When Nintendo released a mysterious teaser called #WhoisEmio? In July 2024, many people thought it was a new horror or horror adventure, something we hadn’t seen from Nintendo in a while, but to the surprise of many when this mysterious title was finally announced, we knew Nintendo hadn’t forgotten about one of its most beloved IPs for a special niche in the 80s.
Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club the return of one of Nintendo’s little known franchises.
Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club is nothing more than the third part of the series of video games titled Famicom Detective Club, until recently a practically forgotten series, whose first two parts were released in 1988 and 1989 for NES. That until a few years ago remakes of both great titles could be appreciated, under the wing of Yoshio Sakamoto, who is also behind the famous Metroid series in addition to the original parts, it was a good idea to create a trilogy.
Emio’s story takes place several months after the events of the first installment and begins with the murder of a high school student. Who appears to have been strangled, and also has a paper bag with a smile painted on it. Similar to the urban legend of Emio, or the Smiling Man.
Where beliefs tell us that a man carrying a paper bag appears in front of crying children. The man will tell them that they no longer have to cry and that he will give them a permanent smile. Then he will kill them. This is where the adventure begins, as you play as a detective from the Utsugi Detective Agency alongside Ayumi Tachibana, investigating the murder of a high school student.
Much of the game focuses on interrogating people. Options include interacting with characters, thinking for yourself, and observing your surroundings. Important information is recorded in your notebook, which includes suspects and notable facts. You will also have access to a phone and the ability to bring or show objects to characters later on. Features of modern visual novels are also present, such as autoplay and dialogue omission. All of this makes up the bulk of Emio’s gameplay.
Like any visual novel of its kind, Emio has optional interactions in the game, though they are not always obvious to the player. Often they are crude moments, such as staring at a woman’s breast or observing a man’s booger. They can also be indecent dialogue that seems out of place in a Nintendo game. The game doesn’t direct you to these options; you’d have to discover them yourself. The light-hearted moments break up the overwhelming sense of dread I felt during Emio, so it’s clearly not a game for kids.
Here many will say that it sounds very boring, since it is a lot of reading and research on your own with a gameplay limited to just that and we partly understand that, since visual novels are for a special or rather niche audience, but clearly this is a high-class visual novel that we fully recommend playing and a good option to enter the world of visual novels.
In the market of such there are many renowned ones that we could compare to Emio, such as YU-NO: A girl who chants love at the bound of this world, Steins;Gate, among many others similar to Emio, but it is extremely to see one made by Nintendo that makes it a gem, and with the Halloween and Day of the Dead season fast approaching, there is no better time to get the game on your Nintendo Switch.