Emu – The Smiling Man: Detective Club Famicom

Emio – The Smiling Man is the unlikely link between past and present at good old RD1, Nintendo’s historic internal R&D division. Sakamoto’s work represents the primordial soup of Nintendo’s resurgent identity post-Switch, a company that’s a complete contradiction in its approach of not only shouting at the top of its lungs how proud it is of its IPs – even the most forgotten ones – but also being able to Giving new life to a franchise that was technically born in 1988. And it ended just one year later. We’re talking seven console generations ago, technological prehistory, and yet… very modern.

We love these operations so much, but in reality they are many: they are precisely the shining mirror of that courage that will be needed by all those publishers (many) who seem to be ashamed for years of what made them famous. Emio represents the spark of absolute dignity that one must always give to one’s past, without shame, without fear of who one is, where one comes from, what products one has achieved success with. Nintendo, rightly, increasingly wants to strengthen and invest in its assets.

Emio – The Smiling Man, however, is not only that: it is also a great video game story. In dark colors. Sakamoto’s creation is a wonderful step back in time, to the humble Japan of the 1980s, without much frills, basic and wonderfully simple.

old thriller movie

The world of Japanese graphic novels is an extraordinarily diverse one: something that has only happened in recent years. overflow like a river in flood In societies should not distract us from some of his more curious tales.

Did you know that Yuji Horii, before starting to make JRPGs, loved writing detective stories to imagine through early video games? Other times were when he and Nakamura (from Chunsoft) discovered how fun it was to write thrillers: Horii laid the groundwork for Dragon Quest , and Nakamura instead set off on a tangent that would lead him to build his career on it. Very high-profile novels. The two created The Portopia Serial Murder Case , a title that inspired a young Yoshio Sakamoto to start writing as well. It was the early years at Nintendo, and after a few rather hectic titles, the dark Yoshio wanted to try his hand at something else: well, that experiment worked out pretty well, and it’s no coincidence that my Famicom Detective Clubs novel is among the most important novels of those years and certainly among the most influential of all time.

We’ve said it, but we’ll say it again: Sakamoto knows how to write, he knew how to write at the age of 25, and he knew how to weave stories, characters, and dialogue with a completely unique brilliance. If you’ve played the new Famicom Detective Club releases, you’ll notice how the direction, character traits, and plots that are so strongly rooted in Japanese society are still fresh and modern, and very enjoyable, and a bit imperfect in their perceived style. Old school, playful flow, but A novel capable of absorbing And proceed to the plaster word board.

In Emio – The Man Who Smiles, the Utsugi Detective Agency is still the same, but living a new “retro” experience in 2024, with the latest narration, photography and story direction is the enviable panacea, which will lead you forward lightly, as if in the absence of gravity, fascinated by the distinctive features of the cast that never goes over the top, guessed, well-characterized but without excess. Who is Emio? This question, in its simplicity, will end up constantly buzzing in your head while you will be determined to blame this character from time to time first, then that character, then the next character, in a primitive investigative fervor that we have not witnessed for a long time. The body of the novel is full of intrigue, but the flow of dialogues – sometimes long and drawn out only on the surface – is striking. Realistic tea towel, pure Japanese style But it’s never unnecessarily revealing or heavy. You’ll be happy to let yourself be carried away by the text, thanks to a gameplay that knows how to weigh suggestions, words, and clues about how to continue investigations and interrogations much better than the chapters of the late 1980s.

Interface faces

Famicom Detective Club has never been popular, even in newer versions, for its smooth gameplay. Let’s talk about a game withMinimalist interfacewhere questions, subject matter and dialogues are confirmed, scenes are verified and detective thinking is stimulated: however, it has happened that progress has not been immediate, or that some answers have been so long that they did not need further catharsis, or that it has been necessary to periodically repeat the flow of options to ignite the movement of dialogues stuck somewhere.

Some of the clue-finding sections were tedious and decidedly unconvincing. Emio – The Smiling Man is an episode that, from this point of view as well, is more correct and honest in its management of both the more interactive controls and the logic of dialogue and progression. The response sentences are often brief and genuinely excite our desire to know more and thus “guess” the option to explore further independently; Dialogues are better written.They are able to draw characters, events and developments with greater efficiency. Sakimoto reaches maturity by offering a more mature product, intertwined but at the same time more digestible, better recognizable in its development, more coherent and correct also at the level of the text and in highlighting the important elements in the dialogues. The logic of thought and deduction works well, the summary system helps you not to get lost, the plot unfolds in time, without burdening the days of investigations, delivering, after 35 years, a new episode of the Famicom Detective Club that is certainly more precise than its predecessors and with a perfectly balanced rhythm, while the visual investigation phases are emptied in favor of the dialogues.

It doesn’t take much to notice the technical evolution on a technical level: nothing transcendent, but the animation, expressions, cleanliness and general design are a step forward compared to the remake, faithful to the original and not free to experiment.

In Emio, Nintendo applied More advanced animation techniquesAble to better describe scenes, sequences and developments and to give an aura of greater modernity to a work that is set in the past, without distorting it at all. The color palettes are saturated to the right point, the anime style has its subtle and delicate but convincing inspiration, and the overall interface is cleaner and better organized, especially in the character description sheets. Thanks to the possibility of responding by inserting text or selecting underlined parts of the description, the player’s involvement is ensured through a continuous phase of deduction and comparison with Ayumi, our friend and colleague at the Otsugi Detective Agency, who helps in reconstructing the discoveries, asks us and perhaps guides us to improve our understanding of the plot.