Easy to see why "The Girl Who Stands Behind" is the favorite between the two original offerings. This isn't bad - it's a solid mystery, there's a couple good tonal moments (the seaside cliff in general is a great set piece), and it's neat to see Nintendo advance the formula established by The Portopia Serial Murder Case. But there's just no competing with the heights of "The Girl Who Stands Behind"'s mystery. Playing through this ended up being less "Aha, this is what I was missing" and more "Ah, this is what the prequel built upon."

Also, for all the polish (I LOVE this art style, and the music/voice acting is such a treat), there's no escaping that third-gen gameplay jank that forms the heart of this game. There was a good stretch of time where I kept running around in circles, trying to find the flag I missed during my first, second, third pass of a scene. I run into that a lot with mystery adventure games, admittedly, but it always feels at its most pronounced for me with the Famicom Detective Club games.

Still, I am VERY grateful we got this. This was my gaming white whale for the longest time, and I'm glad I was finally able to play through it.

Really neat that this game was remade and the fact it came out in the US at all seems like a miracle. Pretty simple for an adventure game a lot of the twists I had figured out pretty early on but it is still entertaining. A lot of the choices about what you need to do at some points are really obscure and annoying which is unfortunately kind of typical for the genre. The game really shines in its visual presentation though as the backgrounds and character animations are beautiful combined with solid voice acting the treatment this game got I wish was applied to all my favorite vns.

Pretty fun throwback detective game. A lot of the twists are telegraphed pretty heavily in advance, and it's relatively easy to figure out whodunnit, but the writing is decent and the art is gorgeous. My biggest issues are some relatively unintuitive things you have to do to progress - even though you as the player have figured out everything you need from the scene, the game won't let you progress until you've done things in a particular way. This, coupled with a few moon logic moments, make an otherwise really nice detective game into a somewhat frustrating experience. Despite this, I still enjoyed it a lot!

As someone who hasn't been a huge fan of text based adventure games, I really did like this, and thought it had a great story with a lot of interesting twists and turns, along with having some amazing art and great characters. However, I feel like there isn't too much that changes the game enough. Outside one puzzle, there isn't a lot of unique puzzles, and most of the puzzles are finding out how to progress to the next story beat among you choices of what to say, go, do, which leads to some really weird ways how the game progresses. There are times where you have to do one very small and specific interaction or choice that seems minor, but makes you progress for some reason. One instance is where you have are at a cliff, and you go this apartment complex where you see if someone you know is there, but they aren't, so you go back outside, and then you notice an object in the ground that has been there since the start of the game. The game just feels a bit too obscure on how to progress. Outside that one huge issue I had throughout the game, I liked it.

This is a hard one. The game has a solid storyline with interesting characters and believable twists and turns. The 3D models are gorgeous, looking hand animated and crisp. The problem with the game is that it's challenging to choose the correct dialogue choice or action to trigger the plot to advance. At times I found myself looping through the same dialogue options three or more times. One time, the game even required me to choose the "quit game" option to advance the plot! If it weren't as tedious to find the correct choice, this game would certainly score higher marks.

Una obra de su tiempo, que bien podría haberse quedado allí.

Pros:
- Comparándolo con el original, el trabajo de remasterizado visual y sonoro es brillante.
- Aunque clasicote, el guion es salvable.
- Al menos, el asesino no es el mayordomo.

Contras:
- Al juego se la pela por completo el tiempo del jugador. Es enrevesado en su progreso de una forma completamente artificial y frustrante.
- Le faltan giros de guion y sorpresas por doquier, demasiado clásico en su concepción.
- OTRO PROTAGONISTA AMNÉSICO.

A very classic murder mystery game in every way for better or worse. The story is a very by-the-books mystery focused on deaths surrounding a family inheritance but after playing/reading so many mysteries with bizarre over-the-top characters and rube goldberg murder methods, FDC's more conventional and down-to-earth mystery is refreshing and comfy in a way. The story comes together pretty well and, aside from the pauses caused by the gameplay, it's nicely paced with substantial story events happening pretty regularly. I would've liked for Ayumi to be a constant investigation partner throughout the game though just to add some more personality to the interactions and because she's cute. Probably the worst part about the game is that it retains the classic adventure gameplay in its entirety where you have to take a lot of annoying steps to progress through the story like repeating certain dialogue choices over and over again and examining random things with very little guidance. Around the 75% mark I just started using a walkthrough to save time. Aside from that though, I think it's a very well-done remake. The music and art is nice and the animation looks surprisingly natural compared to the weird bouncy live2D animation a lot of VNs/JRPGs tend to go for.

Game #134: Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir

First game I've beaten on my Switch. It has extremely beautiful artwork and a well written story but in some parts it needs QoL improvements. Apart from that story is really predictable but still an enjoyable experience overall.

7/10

It's like a darker, more serious and more overtly supernatural version of an Ace Attorney game, if you replaced the humor with a more frustrating focus on sequence breaking and point-and-click exploration. That sounds like I didn't like it, but I did; adventure games of this sort are not my usual genre, so I was unaware of the way "just do the same action over and over until something happens" is a common mechanic.

The atmosphere here is genuinely haunting at times, and the late-in-game genre and play mechanic shift genuinely took me by surprise.

I bought the dual collection when it came out, but I ended up not actually playing it until just recently for whatever reason. I decided to make The Missing Heir my first game, as it seemed to be the recommended starter.

First off, I wanna say, the production values in this are pretty incredible. New soundtrack (with the option to listen to the original soundtrack from the Famicom), nice art and backgrounds (I think the backgrounds are hand drawn and the character sprites, while I'm not sure, look like 3D models that pass off as hand drawn), lots of cut ins and CGs, it's honestly kind of incredible. For an incredibly old duology, Nintendo really put a lot of effort into it. The art is great, and the soundtrack is pretty catchy, too! Also, mostly full voice acting! Megumi Ogata is the protagonist!

The story is, overall, pretty good, too. You play as a detective who has lost his memories right before you're to investigate the murder of the head of a rich, influential family. There are plenty of twists which, honestly, I quite liked! The cast was pretty good and fun, and I quite enjoyed the story.

However, this leads to two major downsides. The first is that, this is very classic adventure game. Sometimes you have to choose the same option 4 times in a row, or you have to do things in a certain order to get the next flag set for you to progress. It's not particularly fun at times, and I ended up opening up a walkthrough towards the end for when I got stuck. I understand it's a very old game and that's how they used to work, but I kind of wish they touched some of this up to make it less... frustrating.

The other issue is the story works at a pretty fast pace, a little too fast. Some of the big twists at the end you're left with only moments to breathe and take in the current chapter and plot beats before it's over and you're on to something new. There's a lot of cool stuff in the story, and I just wish they let it sit and simmer and let you take it in before you're off to the next thing. For a pretty fun murder mystery story, it's over far too soon, which is a real shame.

I would definitely recommend it! It's cool to play a game that was only available in Japan, especially that's so present day in its production. If you like short little mystery games, check it out! I'm eager to play the next one!

A pretty compelling detective story. The mechanics kind of drag—there's a lot of randomly selecting and reselecting menu options just to try to get the exact set the game wants in the exact order it expects, and I can't imagine doing that without a walkthrough to get yourself unstuck periodically. But the plot itself really picks up in the latter half of the game once you start to see enough of the facts that you can start piecing together theories, and it even asks the player to make deductions without handholding a few times. A good balance of making me feel clever without making the entire thing obvious.