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~ Estimated Reading Time: 4 min ~

After my first session of reading Emio, I joked that it was the "driest visual novel I had ever played" - this only became more loving the longer I spent with it.
Without an opening cutscene, the story begins with an already-employed Detective sitting in their office, exchanging pleasantries like any other day, and then receiving a phone call to come check out a crime scene. They arrive and talk to forensics; rather than beginning the discussion from the gruesomeness of the crime, they comment on how uncomfortable seeing a dead child is. After a brief creepy animation, the game would not prompt me to think extensively about its titular murderer for hours.

There's something so understated about FDC3. Sadness hangs with a priority above horror. You're introduced to a character with a design so plain, you write them off on the spot - "someone who looks this basic could never be a killer". But a few sharp lines of dialogue make you pay attention - as if even the boring art-style of the Famicom Detective remakes has become a part of Emio's simplicity siren song. And by the end, I learned to love its cast of the laid-back. Merely getting words out of any of them required a meticulous set of button presses; the 80s-era systems at play here make conversation surprisingly involved. With the way you are given no clues on how to reach the end of any dialogue branch, performing "casual conversation" and "detective's interrogation" begin to blur into identical processes.

I was consistently surprised at what the game chooses to put its time into. A few hours in, there's a scene where the protagonist waits at a bus-stop. There's no obvious option to progress it, because, well, "Investigating" wouldn't exactly make a bus come any faster in real life. Running up and down through its menus to make him hectically talk to himself as he waits for anyone, or anything to arrive - contextualizing menu mashing as literal time-wasting. This is around when I started paying attention to how the protagonist's inner monologue is handled; his voice actor speaks to himself in this tone I can only describe as filmic. Whispering with an erratic pace, constant volatile bursts of energy that you can hear him fight against to keep his voice down. Of course it's easy to get invested in a slowburn so dedicated, when the gameplay attached to it has as many clicks as an Ace Attorney trial.

Sometimes, the amount of "red herrings" it's willing to throw at you feels like a cruel joke - but with a tone that adheres to them so naturally, I wonder if that's even an apt term. As you get to know the people of this city deeper, you seem to only run off on a tangent of small communal traumas that gets further and further away from the mystery's answer. The way Emio gets you to feel involved through its mechanics only serves to make it feel as if you're failing upwards - each incorrect dialogue choice as if you are truly missing the mark on getting the right words out of its cast's quieted mouths. And the honest truths seem to be spontaneous, as if you tripped onto them - it's all unsatisfying in a way that feels right. It's then unfortunately telling of its' developers strengths that Emio is at its least confident when it truly has to confront solving its mystery. Its climax being relegated to an epilogue - one literally broken off into its own storyline, selected separately on the main menu - is indicative that maybe, the pieces don't quite fit together here. They literally commissioned #1 opp to j-art MAPPA to do an anime OVA explaining the bad guy's deal. The outsourced nature makes it all feel unplanned - like someone at Nintendo wasn't happy they made the game didn't get enough out of the evil paper bag man they were marketing it around. Funny they still named this one after the guy, huh?

Even while structurally unfocused, a throughline still shines through - that nobody has been talking to the kids enough. The precise words its town chaperones use began to honestly sting after a while - always a lot of memories of the good kids who they saw signs of pain in, and didn't ever really bother to ask why. Always a lot of "they didn't speak much" - coming from the most well-meaning and narratively otherwise-perfect people, kind-hearted senior citizens and alike. They sensed something was wrong, but didn't pry - but it's too late now. And the game sells it, because you personally know that it was hard to reach to the core of these people! The whole game simulates the feeling of failing to do so!! Emio: The Smiling Man impressed me, because it figured out how to gameify that feeling - the difficulty of reaching out to others, and the satisfaction of saving a life from finding the right question to ask.