This game is definitely MILF city, if that’s your kinda thing. Not enough time spent on middle aged women yelling at you though. Would be way better if that was like 2/3 of the game.
There were not any glaring anachronisms so that’s one point in this game’s favor. You get to dial a phone at least one time. You answer the same landline at least twice. This phone does not belong to you, you’re just the only person around to answer the phone, which is maybe a thing someone would do in 1988? There was no caller ID, after all. This was in a fucking mansion so I imagine they’d have an answering machine but maybe such things were considered gauche amongst Japan’s upper class. Maybe that shit’s the butler’s job, but this butler is nearly 80 years old and too busy stumbling across corpses to do his duty so I guess the responsibility falls to Bachi Delight AKA Japan’s Encyclopedia Brown.
Answering the phone’s one of the most dynamic things the protagonist does though. This is one of those adventure games where almost everyone else is doing way more interesting shit than you are. Here’s a sample of a walkthrough that’ll give you a taste of Bachi’s average day on the job:
I feared maybe I was missing something, that there were some subtleties to the dialogue and investigation that was going over my head but no, this game is dumb, this game is talking to boring characters about boring shit and randomly clicking on dirt or Remembering things at very odd times. Thank you, walkthrough authors. You saved me so much time.
If you read a hintbook for a Sierra On-Line or Infocom game it’s some bonkers shit. It is maybe more entertaining than playing the actual games. It’s some fantastical Only In Video Games! shit. But there’s this strain of Japanese-style adventure game (that I’ve seen western devs ape in recent years as well and they’re worse at it than anyone but I won’t name names here cuz maybe some of them admire me, and I don’t want to crush their tender hearts) that’s like someone was dared to script the most boring possible movie ever made. Player characters with absolutely no agency, where all their problems are solved by other people, all building up to a big twist you probably figured out by chapter 2. I love mundane shit but I have a limit okay I have a limit and I reached it with this game and I am going to complain about this more later on.
As the game progresses you do accumulate a rather modest inventory, though you’re not called upon to use it often. You are still mostly exhausting dialogue choices in hopes that someone will finally suggest you go bother someone else somewhere else. Someone please tell me if this is considered a classic of adventure game design in its homeland. I don’t see how that can be the case, but maybe it has its fans. But as I played I kept thinking this had to be some weird vanity project, this had to be designed for an audience of one, but those sort of things don’t seem to happen at Nintendo often, that company seems more concerned with shipping new Marios and gadgets than maintaining any author’s legacy but, well…
There’s a twitch channel that shows Game Center CX episodes. This morning they streamed the Famicom Detective Club ep, which I didn’t even know existed. This is from the intro:
Oh yeah it’s the Other M guy. Now it all makes sense. Guy seems like the kinda dude who’d want to present His Original Vision, Without The Limitations Of The Past, so you have what may have been a somewhat charming, clunky, absurd Famicom game all polished up nice and good in every way except for its scenario design, which is the most tedious shit oh my God I will never stop complaining about it, I think my 3 previous posts about this game were all identical so here’s a fourth, why not, I’m just echoing the game’s presentation okay, I’m being clever.
The best part of the game is gaining the option to Call/Engage someone immediately after learning their name, even though they’re clearly nowhere nearby. You’ll just be on, like, a cliff overlooking the ocean, and start shouting KOJI! KOJI! and the dude you’re with gotta tell you “Right now Koji is working at the Family Mart on the other side of town,” and that would finally give you the option to fucking leave the cliff. That’s the sort of thing I would enjoy in a Famicom game. Easier to forgive bad manners at lower fidelity. This game is too slick for that. This game is just dumb and joyless.
You see your character topless at one point. He has no nipples. Just a heads up in case you went into this hoping to see some nipples.
Your character is also largely useless, as I mentioned earlier. At the end of every day you go back to the detective agency and have a discussion with your teenage girl counterpart, and from the sounds of things she is doing all sorts of stuff that is actually fun while you stand around cliffs Remembering in hopes that it may summon a MILF (who won’t kiss you.) Maybe you’ll luck out and have a day where you actually get to search the environment and find, like, a button buried in the dirt? But then during the Girls’ Side recap she’s all “Oh yeah I tracked down some yakuza and visited their bars and I learned all about usury and I think maybe our suspect is in major debts and he may have committed murder-for-hire and oh let me sew that button back on your shirt because you are clearly a helpless little child.”
She has her fans in Japan. Does Bachi Delight? No. He doesn’t have fans anywhere. Bachi Delight fuckin sucks.
This is the only character I almost liked. He was horny, and delusional. Thumbs up to the doctor who wanted to solve crimes and ogle women. Thumbs up to the guy adventure games should be made for. Nintendo is for children, throw Nintendo in the trash, can’t wait to play JB Harold, a PC-Engine CD-ROM that was made for adults with adult needs.
Or maybe I’ll play the Famicom Detective Club II fan translation cuz I’m a fucking boob who never learns I dunno I dunno I dunno
