Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club review for Nintendo Switch

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.

I was also curious as to how Emio – The Smiling Man went about earning it’s ESRB rating. It’s not often that we see Nintendo published titles with a Mature ESRB grade, and in their early marketing for the game Nintendo was certainly playing up the horror element for Emio. Having finished the game I’m not sure that I’d entirely qualify it as horror, more of a serial killer thriller of sorts, light on the gore and violence but certainly dealing with more mature themes like abuse, suicide, kidnapping and so on. It doesn’t really ratchet up the gruesome elements until the tail end of the game, and I don’t think there’s anything here that’s so severe it’ll turn away people that can’t typically deal with horror in general. 

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. 

When it comes to options during dialogue, there’s a few prompts you can select from. The option to Ask is to just directly ask a question of a character, which will then give you a few prompts to choose from in relation to wherever you’re at with the current story. Another is to Call or Engage, usually used to either get a characters attention or pull someone in from the distance to start dialogue with them. Outside of that you can Think, generally used to generate new prompts for the Ask option of dialogue, or to clue you in on how to proceed. You also have an option to use your phone to call other characters, but this function is really kind of underutilized throughout the game. 

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.

Despite that particular issue, I thought Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club was a really enjoyable experience overall. The story is well-told, with a tight cast of memorable characters that help deliver the tale really well, in addition to limited animation during scenes to keep you entertained, and a hefty payoff with an epilogue chapter that helps tie everything up neatly. I’d certainly be down to check out more games in the series, whether that’s the older ports on Switch Online, or possible future entries down the line. If you get a chance to check out Emio, whether you’re into visual novels or not, I think you’ll enjoy your time with it. 

Note: Nintendo provided us with a Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club Switch code for review purposes.