My Favorite Games of 2021

In 2021 I played a lot more visual novels than I normally would due to so much of my time being spent either in cancer treatment or recovering from cancer treatment. I had neuropathy issues following surgery that largely prevented me from using my left hand for gaming (even typing was hard!), which was a definite factor in what I could play. Fortunately visual novels are easy to play one-handed.

These are the 12 games I liked the most out of the ones I finished in 2021, in the order I played them. If the game is available on multiple platforms, the one I played on is listed first. My top three picks of the year are marked with an asterisk (*).

Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Switch) *

I rushed to finish this one before surgery because I didn't want to lose interest or forget too much while hospitalized, and it turned out to be a good thing given my post-surgery neuropathy. Three Houses manages to refresh the franchise after Fates tried to retread too much of what made Awakening popular. The focus this time is on houses representing the continent's three countries at a military academy, and how they end up careening towards war. I think the first part of the game where everyone is playing school is overly long (if I want Persona I'll go play Persona), but the story is compelling and I like all the shades of morally gray.

Gnosia (Switch) *

Can you build a visual novel out of the Werewolf/Mafia party games? Why yes, you can! Gnosia's premise is that you're on a starship and one or more of the crew has been infected with Gnosia, which causes them to eliminate one other member of the crew every time they enter warp. You play every round of "Werewolf" in an attempt to cold sleep the Gnosia before they equal the number of the crew, in which case they win! But sometimes, you might be Gnosia. There's a time loop component where your protagonist is trying to put together the reason behind their looping and why Gnosia is on board to begin with.

Raging Loop (Switch, PS4, Windows, Android)

The other Werewolf/Mafia-inspired visual novel with a time loop. This is the one to play if you want a modern day horror bent, foul language, and a crass protagonist. Or, if you don't want to get into the weeds of playing an actual game of Werewolf and prefer the narrative work it into the story with the protagonist making most plays without the player's input. I enjoyed this one a lot too, and the story is stronger, since it's not reliant on rng or the player figuring out a particular mechanic. If you want a more traditional visual novel, this is the one to pick.

Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk (PSVita, Windows)

Partner game to Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly. There are a few easter eggs, but nothing that requires playing the first game. Though I like Jed a lot more as a protagonist than Beniyuri, I didn't like Ashen Hawk as much since the gothic mystery setting was swapped for a low fantasy Renaissance town. There are still mystery elements, like why nobody comes to or leaves town anymore, but they're side details that most characters don't worry about. Most of the game is taken up by the ongoing rivalry between the Hawk and the Wolf clans.

My Vow to My Liege (Windows)

Otome visual novel set in the Spring and Autumn Period of Chinese history by an indie Chinese developer. Tengyu takes on the persona of her deceased brother Fuchai in order to provide her country with a king and break the Sacred Vow her ancestors made with the deceitful Dragon God. Though this is a romance game, there is a lot of war and military action that will occasionally take primary focus, making this the most gritty otome I've played, above Hakuoki, which also took place during a war. Tengyu/Fuchai herself is quite proactive and fully capable of throwing her weight around as king, making her a refreshing change from most commercial otome heroines I've played.

Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir (Switch) *

Remake of an old NES adventure game! A teen detective is hired by the butler of the wealthy Ayashiro family to investigate the death of the family matriarch. The artwork is now modern day visual novel gorgeous with minor animations for some scenes. All dialogue is voice acted, including the protagonist and his inner thoughts. However, the gameplay has not been updated so if you remember those times in 80s adventure games when you had to do nonsensical things or talk to someone multiple times to progress the game, that's all still there. The story itself has aged gracefully though, and remains compelling throughout.

Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind (Switch)

Remake of The Missing Heir's prequel. Though this is probably better put together from a gameplay perspective, having been developed later, I'm not sure I liked it as much. Notably there's a very suspicious area that you're oddly never allowed to investigate that bothered me the entire game. The ending was a surprise I didn't see coming, though it felt karmically appropriate. Given the urban legend that's part of the story, this is definitely the creepier of the two Famicom Detective Club games.

Steam Prison (Switch, Windows)

Romance game following Cyrus, a young woman from the Heights, who is framed for the murder of her parents and sent down to the penal colony in the Depths as a convicted prisoner. I feel like this is a case of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, as there's a lot about this game that doesn't feel fully thought out (despite the fact the writer clearly loves worldbuilding), and yet I had a good time with it. Most of the issue stems from fact that Cyrus's parents got murdered, yet we're trying to have a love story at the same time, and the game is usually not good about resolving both the romance and the murder plotlines.

The Great Ace Attorney: Chronicles (Switch, PS4, Windows)

This is actually a combination of Great Ace Attorney: Adventures and Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve, which I covered separately on my blog since they originally released as two individual games, but they're really a two-parter and the only way to buy them in English is as a bundle. Series creator Shu Takumi returns to write and direct the world-spanning story of Ryunosuke Naruhodo as he tackles cases in both Japan and Britain. Not as laugh-out-loud funny as the mainline Ace Attorney games, but if you want a little more drama in the usual formula, these games got you covered. Ryunosuke does all right as the new protagonist and Susato is now my favorite of the series' assistants.

Animal Restaurant (iOS, Android)

I'm not big on mobile games, but the simply named Animal Restaurant scratches my itch for building things while also being ideal for short play periods. You basically manage a restaurant run by cats for various forest animals (and as you progress, for city animals and even a few non-animals). While you can and are encouraged to participate in a variety of activities, the bulk of your earnings for upgrades, new recipes, etc. happen while you're away. You can't permanently buy your way out of ads unfortunately, but they're fairly unobtrusive and the game is set up in a way that you can choose whether or not you want to view any video ones. It's just you progress a lot slower if you don't.

Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse (3DS)

Pseudo-sequel to Shin Megami Tensei IV initially following the neutral route and then branching off to its own thing. Features a new protagonist, though the old one is still a part of the story. Apocalypse has a number of quality of life improvements, though gameplay is otherwise very close to its predecessor. The story makes it pretty clear what it's like living in a crapsack world where various deities and demons fight to decide the fate of humanity and expect humanity to simply obey them. The cast skews unusually young even by JRPG standards (half the party is fifteen or younger), but they talk a lot, making this one of the livelier mainline games.

Rose in the Embers (iOS, Android)

Period romance in Taisho Japan. Part of the Love 365 library app. Each route in this otome can be purchased separately, though I played all the main ones. (Side stories and sequel stories cost extra. It's mobile. Everything is piecemeal.) I'm not usually a fan of cross-class romance, especially the maid and master thing RitE has going on in a couple of its routes, but I love early 20th century stuff and this turned out better than expected. It helps that only one of the men is the super rich guy flinging around more money than he could ever spend. The others are decently off, but feel more middle or upper middle class.

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.

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.