Admittedly, visual novels are not my preferred genre when it comes to video games. I’ve played through a handful, and while I can generally understand the appeal, I’ve always preferred a little more interactivity with the story to keep me entertained. Something like Capcom’s Phoenix Wright series for instance, balances story and mechanics in a way that I really enjoy, and unfortunately that’s not always the case for a lot of visual novels out there.
However, when Nintendo decided to port the early Famicom Detective Club cames to Nintendo Switch Online earlier this year, positive word of mouth had me interested. I still have yet to get around to playing those, but when the opportunity came up to check out Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club on Switch, I decided to finally give the series a go. Overall, I’m glad I did, and having now finished Emio, I’m looking forward to going back and checking out those earlier entries. Emio’s story had me hooked from beginning to end, and outside of some minor quibbles with how you interact with the story I really enjoyed my time with the game.
Emio – The Smiling Man is definitely a visual novel, you won’t be doing much outside of the story other than selecting prompts to further dialogue, and occasionally searching a still image of a scene to trigger additional prompts to move the story forward. The screen searching element is very, very light, you’ll only have a few things to look at on most locations, and even then it typically just serves up a sentence or two of information. There’s no need for pouring over a scene and attempting to pixel hunt for obscure clues, and for the most part you can skip over searching most scenes entirely.
My biggest gripe with Emio comes from these various options, which don’t always do the best job of highlighting which one you need to choose from in order to advance the story. There’s a couple of sequences where you’re essentially expected to continuously choose from one option over and over, but the game doesn’t do a great job of letting you know that, which can be a little frustrating to deal with. Granted, since there’s not a lot of options to choose from overall you’re not spending too much time figuring this stuff out, but it does ruin the pace of the story at different points which is disappointing. Maybe this is less of an issue for folks more experienced with the visual novel genre, but I certainly had a couple of moments where I felt like I had no clue what the game was expecting of me until I just brute forced my way through all the options in order to trigger whatever event was next.
Note: Nintendo provided us with a Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club Switch code for review purposes.
Emio The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club for Nintendo Switch
Price: $54.95
12 used & new available from $50.97
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