With Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club being Nintendo’s big August release for this year, Nintendo has opted to make Emio – The Smiling Man their next covered game, as part of their “Ask the Developer” interview series. Across three chapters, many questions were asked of Producer, Yoshio Sakamoto and Assistant Producer, Kaori Miyachi.
When talking about plot writing and his goals for the first two Famicom Detective Club games, Yoshio Sakamoto spoke at great length in response to four questions, but we have condensed his full answer into one complete answer here:
Sakamoto on Writing the First Two Famicom Detective Club Games:
Yoshio Sakamoto: As a child, I read a lot. It might be hard to imagine now, but I was prone to being sick. (Laughs) I often missed school, and reading was about all I could do during that time. Maybe I was exposed to a lot of stories back then. However, I didn’t have any writing experience, so my debut was with Famicom Detective Club.
I was really into movies back then. I particularly liked horror movies from an Italian film director named Dario Argento. I may have been influenced by him. However, the first game, Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir, was inspired by the concept of the Famicom Shonen Tanteidan (Famicom Boys Detective Team), and the idea of the protagonist having amnesia came from the external development team we were working with at the time.
Because I wrote the plot based on those concepts, I never felt like it was the original story that I truly wanted to create. The end result was something that diverged slightly from my idea of ‘scary’.
Still, I feel like I achieved what I set out to in terms of an adventure game that incorporates cinematic techniques. For example, asking myself, “How will it be if the music stops abruptly in this scene?” or, “How about slowing down the pacing of the text during a tense scene?”.
As it turned out, lots of people enjoyed playing Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir, so I figured this type of game must have potential. That being so, I wanted to create my own world from scratch, which came to be Famicom Detective Club PART II: The Girl Who Stands Behind.
And since many of the ghost stories that I fell in love with then are set in schools, I wanted to incorporate this theme. That said, there was a period of time when I wasn’t making any progress with writing. (Laughs) I took inspiration from various movies I watched and thought were cool, and incorporated them into the game’s direction.
One of the things that I was especially passionate about was the music. I planned on using music such as progressive rock (10) or technopop from the 1970s. I was able to realise all of my ideas, and I was happy that it met my own expectations. And ultimately it was embraced by fans. In retrospect, the development of Famicom Detective Club PART II: The Girl Who Stands Behind cemented what I wanted to do, and that enabled me to take on the challenge of this new title.
Taking into account the Family Computer’s capabilities, I think the end result was decent. But one thing that caught my attention was the large number of people asking to have something like it every week. I was like, “That’s impossible”. (Laughs)
I can’t churn out stories one after another, and while we discussed outsourcing it to an external writer, asking a novelist to write a story for Famicom is no easy request. It’s not just about writing a story, because you also have to figure out what kind of gameplay it’s going to have. In the end, I was left to dwell on the fact that I couldn’t release a new title and keep the series going.
For the full interview, why not click here to check out Ask the Developer Vol. 12, Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club – Chapter 1.
Ask the Developer | Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club (Participating Developers)
- Yoshio Sakamoto | Producer
- Kaori Miyachi | Assistant Producer
