Famicom Detective Club

Famicom Detective Club is an adventure game duology developed and published by Nintendo for the Family Computer Disk System. The first entry, The Missing Heir, was released in 1988, followed by a prequel released the next year titled The Girl Who Stands Behind. In both games, the player takes on the role of a young man solving murder mysteries in the Japanese countryside.

The duology was the first writing project for Yoshio Sakamoto, before he found greater success and recognition with Metroid. The games were inspired by Enix's 1983 adventure game The Portopia Serial Murder Case, horror films by Italian director Dario Argento, and detective novels by Japanese writer Seishi Yokomizo. Both games were only released in Japan and received positive reception from critics.

Nintendo revisited the series on the Super Famicom with a remake of The Girl Who Stands Behind and an episodic Satellaview broadcast featuring a new story, BS Tantei Club: Yuki ni Kieta Kako. In 2021, Nintendo released new remakes of The Missing Heir and The Girl Who Stands Behind for the Nintendo Switch, developed by Mages. The remakes were localized and released outside Japan, receiving ratings that reflect appropriateness for teen and above audiences only. A fourth entry in the series, Emio – The Smiling Man, developed by Mages and Nintendo EPD (with Yoshio Sakamoto returning as writer), released in 2024.

In Famicom Detective Club, the player chooses commands from a menu such as Ask, Examine, Take, Show, and Go to interact with the environment and characters. Character dialogue is displayed in a message box at the bottom of the screen. Commands are only listed in situations when they can be used. Some commands like Examine or Take place a cursor over the scene which the player can direct to an item or area to interact with. At certain points in the story, the player is asked to answer questions, and must scroll through letters to write out an answer. The player may save their progress to return to the game later when the option is listed in the command menu.

The story begins with a man, Amachi, discovering the fallen protagonist on the ground near a cliff. The protagonist discovers that he has lost his memory, and after recuperating, he revisits the cliff and meets a young girl named Ayumi Tachibana. He learns from Ayumi that he is an assistant detective investigating the death of Kiku Ayashiro, and heads over to the nearby Ayashiro estate located in Myoujin village. The Ayashiro family owns a huge plot of land passed down from generation to generation, but there is a strange saying in the village that the dead will return to life to kill anyone who attempts to steal the treasure of the Ayashiro family. As the protagonist investigates the mysterious death of Kiku Ayashiro, he discovers the terrifying connection between this saying and the serial killings which take place.

Three years before the events of The Missing Heir, the protagonist, a 15-year-old boy, escapes his orphanage to look for his parents. Two police officers chase after the protagonist until Shunsuke Utsugi, a private detective respected by the police, takes him in as an assistant.

A few months later, Utsugi and the protagonist are called to investigate the murder of freshman schoolgirl Yoko Kojima. The protagonist begins gathering information from Ushimitsu High School to solve the Yoko case and connect it with the Genjiro Kaneda case along with the help of Yoko's two high school friends; a girl named Ayumi Tachibana and a boy named Hitomi Kawai. It soon emerges that Yoko was deep into an investigation of "The Tale of the Girl Who Stands Behind," a rumor involving a ghost of a blood-soaked girl that stands behind a student, and the trio set out to discover the truth behind this rumor.

The duology was written by Yoshio Sakamoto. The games were his first experience with scenario writing, and he considers it a turning point in his career. Sakamoto would later become more well known for his work on the Metroid series.