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

Fresh prints, not since
Watson and Mr. Holmes
Have two minds (two minds), so fine (so fine)
Looked under every stone
When you need some help to save the day
They're never far away

I went and played the other games at once. And it's a murder mystery at a school setting... first impression not that good. Doesn't help that the game, even though they are stand alone games, probably work better if you play this one first since it ends with the phone call that started the investigation in the other game. Here we begin with the protagonist running away from the police and runs in to Detective Usagi that takes him under his wings as his assistant in the detective agency. Then it kicks off when the body of a school girl is found in the river, the best friend of the girl who was your co-assistant in the Missing Heir.

The girls worked together in their detective club at school where she had stumbled upon the mystery of the girl who stands behind you, a ghost tale 15 years old that is connected to the disappearance of another missing school girl, who turns out to be the dead girls cousin. The girl disappeared at the same time a loan shark was killed and his son came into a great wealth. Meanwhile another victim of the loan shark killed himself. So that was 4 dead bodies before the game start. Two more bodies turns up, but I gotta say, the first game is better in that regard since they had the deaths spaced out so you got something here and there. I mean, the bodies doesn't come until the last hour of the game.

Also, Missing Heir had an interesting end puzzle where you traversed a maze with the help of a mirror and a poem. That was an actual puzzle, here was just triggering the right words to get to the ending. They also fixed the problem with spelling out the name of suspects and such by just giving you the list of names and choosing from there. Thank you for that. Apparently the game also track responses and such with ends with a compatibility chart with the assistant girl, doesn't evolve more than an extra cutscene at the end. But I give the game this, it was a memorable scene when you are cornered by the murderer and he lunges at you with a knife, cracking a mirror in the wall, shattering it. He turns around ready to strike again, and the damned skeleton of the missing girl from 15 years ago falls on to him.

I see you!

Jesus Christ! Is this really a Nintendo game? Now I get why it wasn't released in the West in the 80's. Usagi shows up with the cops and arrest the murderer. The ending makes it feel like a supernatural event. First game had shades of it, but more as superstitious nonsense. Here it has been hinted all around that her ghost haunted the school, and people have felt watched and uneasy and questions if she the first murdered girl possessed the second murdered girl. And then she turns up and save the day. Why isn't there a third game? I would loved a game set after Missing Heir with more supernatural things... or maybe I miss another game like Gabriel Knight and this come close to it. And maybe at least put them at 18 and up? I must clearly say that I don't see the Japanese police be all right with using 15 year old kids to get information from the teachers and students at the school, especially when we go to the more seedy parts of town with a... *ahem* "gentleman club". Maybe this is the real reason it never got to the west.

Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir (Switch)

 

Sometimes some crimes
Go slipping through the cracks
But these two
Gumshoes
Are picking up the slack
There's no case too big
No case too small
When you need help just call

So played through what I think is the first game in the series... well, not first chronological, but first released. A bit of a hassle. A remake of an old Famicom game from 1988, they spruced up the graphics and music and added voice acting and I gathered the girls voice actor from the detective agency is the same from a sattellaview episode. So that's neat. 

Story begins with the protagonist waking up after being rescued by a man near a cliff. You have amnesia and can't recall who you are so while going back to the cliff you meet a girl who recognise you. She works with you on a detective agency and helps you with your case where you were looking into a mysterious death of a chairwoman for a big company. So you restart the investigation as you can't remember anything, but then the suspects begin dropping like flies and all signs points to the family lawyer. I mean it, at the end we end with 5 murders, another person killed in self-defence, and two more dead in the protagonist parents thrown in for good measures (but that was before the game started). Great since the Midsummer Murders seems to be cancelled this summer as of writing (I guess Covid related from last year).

It was nice playing it. Interesting visual novel with pretty much one path forward where the most troublesome moment being trying to spell the name of the suspected murderer. I knew who it was, I just had some problem spelling so I looked it up. It would have been solvable if I could look into my notes during the input screen.

Story is engaging, but it's a bit too convenient in the end. Spoilers for anyone wanting to play the game, but the missing heir? Turns out it's the protagonist and the lawyer guy was was the first person you saw and he orchestrated it so that you would be there so he could get his hands on the symbol of the successor. And then your uncle shows up and rescue you in the last minute. He was also a lawyer and I thought he was the family lawyer, so oops on that. That and the police seems rather callous with a 17 year old kid looking at dead bodies and such. Well, there is another one so let's continue with that.

Super Smash Bros. for Wii U (Wii U)

Happy Together!

So not only have I've been dusting off my old reliable Wii U, I also went through reading this old blog and realised that when I wrote about Smash Bros for 3DS I wrote that I would play the Wii U version, but I never wrote about it, mostly because as noted, I was a bit burned out by the series, and it has actually not been helped with Ultimate. So why didn't I play that instead? Well, I mostly played the Wii U version because it was the last game in the series as of yet to have trophies. And you couldn't transfer data between the version, what a huge hassle.

Cause what is there otherwise to talk about? It's a fighting game and works as much every other Smash game. Didn't help the Wii U that much, but introduced DLC where we finally got Roy back in the fold. As well as Mewtwo that you could get for free if you bought both games and registered it on some Club Nintendo site or such, unfortunately I bought the 3DS version in a Swedish shop meaning it didn't have the code so I had to buy it on the side. Well everything is bought online today so no problem with that anymore.

So I played through Classic Mode with every character, and some on All-Star Mode, but with this many characters it's a real pain getting through it. Also, All-Star mode is fine since it's pretty much the same as it always been, but Classic mode, what a downgrade from the original (now this might be just me playing it on easy since I want to get through it) but I recall Classic mode have different phases with metal Mario, large and small versions and such spicing up the gameplay, here it's just move around the board and choose a group of enemies. And why isn't there any Adventure mode like in Melee or Brawl? At least the 3DS had the great cave offensive or whatever it was called. So nothing special about, works like everyone else and if you have a couple of friends it's a great time, maybe not so much playing alone.

So why is trophies so important? Because it introduced me to a much larger world of games. In Melee you could get trophies from games that wasn't out yet and games that never was released in Europe or the US. The stickers in Ultimate doesn't tell me anything about the games they come from. I learned about Earthbound from the trophies, got me interested in Metal Gear before the Twin Snakes come out and something called the Famicom Detective Club... wait, that came out on the Switch some time ago. And I got it, might be a fun playthrough.

Duck Hunt (Wii U)

 

Duck Season!

Summer vacation and Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time isn't going well in the heat, so let get off some steam by shooting some ducks. That's right, a couple of rounds of Duck Hunt, a classic game from the original NES that introduced most people to the Zapper, the Nintendo light gun. 

Weapon of choice for Captain N!

Didn't have it as a kid, but played it at my neighbours place. Didn't get any far since the zapper were kinda unreliable... and my aiming suck probably. So this version is perfect for someone like me, you use your wiimote and it has a pointer on screen so I can see what I'm shooting. So on the first game I could get up to round 12 and on the clay pigeons I got up to round 16. Two ducks on the other hand didn't get me further than round 4, but it was the last game I tried so my arm might have been a bit tired as well. 

Well, that was pretty much it. Nothing else to say, fun distraction and with another player the competition between who can go most rounds and highest score might be of interest, but beyond that there's hardly nothing special.