trust you either. You have to impress her before you open up. Guessing her name is how it’s done. To find her name, you have to read the Health and Safety placard directly behind her (next to the alcohol). Your character will then deduce that the name on it is Mama Shoko’s real moniker, and you can then start the dialogue by asking about Mama Shoko.

Once you’ve entered the nam??e, she’ll then reveal a big secret to you. It’s not going? to crack the case wide open, but it will confirm a few things. I won’t spoil it for you, but even if I did, you probably didn’t read this far.

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The latest entry in the previously latent Famicom Detective Club, Emio �The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club, is a visu?al novel. It’s not really an investigation game, as you don’t have much agency in searching for answers, so it’s largely linear. Having said that, how long does it take to complet??e?

It will probably take you between 12-15 hours.

There isn’t really much you can do in terms of side activities, and the structure is rather rigid. There may be some moments where you don’t know what the game is expecting from you, and you’ll find yourself temporarily stuck, but it’s unlikely it will be for very long. There aren’t many variables, and you can always “Think�to get a hint. There isn’t much you can do?? to really extend your playtime.

One thing to note is that you can get a plot recap whenever you load ??your game. You don’t have to play 12-15 hours within a short window to really understand everything, and the game won’t punish you for forgetting a detail (not significantly, anyway).

How many chapters are there in Emio - The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club

There are 12 chapters in Emio �The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club plus a prolog??ue and an epilogue. Once again, this is li?near, so you will absolutely need to go through the 12 chapters to reach the end. The epilogue is optional and is provided separately. Here is a list of all the chapters:

• Prologue: A Face
• Chapter 1: The Urban Legend
• Chapter 2: Disappearance
• Chapter 3: The Language of Flowers
• Chapter 4: A Suspect
• Chapter 5: The Paper Bag
• Chapter 6: Existence
• Chapter 7: Irumo Village
• Chapter 8: Brother and Sister
• Chapter 9: A Visitor
• Chapter 10: Minoru Tsuzuki
• Chapter 11: Suspicion
• Final Chapter: The Truth
• Epilogue: Depths

If you’re wondering what makes the epilogue “optional,�the game warns you (in character) that it’s dark and heavy. I can confirm this.?? While it’s a very quick and straightforward chapter, it delves into the past of The Smiling Man. It covers what drove them to murder, the murders themselves, what happened before the game’s narrative, and their fate. It gets disturbing, and it contains details that answer some lingering questions, but you don’t have to play through it if you don’t think you can stomach it. The mystery is solved in the previous chapters; the epilogue is just extra.

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Emio �The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club is the third core title in the Famicom Detective Club series. What was formerly Japan-exclusive finally came to North America in 2021 as Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir and The Girl Who Stands Behind. How important is it to have played those games before starting Emio.

Not all that important, as it turns out. Emio is its own mystery and features characters who are newly introduced to the series.? There are s?ome returning faces like Mr. Utsugi, Ayumi, and Detective Kamada, but their roles require no previous introduction.

Likewise, there are references made to previous games, but knowing what they refer to, specifically, doesn’t really matter. The protagonist sometimes refers to his parents and troubled childhood, but it’s within context??. He also mentions having a previous bout of amnesia, but that’s all you need to know. The references made are within the ?context of the current case, so intimate knowledge isn’t required.

Familiarity can enrich the experience, however. It’s also worth noting that the remakes of the first two Famicom Detective Club games are very recent and close to the standards of Emio. If you’re curious about the series, it might be more fun to start at the beginning (The Missing Heir if following release order, The Girl Who Stands Behind if you prefer chronologically). However, if the plots of those two games don’t interest you, while the idea of a bag-enshrouded serial killer is more enticing, then you won’t lose much if you skip ahead and start with Emio.

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I can’t say I was expecting remakes of the long-dormant Famicom Detective Club series, let alone a completely new entry. That’s to say nothing of how it was announced. The series lived and died on th?e Famicom Disk System (excluding some dalliances ?on the Super Famicom).

