VN Talk: Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind

In which I talk (write) about visual novels from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: Switch
Release: 2021

Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind is a prequel to Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir, and because of that it doesn't have to deal with any of the fallout from the previously published game. The result is a less personal story, but definitely a creepier one.

The two games can be played in any order (and in fact you can import your protagonist's name from either game if you have save data from one or the other), though personally I enjoyed having gone in chronological order of release date. As with the first game, I think it mostly holds up over the thirty years since it's been written, but despite the fact I "solved" The Missing Heir early on and could not say the same for The Girl Who Stands Behind, I found The Girl to be the less memorable of the two.

I'll be discussing spoilers from here on out, so now's the time to tap out if you don't want to see them!

As a mystery, The Girl Who Stands Behind is significantly more complicated than The Missing Heir. Though the culprit is not immediately obvious in either game, in The Missing Heir you have some likely candidates to start with. The Girl Who Stands Behind has nothing of the sort. Rather, it's a new mystery tangled up in an older one.

When Ayumi's friend Yoko is murdered, we learn that she was investigating the school's urban legend about "The Girl Who Stands Behind," which is pretty much the kind of legend you'd expect it to be from the name. When you're alone at school, late at night, you may hear a voice call out to you from behind, and it's a ghost called "The Girl Who Stands Behind."

However, since someone got killed over this, there's obviously more to "The Girl Who Stands Behind" than being a simple urban legend. This leads into a deep dive into when the legend started, what was the inciting event, who the real girl could have been, and why she was killed.

Identifying the girl isn't that hard once the protagonist finds out when the legend started, because a girl named Shinobu went missing fifteen years ago, and one of the teachers who was a student at the time admits to having seen a bloody Shinobu late at night, but figuring out why she was bloody, who killed her, and why her body was hidden is much more complicated.

Maybe too complicated.

While I was writing this, I came to realize that the reason I didn't like this game as much as The Missing Heir is that there are too many players in the game with hidden backstories tying them to a crime of several years ago that Shinobu had the misfortune to stumble into.

We have multiple pairs of misbehaving fathers and sons, and one of the sons we never get to meet alive, even though he seems like a suspect at one point and was still breathing through a good chunk of the story. Running counter to that, we end up spending a ridiculous amount of time with a suspicious janitor who is actually not involved at all. We spend so much time investigating around the janitor we even run out to visit his mother!

And there are frustrating red herrings like that stupid wall (if you've played the game you know exactly which wall I'm talking about). Even the protagonist admits he thought it hid the body at one point, but are you ever allowed to investigate it? Can you even bring it up as a possibility to anyone prior to the end of the game? Nooooooo.

Though I had fun running through the case as I was playing it (I really did like unraveling the urban legend portion of the story), The Girl Who Stands Behind just didn't give me that strong a punch at the end. The Missing Heir felt like everything wrapped up, and even though a lot of people died, it felt like an upbeat ending. The Girl has a very creepy visual of Shinobu's corpse falling down on Hibino's shoulder, which definitely lands a reaction (especially since I was not expecting her body to be behind the mirror), but I just didn't feel as satisfied.

Worse, the game tries to land that upbeat ending by framing Principal Urabe's covering for Hibino's crimes as an act of fatherly love. While Urabe's actions could have come out of love, the result of it was tragedy and should not be celebrated as the feel good capstone to a murder mystery. With the reveal of her body, it feels like Shinobu has finally gotten her justice, but Yoko, whose death kicks off the story, ends up feeling like a forgotten victim.

That said, I enjoyed a lot of the school elements of the story. The protagonist is sent in to investigate precisely because he's the same age as the other students and they're more likely to talk with him than the police. This is the first time he works with Ayumi, who runs support for him in The Missing Heir. She has a lot more to do in this game and The Girl Who Stands Behind also introduces Hitomi, who I wish had been in The Missing Heir as he's very funny. Hitomi is typically a girl's name, so the fact this Hitomi falls into the 80s Japanese delinquent archetype is a hoot.

The setting in general feels a little livelier, a little less artificial with all the students around. There are kids hanging out between and after classes, and a much larger student body to press for information than the relatively static number of villagers in The Missing Heir. No small number of them will comment on the protagonist being a teen detective, but it doesn't seem quite as out of place as when the police would do it in the previous game since these are his peers.

I'd still recommend The Girl Who Stands Behind, but overall I think The Missing Heir was the better mystery.