I’d seen a number of reviews comparing this series of games to the Phoenix Wright games and let me tell you this – they’re not really much alike at all. Phoenix Wright has humour and puzzles and magic and stupidity and nonsense, whereas Famicom Detective Club is (despite appearances) rooted in reality with no magic or ghosts or stuff like that. And there’s no trial – just investigations. Which play out mostly like a visual novel.
The Missing Heir is one of two updated Switch versions of the very old series on the Famicom, and so previously only appeared in Japan in impenetrable Japanese. This game is about you – a young private detective who is suffering from amnesia following an attack – trying to figure out who he is, why he was attacked, and continuing the murder investigation that he was in the middle of when he lost his memory.
Although the game wasn’t quite what I was expecting, I did really enjoy the story, The plot really makes you want to find the killer, so it works as a proper murder mystery. The artwork and voice acting (Japanese only) were both great too. The “gameplay”, such as it is, was a bit frustrating however: Progression is mostly just making sure you say the right things to the right people in the right orders, and it’s here the game fall down a bit – you have to pretty much exhaust all your dialogue and action options, sometimes multiple times, in order to trigger the next action or event. It isn’t always clear which thing you need to say or do as often the reaction to what you do is unexpected. Thankfully, it’s worth it.
