VN Talk: Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir

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

Platform: Switch
Release: 2021

Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir was originally an old adventure game for the 8-bit NES some thirty odd years ago. It wasn't brought over to the US at the time, and no wonder since it has more in common with PC games than what we considered console games at the time. Famicom Detective Club has a lot of text and requires a player willing to read a lot and puzzle out which actions to take next given the information they have.

Sometimes those actions are arbitrary or silly in the fashion of adventure games of the late 80s and early 90s, and none of that gameplay was updated when Nintendo did a remake of the two FDC games, The Missing Heir and The Girl Who Stands Behind.

The story, at least for The Missing Heir, likely would have required some rewriting for content that would have been unacceptable at the time as well.

So what about the story? This is a thirty year old game!

Surprisingly, it holds up well! Put on your spoiler hat though. This is a mystery game and it only was translated into English for the first time this year. It's not possible to discuss without spoiling the ending.

The Missing Heir features a nameable protagonist who is a teen detective called out to investigate the death of Kiku, the matriarch of the wealthy Ayashiro family. The butler wants the protagonist to find Kiku's missing daughter and heir to the family business and fortune.

However, someone also tries to kill the protagonist, resulting in him starting off the game with amnesia and needing to be briefed on what happened. Despite his lack of memories, he's still game for solving the case, and with his friend Ayumi doing secondary investigations remotely, he's able to make good progress.

He also has a personal quest of his own. Being an orphan he wants to find his birth family, and it doesn't take a genius to realize that even if he's not the missing daughter, he must be her son and thus a missing heir himself.

And that turns out to be true. His mother eloped to marry the man she loved and his parents died in a house fire that he survived as a baby. The reason for the murder attempt on him earlier in the game was because someone realized his connection to the family and there are others who stand to inherit if his mother's fate is never brought to light. There's a talisman his mother left him that is considered proof of being the family heir and no way to claim the inheritance without it.

His amnesia is just a convenient way to keep that hidden until late in the story where it can be a surprise reveal, and while it's realistic for him to not suspect he has a personal relationship to everything going on, it's a little aggravating when the player is expecting him to eventually figure out he has the burn mark signifying that he's Yuri's baby. Fortunately, the game does address why he doesn't notice it until someone else points it out, but until we see exactly how it's positioned on his body it's a bit of a hangbanger wondering how he's missed seeing a scar on his own arm.

The villain also has a good reason for keeping the protagonist alive after the initial murder attempt because he needs that talisman Yuri left behind, thus establishing why the protagonist is allowed to investigate through the game than being immediately offed in a second attempt. (The first attempt was by an accomplice who didn't know better.)

But even though the protagonist's heritage is the titular mystery, there's more going on in this game, and this is where it gets good. For what was probably considered a children's title, there's a pretty high body count, and surprisingly the police have zero problems with allowing a teen detective check out a crime scene.

Matriarch Kiku has two nephews, a niece, and a grandnephew in addition to her missing daughter (who most don't realize is already deceased) and presumably all of them would like to inherit the company rather than some cousin who's been missing for years. But then, one by one, they start turning up dead, and their deaths don't necessarily look like murders either, like the guy hung from a noose with no signs of a struggle. Is that murder or suicide?

Finding the missing link to figure out how the deaths happened, who the murderer is (since you have a pretty good idea of name, but not the face), is a much better ride. I really liked the discovery that the two nephews and Kiko herself had been killed through poison-laced tobacco, using their own vice against them and murdering them in a way that did not leave a mark. And it also explains why the later murders had to be more violent with clues left behind because those victims didn't smoke.

It was on learning this that I realized this plot point was probably a major blocker in getting this game localized when it originally came out. Cigarettes would have been a no-no and here it was an integral part of the murder method.

Once all the relatives are popped off and Kiko's lawyer Kanda stands to inherit, it's pretty obvious that the culprit has to be him. But he's impossible to meet in any obvious way as he's never in his office. It's not until the protagonist undergoes the traditional Ayashiro family trial to inherit the company that Kanda finally reveals himself and tries to kill the protagonist now that he has everything he needs to legitimately take over the company.

In a way, it's a little surprising that the protagonist does not take any countermeasures against this knowing that someone already tried to kill him once. He's not able to beat Kanda, but is saved by his adopted uncle Kazuto, who, like Kanda, remains an enigma most of the game that we barely catch a glimpse of.

I'd actually forgotten about him entirely so when he barged in to rescue the protagonist it took me a while to figure out who he was. Since he was the son of a mistress, he never stood to inherit anything and was actually sent away after Kiku's husband died, which is likely why he never made Kanda's hit list.

With Kanda apprehended, the game moves on to a predictable ending. Kazuto tells the protagonist he's the heir and the head of the company now, but the protagonist is just happy to have finally discovered his family and makes his uncle the new heir, since he's better positioned to run a business.

It's a short game and doesn't really break any new ground, but it's aged well and probably would have blown my mind had I been able to play it when it originally came out. Even thirty years later it's still a solid title. Next week, health permitting, I'll cover the second Famicom Detective Club game, The Girl Who Stands Behind.