Famicom Detective Club is a series of adventure games originally created by Nintendo for the Famicom Disk System in the late 1980s. Inspired both by seminal adventure game The Portopia Serial Murder Case, as well as the horror films of Dario Argento, the various entries were produced by Gunpei Yokoi and written by Yoshio Sakamoto of Metroid fame, having originally written them in novel form before development started in earnest.
The series consists of the following entries:
- Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir (1988; FDS) (1989; FDS)
- Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind (1989; FDS)
- BS Detective Club Lost Memories In The Snow (1997; Satellaview)
The Missing Heir has the player as an amnesic assistant detective in the Japanese countryside investigating both his missing memories and a string of mysterious deaths, starting with that of Kiku Ayashiro, the matriarch of a wealthy family within the community. The Girl Who Stands Behind is a prequel taking place in a suburban town, and has you attempt to figure out the connection between the death of a high school freshman, a murder case from a few years ago, and a local urban legend surrounding the high school. Lost Memories in the Snow has the player in the role of recurring character Ayumi Tachibana, as she takes the lead in investigating a new murder case in order to prove her mother's innocence.
The Girl Who Stands Behind was remastered for the Super Famicom in 1998 through the Nintendo Power rewritable cart service, with the original duology also seeing various re-releases on the Game Boy Advance and Virtual Console. Like the vast majority of Satellaview games, the third game has not seen any rerelease since the ending of the service, though footage of the game's chapters have been recovered and uploaded to Nico Nico Douga in the years since. Additionally, of all the three games, the Super Famicom version of The Girl Who Stands Behind was the only one to receive a Fan Translation, using the subtitle The Girl in Back.
The original duology would finally see an international release when the games were remade for Nintendo Switch. Developed by Mages (formerly 5pb.), best known for their work on the Science Adventure Series Visual Novels, the remakes were released globally on May 14, 2021. The English trailer for the remakes can be viewed here
. Prior to this, the only presence the franchise had in Western territories was through Ayumi Tachibana's cameos in the Super Smash Bros. and Super Mario Maker series.
These games contain examples of:
- Always Murder: In a general sense, every major incident or criminal activity will involve murder as the modus operandi, regardless whether it didn't seem like it at first.
- Artifact Title: The Switch remakes retained the "Famicom Detective Club" name, even as they were brought to countries that never called the original console the "Famicom" to begin with.
- But Thou Must!: You will generally have to select all important options before the game will let you proceed; sometimes this forces you to ask questions that will obviously insult the person you're talking to and clearly have no chance of producing a useful answer.
- Devious Daggers: At the end of the first two games, the main antagonist will make an attempt at stabbing the main protagonist(s), but fail in one way or another. Chief Sakuma in the third game is the one to make the stabbing attempt and only succeeds in one kill before a gate collapses onto him.
- Dies Wide Open: Anytime someone is murdered, they almost always have a chance of having open eyes, but that depends on the circumstances. When the remakes of the second title show Genjiro's corpse, we never see his face closely, but we are definitely shown that his eyes were open in artwork featured in the manual of the original Famicom release of said title during its second half. As for most of the other murder victims, the enhanced graphics in the Switch remakes make the trope more apparent when the victims die.
- Hello, [Insert Name Here]: The protagonist has no official name, just being whatever the player decides to enter, although promotional materials for the remake name him "Taro Ninten".
- Old Save Bonus: The Switch releases will read the save data used by each game and give the protagonist the same name.
- Sinister Suffocation: The respective BigBads of the first two games had at least one person each game strangled to death with their barehands. Reiko, the Serial Killer from the third game in contrast, nearly was the one to get strangled to death.
- Super Title 64 Advance: Naturally, the title begins with the Famicom, as in the Famicom console. It made sense for the two games that were released on that system, but it has become a bit of an Artifact Title with the remakes, especially with the localization.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Sometimes the killer's actions stem from a past incident related to someone who had done something so awful that it drove said killer to their series of murder.
