My last post was at the start of the month and in the meantime I’ve been “here and there,” as a beloved colleague often says. Here and there means not here, mostly, because I’m somewhere else for an indefinite period of time. This is obvious, but I may be here sometimes, in the video game world, but at the same time I’m somewhere else inside my History books where I usually feel more confused than usual, but also a bit more accomplished. This could be a prologue to The Sekimeiya that I left unfinished, but no. Even though I’m always time travelling, I don’t need an egg to do it. I can open a book or install Baldur’s Gate 3 (BG3) instead, and travel to another world, one very reminiscent of what we associate with the Middle Ages in pop-culture. 

I think my journey in BG3 went very well at first. I was totally immersed in the game, loved the story, the characters, and my companions. The game was extremely beautiful and ran perfectly on my PC, or so I thought. No stutters, no frame drops, detailed textures, beautiful light leaks, everything felt so real and alive in that fantasy world. The graphics were so sharp and the world almost bled into my own. I managed to play for five or six hours at first with no problems. In my second session I started getting constant Direct X crashes. It happened at camp, during combat, in the course of an autosave, never with cutscenes, at least so far. I pressed on and tried to run the game with Vulcan. It was way worse. Back to Direct X, sometimes I was able to play for about an hour with no issues. I changed some graphics settings and got myself an extra thirty minutes. 

Next day rolled around and my crashes got worse. Now it wasn’t only the Direct X crash, but also a BSoD. I got it about three times. Not only did the game crash, it completely shut down my PC. Worldly problems seemed to be bleeding into the game. I looked it up online and wouldn’t you know it, I wasn’t the only one. A lot of people have been having the same issue. People tried to help each other with solutions to the problem, some I tried myself with no good results. Many attempts and many tweaks later and I was back to square one. I contacted support and they suggested a number of ways to fix it. I did half of it, still no results, and when I felt ready to continue trying, I stopped. I tried to analyse what I was feeling in the midst of all the frustration and I think the most likely answer is that I got bored. I was immensely bored. Every time I started the game I knew I’d only have the pleasure to play it for one hour tops and then the rest of my free time would be used to solve my issue. I don’t know if it’s wrong or not, but I didn’t have time for it, at least it felt that way. I have a list of things that I could still try, I just didn’t have the energy to do it then and needed some consolation. And where do I find consolation in the gaming world? On Nintendo Switch, of course. The most perfect little device ever made. 

There’s this game called Emio – The Smiling Man (Famicom Detective Club) that I was very eager to start and I decided to jump right in. I still don’t know if there’s branches but it plays like an interactive visual novel. So far it has been a very straightforward investigative story about a string of murders, some old and some new, apparently connected to the urban legend of the smiling man. We play from the perspective of two young detectives from the Utsugi Detective Agency – our own character, to whom we can give a name of our choice, and our partner Ayumi. We interact with the environment and people via a menu displaying different actions: call/engage, ask/listen, look/examine, take or show (in some situations), use phone, think and open notebook.

While questioning someone, we can mention a given subject from a sub-menu. When the character answers back there’s highlighted text which can be used to expand on a specific element of the conversation. Using the option ‘observations’ we’re able to extract more knowledge about a line of questioning. Recourse to the option ‘think’ is used to ruminate on some loose ends and initiate dialogue as a reaction to any new information. At the end of a chapter we do a wrapup of the new findings so far. At this point we have to answer multiple-choice questions and complete some sentences by typing the right words. These words can be Japanese proper names and are hard to type because we can’t go back to check how the name is properly written. We can, however, check the internet. I only had to do it once, when we met Mama Shoko at her bar. We had to figure out her real name, which we did, but when the prompt to write it came up, we couldn’t go back to see how it was written.

At first, I didn’t know if there were consequences if we failed some of these quizzes in the deduction phase. I reloaded and confirmed that the feedback from our fellow detectives changed according to our reasoning, but didn’t notice any particular changes anywhere else. Maybe it could affect our relationship with Ayumi for whom our character had a special fondness. However, it took me so long to publish this post that I eventually finished the game. I can confirm that this is a straightforward interactive visual novel. Whether we get choices or not, the narration forces the player to follow the plot. So, why are there any choices at all? After finishing the main story we unlock an epilogue chapter. 

The extra chapter tells the story of the smiling man and ties some loose ends. It was surprising that a big part of it is a short anime movie. It’s equal parts beautiful and tragic. After we reach the end, an ‘extras’ section is unlocked and there’s an option called Mr. Fukuyama’s Report Card. Fukuyama is the teacher extraordinaire. In the card we get information about our performance in the quizzes and other choices through the game. I don’t think he was very pleased with my performance and he told me that my favourite drink was green tea. False. He also told me that I was very serious. Maybe he’s right, because I often think I’m not serious enough. Anyway, I think the game’s replayability could be tied to his assessment, and if that’s the case, it’s very lacking in new elements to even consider. The advantage of it being a short game is that I’ll eventually pick it up again to replay the story. I enjoyed how the story developed, even though it had an unnecessarily big cast of characters registered in the notebook.

I think it was a game that came at the right time to help me focus on other things and forget about my PC problems, but I can’t hide a certain disappointment because of its short duration. I’d really love to play cat-and-mouse with the smiling man for a bit longer and maybe have more screen time with some of the characters in my notebook. The absence of the usual visual novel tropes made me want more than what I got – this is a compliment, by the way. What I really wanted was more stories like this, touching what we call “mature themes” in a respectful way, where things don’t necessarily get happy endings, they’re the result of violence patterns leaving nothing but trauma, confusion and more violence. Emio made an excellent portrait of that nuance, beyond the criminal investigation, the interrogations, and the horror bits.

https://swordofseiros.wordpress.com/2024/09/29/emio-the-smiling-man-nintendo-switch/

#baldurSGate3 #bg3Crashes #crime #detective #emioTheSmilingMan #famicomDetectiveClub #gaming #murder #nintendoSwitch #pcGaming #VideoGames #VisualNovels