In a way,?? the visual novels feel very representative of the genre’s heyday on early Japanese home computers. Detectives were a popular subject, and the Famicom Disk System had a handful of its own. Here in North America, visual novels, in general, are niche, and retro detective stories are a niche within a niche. So, it’s refreshing to not only see these games for the first time in English, but also get to join i??n the revival.

Emio �The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club feels very much like a continuation of both th?e style and spirit of its prede?cessors, for better and worse. Before I even start talking about it, you probably already know if you’re on board to check it out.

Emio �The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club (Switch [Reviewed])
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: August 29, 2024
MSRP: $49.99

Emio �The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club takes place a few years after The Missing Heir (which is the first game released and the second game chronologically). The ??trio at Utsugi Detective Agency gets called into action by the police to help them with a murder. A schoolboy was found strangled. More unusually, a paper bag with a smiling face drawn on it was placed over his head.

The paper bag ?is referenced in a local urban legend about a paper bag-clad man who promises crying girls a way to smile forever before strangling them and leaving them wearing his signature smiling bag. However, more realistically, it harkens back to a series of murders 18 years prior to the start of the game, where girls were found strangled in the grinning headwear.

The plot gets a few wrenches thrown into the gears. First, the original serial murder victims were all girls, whereas this one was a boy. The boy was also ??strangled with a rope or cord, while ??the girls were bare-handed. However, the fact that the original victims were found wearing paper bags was kept out of the press, so the likelihood of a copycat is rather low. So, it’s time to pound the pavement.

I want to stress that Emio is not? an investigative game. It’s purely a mystery visual novel about detectives. Y??ou don’t have much agency when it comes to figuring things out; you’re mostly along for the ride. I don’t say this to disparage the game. I just want to set expectations.

However, the format does get in the way. You generally go around interrogating people, and this takes the form of aski??ng questi?ons, looking at stuff, and thinking. You’re sometimes given a list of questions, and you kind of just click through them. You ask about one subject, and eventually, the person you’re talking to just starts repeating themself. So you start asking about something else, and when you stop getting new information, you think, and that unlocks more. It’s not a far cry from the format of the first two games, but I’m not sure it was worth keeping it for continuity’s sake.

Murder aside, Emio is kind of a cozier detective game. The subject matter is grim, but the story isn’t told with much tension. I think telling you what the story doesn’t have in comparison to what you might expect could ruin the surprises more than telling you what it does, so I’m going to refrain from doing that. ??Instead, I’ll illu??strate it like this:

There is an early scene in the game where you wait for a bus. This isn’t a timed thing. It doesn’t have really ?much impact on the narrative. To get through it, you do the exact same thing you do everywhere else: you poke through the menu to try and find the op??tions that move things forward. It’s long, quiet, and somewhat comical. It’s not padding, nor is it significant. It’s just more time to spend with the protagonist in a way that makes them relatable.

And there are a few of these scenes throughout. Conversations with characters that don’t really have any meaning or significance. There are characters without any meaning or significance. There’s a scene where a character keeps wincing in pain, and when you find out the reason for it, you discover that it wasn’t anything important or concern??ing. The whole story could have been told much more concisely, but it relishes in bringing you into the world. Perhaps a little too much.

It’s not even that it’s boring??. Usually, when you’re trapped in a scene, there’s something fascinating about it. The characters that it’s so keen on showing are legitimately interesting and well-rounded. Suspicion is cast on so many of them that it’s easy to wonder what dark spots they have and how they tie into the overall mystery.

The main problem with its storytelling is its astounding lack of focus. It throws t??hreads in all directions and raises so many questions, that the conclusion has to do a lot of scrambling to tie them together. A few don’t really wind up in that knot to any satisfying extent. When all is said and done it’s a bit of a mess, but manages to find paydirt where it counts.

