GAME CLEAR No. 157 -- Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind

Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind (2021, Switch)

Remake of: Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind (1989, Family Computer Disk System)
Original Developer: Tose Software, Nintendo R&D1
Original Publisher: Nintendo
Remake Developer: MAGES
Remake Publisher: Nintendo
Clear Date: 2/22/24

"…"

Well, I know I didn’t exactly praise the previous Famicom Detective Club game very effusively, but I did need something for my flight back from Argentina, and it didn’t feel right to leave the duology incomplete.

The Girl Who Stands Behind offers the exact same menu-navigation gameplay as its predecessor, but for my money, it has the more compelling murder mystery. The game is a prequel to The Missing Heir and offers a more age appropriate setting for its protagonist: a high school. It’s there that the protagonist meets his eventual partner at the Utsugi Detective Agency, Ayumi Tachibana. The two work together to solve the murder of Tachibana’s best friend Yoko Kojima.

The game is quite pretty and well-animated, and I think this is owed partially to the fact that the game was also remade for the Super Famicom in the late nineties, complete with updated character portraits and pre-rendered backgrounds. As a result, the scenes and the characters in the game seem a bit more vibrant than those in The Missing Heir, which I think is a fun decision by MAGES. It makes it feel like you’re making a generational transition between games despite the fact that both are obviously running in the same engine and were released and developed simultaneously.

Another notable difference between the two is that The Girl Who Stands Behind offers considerably more comic relief than its predecessor. Maybe that’s not the tone some want in their young adult murder mystery visual novels, but I found it enjoyable and amusing.

Anyway, other than slightly fancier presentation and a shift in humor, The Girl Who Stands Behind is more of the same. I once again enjoyed my time with it but am not dying to recommend it to anyone. But it’s probably more fun than clicking around my little website.