Overall, it's better than the previous two entries, but I still didn't really like it.
For context, we played all the way through both The Missing Heir and The Girl Who Stands Behind; so I am not somebody who picked this game up on a whim, but rather somebody who saw a lot of potential in a sequel created after so long. I didn't love either of those games, but after I felt such an improvement in the demo, I was totally interested in picking this up. I am a huge Ace Attorney fan, I enjoy visual novels and detective games/shows/films. All of this is to say that I am very much in-the-bag for this sort of experience.
I don't think these Famicom Detective Club games are very good. The story's pacing is rough, the actual investigation gameplay ends up feeling very dull, and the game really meanders in ways that makes for an experience that we felt had a lot of friction. I am an enjoyer of games with friction and unique textures, but these games did not work for me. I really wish I could have come out of this saying that I loved it, but I didn't.
The presentation is wonderful. The voice acting is great, the music is outstanding, and this game in particular cleared up a lot of the cruft of the original Famicom releases. There were very rarely moments where we were stuck and frustratingly fiddling with menus until we were able to progress, contrasted with the original games, where that happened with a high degree of frequency. The investigation felt much more intuitive from a gameplay perspective this time around, and I think that deserves to be mentioned. I recognize that the games are designed to be "conversation puzzles" of a sort, where you are meant to intuit the correct way to proceed based on something of a detective's intuition. This game pulled that off much better than the previous two entries. The concept of Emio, a serial killer born from an urban legend, is an interesting hook. I was onboard with the game after the demo period and I wanted to see more. I loved the nods to previous games, I loved the little details they've included. I want to preface my complaints with this: despite me not loving these games much, they should keep making them. I don't think all things must be made the way I prefer, I don't think all things must be good, and I definitely don't think these games need to drastically change just to appease people like me.
Unfortunately, I feel as though the pacing of this game is an absolute killer. Much of the game's interesting revelations happen in the last hour of the game (counting the, frankly, very well-done epilogue section), and very little of it is allowed time to sink in with the player. You spend a lot of time showing sketches to passerby, only to receive very little information in return. Pivotal scenes are often ended very abruptly before they can reveal anything of particular interest (an issue with all three of these games), leading to so many moments of frustration where we just wanted to sit and read some actual, juicy information about the case we're investiating. You basically never get that, barring a very small number of exciting scenes, resulting in a game that both gives you very little to go off of for its core mystery while also doing its best to make those exciting moments quickly forgotten by shifting gears to entirely unexciting story sections. I seriously cannot believe that the location of the killer is revealed to you by some random construction workers. The game is, weirdly, too authentic to the actual process of investigating a crime, and it ends up being a bit of a boring video game as a result. It does not have peaks and valleys of high moments and low moments; it, like the past two entries, is concerned with being a slow build-up of information before a crucial blow-out at the end of the game. This, to me, is a very bland way to structure a mystery, especially in a game that has an active serial killer on the loose.
I strongly believe that interspersing more of the epilogue's revelations throughout the core game experience would have resulted in something very cool, very special, and very thought-provoking. As it stands, you wind up doing a ton of meandering about, and then the vast majority of the intrigue is given to you at the very end of the experience. I love slow-burn media (The Hunt for Red October is basically a perfect film and is an example of this), but murder mysteries in particular really need to keep giving the viewer more and more breadcrumbs and tension throughout to keep me interested. We love playing these games together and coming up with theories along the way, but too much of the game's crucial information is given to you at the very end, or things that are explained to you get pushed to the sidelines too quickly. I will give props to the ending for being appropriately chilling, totally engaging, and very well executed in a vacuum; but this level of interest and excitement should have been included in the main game scenario. It makes absolutely no sense to me at all that we are able to call Utsugi whenever we want, but he intentionally withholds the information he has gathered for no logical in-game reason. It is purely to give the player an exciting epilogue. To me, this is very sloppy execution of a great idea, and with some solid editing it could have been much better.
As for characters, Ayumi in particular has been done so dirty in this game; she spends so much of her time having to comfort Fukuyama, a character that both of us started to dread spending any time with (and honestly were totally convinced was a creep). Her entire purpose is to gather a small amount of information on some days, but usually just spends most of it being manipulated into giving this guy attention. I do not like Fukuyama, and I do not like that Ayumi's role in the story is largely to support a side character who, ultimately, has very little bearing on the story of the game. I think Fukuyama's presence was to contrast Minoru's life. Fukuyama grows up fairly well-adjusted, a passionate man who cares about his students, his enthusiasm a weapon for which he hides his insecurities. Minoru, on the other hand, is implulsive, dangerous, and insular; he has support from people who love him, but his single-minded obsessions and enthusiasm are his undoing, and are his descent. This is, at least, my best interpretation for why this character exists and why his inclusion is given such weight in the story.
Kuze and Kamihara getting married at the end really comes out of nowhere and didn't feel earned in the slightest. It actually disappointed me that the writers felt as though the logical conclusion to those characters was to have them get married (and in a very short span of time as well). Kuze's letter at the end mentions that looking after her brother is how she will repent for the genuine heinous things she did, but that is literally what she wanted from the start, and her being removed from the force doesn't feel like much of a punishment for a woman who wanted to be a florist anyway. She comes out of this having effectively gotten everything she wanted, to be honest. I guess that's kind of how things go for cops though. ACAB.
Minoru's story was well-told and if it had been interspersed more throughout the game I think I would have liked it even more. Again, the epilogue, in a vacuum, is very, very good, but it does end up feeling very info-dumpy in a way that I think was meant to recontextualize the entire game for the player (normally a very good thing to do!), but in reality just serves to explain the missing pieces all at once in a very unsatisfying way. The game asks you, at the end, "what did you think?", but I wish they had asked this question more throughout the experience. Somewhere, there exists an edited version of this game that is constantly revealing pieces of Minoru's story in such a way that his motivations are kept intact while also making him a morally complex character instead of spending 95% of the game as a villain to catch, only to learn his backstory in that last 5%. Sorry to harp on about this point, but again, the pacing of this game's story (in additional to the actual moment-to-moment gameplay pacing) is its biggest issue to me.
Mr. and Mrs. Todoroki, on the other hand, were pretty well executed. I think leaving these two out of the epilogue and not giving them a proper conclusion in the story was actually a very good move. It leaves you to wonder how that scene would play out, how they would feel knowing that their child has not only been killed after having been missing for so long, but also that he committed some exceptionally gruesome violence on himself and other people. Leaving all of this open to the imagination was a good call.
Uhhhh, what else... There's probably other stuff but I'm tired of writing. The game's chill I guess, keep making them and maybe I'll check 'em out.
