I've been reading the Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir remake for Switch (on the Steam Deck lol), and I'm enjoying it a lot. I've only read one other VN, so take my praise in that regard with a grain of salt... BUT as a new VN reader it's making me want to read more of them, so that should mean something.
It's a murder mystery. The atmosphere can be pretty eerie and reminds me of Ai: The Somnium Files' (the only other VN I played but yeah...). The newly arranged music, which is spooky at times, really adds to it. Between the spookiness are comfy areas of an old school Japan "countryside." It's a pretty traditionally Japanese story, and I can see why it's taken a while to be translated. I'm surprised this remake even happened in general but I'm glad it did. The new art is quite pretty, it's fully voice acted, and the face expressions are sometimes animated in a unique way that looks almost like rotoscoped. The mystery is constantly being twisted and added to. There are elements of corporate intrigue and alleged paranormal sightings. It goes to places you generally don't see Nintendo stories go, you actually see a couple dead bodies with blood and their eyes wide open... There are some common themes, but I wouldn't expect to be blown away by the writing or something. The main highlights here are the setting and the atmosphere, which can be done in a unique way in a VN compared to say a book or manga, so it's nice to see it taken advantage of. Some additional random things I like that it has are: you keep returning to the same handful of places in the story, Idk why but this always gives me a comfy feeling. Also, it has that thing in point and click adventures and JRPGs where you can select random objects like a table and it says "This looks like an expensive sturdy table." it's uh the little things...
It seems like they probably haven't changed much about how it works from the Famicom version. It can get a bit annoying having to go through every dialog option, which are mostly just "About [character name]," and finally guess which is the right one to make the dialog progress. I guess it's to give some sense of detective work with user input in the dialog, but it's a bit tedious. I wouldn't have rather them changed it in the remake, though. I'm on the final chapter, and there were two easy open-ended questions where you input an answer with text to solve part of the mystery toward the end.
They also remade the prequel, The Girl Who Stands Behind, and they changed one scene in the localization from something controversial to something goofy... which I can get autistic about so I'll just try the fan translation of the SNES version. Don't feel like going into details about what they changed you can look that up if you also care.
That's my lengthyish review... anyone else read this vn?
