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.