Emio spends so much of its runtime setting up dominos just so?? it can satisfyingly kno??ck them down at the end. That works in a lot of media, but video games take a lot longer to get through than a movie or even most novels. Expecting a player to stand at a bus stop for a portion of the story just so the ending hits marginally harder is a big ask.

Regardless of how I feel about Emio overall, I’m happy to have experienced it. Back in the �0s and �0s, publishers put a lot of thought into whether or not a game was worth localizing. We missed out on a lot of RPGs in the West because the games in the genre sold about as well as boxes of pre-chewed fingernails, and many titles didn’t have a chance because they were too Japanese. Emio - The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club is both very niche and very Japanese, but Nintendo still fou?nd it worthwhile bringing it across the pond. They probably aren’t even forecasting record sales; it’s just less risky to attempt it in today’s industry.

With that said, I’m not sure Emio is going to stick with me in the same way that Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo will. If anything does cement itself in my mind, it will be its conclusion, which is so incredibly impactful, partly because you’ve spe??nt so much time immersed in the very human side of its mystery. It’s also impactful because it’s incredibly dark in a way the rest of the narrative only hinted at. You'll just have to do some digging before you find the body.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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The Emio Famicom Detective Club demo will creep into the Nintendo eShop on August 19, with additional free chapters to follow until August 27. Those disappointed with the initial reveal of Emio being a part of the Famicom Detective Club can give it try before its August 29 release.

Strangely, the Emio - The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club demo will be released in installments. You'll be treated to the Prologue and Chapter 1 on August 19, Chapter 2 on August 22, and then Chapter 3 on August 27. All three sections of the free demo will launch at 6 pm Pacific Time (9 pm Eastern). As you may expect, your progress from the first three chapters will progress into the full game when it launches later this month.

Nintendo has released a trailer, showing new footage of this murder ??mystery. It shows the str?ange criminal approaching a victim and saying, "I can give you a smile that will last forever." After killing them, they then place a paperbag with a drawn grin on it. Creepy!

Throughout the adventure, you'll play as a prior character featured in the series Ayumi Tachibana for the first tim?e during sections of the story. For most of it, you'll be an assistant private investigator, solving a crime that repeats the actions of a disturbing string of murders 18 years ago.

Nintendo teases that this will be an "intense story of suspicion, isolation and fragility" as you dive deeper into the narrative. We'll discover if this Detective Club can be successful when the game launches on August 29 for the Nintendo Switch. You can p?re-order it for $49.99. It will be one of very few times that Nintendo releases a Mature-rated title.

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About a week ago, Nintendo dropped a teaser that looked like it could have been ripped from Silent Hill. It involved a person wearing a trenchcoat and a paper bag on their head, and there were some squeaky horror cuts. Our only clues were the video’s title, Emio, and the words “Smiling Man.�/p>

We received more clarification today. The bad news is that it’s not a new Eternal Darkness. The good news is that it’s a new entry in the Famicom Detective Club. The series began in 1988 with two games on the Famicom Disk System, then immediately went dormant. They were remade for the Switch in 2021 as Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir and Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind, which was? the first time the g?ames were localized in other languages.

The new game will be called Emio - The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club. According to the announcement interview with producer Yoshio Sakamoto (director of the original games, people stay at Nintendo for a long time), the mystery will focus on an urban myth wherein a man will “offer girls a paper bag with a smile drawn on it in exchange for their life.�Seems like a bad deal to?? me.

The Famicom Detective Club games were part of this wave of mystery visual novel/adventure games that hit home computers and the Famicom in the �0s. They weren’t unique game changers, but Nintendo’s own take on a trend. I’ve wanted to play them since getting into the Famicom Disk System library, but I haven’t tried the remakes. They’re expensive. I wanted to review them, but CJ beat me to it (for a number of reason??s) and I n?ever circled back.

I guess I’ll have to try and cram them into my schedule since Emio - The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club is out on Switch August 29, 2024. There will be a physical version avail??able.

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