- Developer: Nintendo
- Publisher: Nintendo
- Release date: 14/05/2021
- Price: £49.99 (As part of 2 game bundle) / $34.99 (Or part of $59.98 2 game bundle)
- Review code provided by Nintendo
Introducing Famicom Detective Club: The Girl who Stands Behind Review
So, before I get too deep into this review for Famicom Detective Club: The Girl who Stands Behind, I want to point out that I am writing this more or less as a companion piece to my review for the other title in the Famicom Detective Club releases, The Missing Heir. These games were clearly made in tandem with one another, so they share a lot of the same successes and a lot of the same flaws. I don’t want to spend too much time repeating myself so I will be mostly talking about this game in comparison to its sister title. For a baseline, please make sure you’ve at least glanced over the other review in this duology. With that out of the way, let’s get into what makes The Girl Who Stands Behind special.
Get Your Magnifying Glass
The mystery in this title is that of the death of a young girl, Yoko, from a local high school. Our protagonist from the other Famicom Detective Club title is on the case, working to figure out who killed her. There’s a lot of the requisite twists and turns. As it turns out that Yoko was something of a detective herself, having founded the detective club at her school. She was also working to uncover the secret of the titular girl who stands behind, an urban legend that has circulated at her school for the past 15 years or so. The question being, did a spirit really get her or was it something more down to earth? And how does this all connect to a 15 year old murder and disappearance?
If you’ve already played The Missing Heir and know how that ends, you may be wondering how this story picks up from there and the answer is that it simply doesn’t. The Girl Who Stands Behind is a prequel to The Missing Heir, meaning that you can play the two in either order and it won’t effect the experience much. This game does have a very short scene at the end to bridge the two. But given that they take place two years apart, there is little connecting them other than the characters.
I think I would actually recommend playing this game first of the two for story purposes since it gives a lot of backstory to Ayumi, our detective partner from the first game and lets us see the detective of the agency we work for in person this time. Ayumi has a much larger role here, as she was friends with Yoko. It makes her feel a lot more like her own character rather than a vehicle for plot and someone to bounce ideas off of like she could sometimes feel like in The Missing Heir. She and the main character actually have some good chemistry and I found that I ended up liking both of them a lot more after playing The Girl Who Stands Behind. I feel like the writers really found their footing when it came to this one.
Searching for Clues
I also appreciated the way that the mystery was entirely differently structured in The Girl Who Stands Behind. While The Missing Heir had a lot of bodies piling up and a lot of searching for missing people, The Girl Who Stands Behind had a different approach. In this case, there’s a lot more chasing down different leads, even a whole segment that involves chasing a red herring for a while. Though this does end up having some weight later on. The only complaint that I could have is that the story drags a little bit in the middle of the process of following that red herring, but it gets back on track in the span of one of the chapter so it’s not all that bad. I was also pretty ready to complain of the game having an anti-climactic ending when I was in the final chapter, only for things to escalate in a way that was extremely satisfying to witness.
The tone is a bit different in this title as well. The mystery itself is just as serious, but despite this being a murder case, there are a lot more moments of levity throughout the narrative. Characters are more willing to joke around and to mess a little bit with the main character or act a bit silly, but it never was overdone or drawn out too long. Just enough to get a sensible chuckle before moving on. A good amount of this in the back half came from the character Hitomi, who I just thought was one of the best in the game!
There’s also more points of making choices in this title, but I don’t know exactly how much this affected anything other than the way the game scored me at the end for what type of detective I am and what my relationship with Ayumi was. Progression is pretty linear, so I doubt it changed a whole lot, but to have things summed up like that was a bit nice, even if it was entirely unneeded.
So many Suspects
Gameplay is largely similar to the first game in terms of it all being a lot of walking around and talking to people, with the occasional showing them items. It’s simple, but it works fine. The progression of pointing you in the direction of where to look next is a little smoother this time but it is still very specific and I think I had a time or two where something didn’t trigger until I did it a second time, though I can’t be sure because I was stuck for a while. The “remember” option of the first game has been replaced with “think” which serves just about the same purpose, but just the simple act of renaming it made the function so much clearer and that helped a lot.
There are some weird spots to jump through, though, just like last time. There’s plenty of having to ask about the same thing multiple times to get everything a character knows instead of them just saying it all the first time, which was frustrating again. However, the most annoying point in the game was when I had to use a functionality for completely the wrong purpose. You see, the option in the menu to save the game is called “quit investigation” which is pretty cute. However, there is a point in the game where you are asked to use this as a legitimate response to someone, the option literally saying that you are going to quit the investigation. This was frustrating since I had been trained to see this as a save game button and nothing else. It comes up this one time and never again. Looking back, this did happen in the first game, but I had gotten lucky and was trying to save the game to quit when I needed to choose it so I hadn’t quite realized it. This time around, the interaction was more obvious to me and it really just exemplified the moon logic this game sometimes wants you to have.
However, it’s clear that a lot was learned from the first game when this one was made because there were a lot of improvements. Like I mentioned before, there were more instances of choice in this title, which was nice to see even if they may not have changed much. The alternate forms of solving were better too. There were points where I would be prompted to enter words in The Missing Heir, which weren’t super difficult, but I could see hassling people. In this title, those were replaced with selecting a subject from your notes, which was more appropriate I feel. Yet, I can completely understand people who might need a walkthrough for the stickier parts of this game and I don’t blame them at all. I know because I did need a bit of help at one point and I’m not afraid to admit that.
Looking to the Past
The visuals in this game are just as good as and possibly better than those in The Missing Heir. I said that the approach to characters in the first title had raised the bar for visual novels for me and this just did it one better. The same 2D yet 3D feeling character artwork is here of course, with that same beautiful subtle movement at all times that gives them life. However The Girl Who Stands Behind had a good deal more action work and unique art assets to go along. I felt like there were a good deal more points where there was animation for the characters beyond their basic ones, not to mention there were a few wonderful instances of a character giving full crazy face. What stood out to me were just how many cases there were of characters who only appeared for just a few lines but had a full face. And how there was a character or two who had more than one outfit they wore. It was some nice attention to detail. If The Missing Heir set the bar high, then The Girl Who Stands Behind was the high jump champ who effortlessly cleared it.
Music and voice work were just as stellar this time around as last time. Those instances of characters going full crazy eyes were helped along by some voice work that I am sure the actors had a lot of fun with. It is fully voiced, but once again just in Japanese. Like I said last time, it still helps to get a feel for the tone. There are multiple versions of the soundtrack again. There’s, of course, the modern reinterpretation of the tracks, but in this title we also got the Famicom version and the version from the Super Famicom and there’s a lot more difference between the two than you might have thought.
Everything ran perfectly fine as well. You won’t have any complaints from me on that front. However, just like any text heavy game on the Switch, your comfort with playing it on tv is going to depend on your setup for if the text will be a comfortable size or not.
I’ve Got It!
The murders of the first game may have been more salacious, but in every other way, I think that The Girl Who Stands Behind may be the superior title. The characters are more interesting, the gameplay has had some bumps smoothed out, the visuals are more exciting, and it’s just a bit more polished in that way that can only come from having gained the confidence from a first attempt. If you are in a region where these games are separate and you only want to get one, I would say that this is the one to go for.
Pros
- Stunning visuals raising the bar from the last game
- Main characters feel stronger
- General tweaks and improvements
Cons
- Progress can still be overly specific
- Strange use of options at times
Verdict
If you can only get one Famicom Detective Club game, this is the one to get. An improvement on an already fun time? Yes please!
