Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir (Switch, 2021)

Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: extracted audio, YouTube

Credits

Music Composition: Hiromi*
Music Arrangement: Takeshi Abo

* The game erroneously credits Kenji Yamamoto as the original composer, probably because they just used the same staff roll for this remake and the sequel and didn’t bother to check if that composer credit was correct for both games.

Info

And now for the remake, done by cool guy Takeshi Abo! I feel kind of bad that I’m only listening to this right now because this soundtrack is actually indirectly the reason I got into him in the first place; someone on the VGMdb forums speculated that Kenji Yamamoto may have secretly worked on the remake soundtrack without being credited, so I asked a friend who was familiar with Abo if he thought those pieces sounded like Abo, and that led to me listening to other Abo soundtracks. But I never came back to this one! Oopsie.

The remake was handled by MAGES., a company with a bunch of experience in developing visual novels, and Abo’s an employee there with even more experience in composing for visual novels, so obviously they let him handle the music. The remix soundtrack covers every single piece from the original soundtrack, including jingles, except for one ambient seashore(?) sound effects track that’s included in the game files for some reason. There aren’t any new compositions, though there is technically a new, very slight variation of the track “Murder Case” they apparently use in at least one situation.

Abo’s arrangement style here was fairly conservative: every track is pretty much instantly identifiable as the original piece, and new material is usually just confined to a brief intro or short section right before the loop. Instead, they’re expanded vertically with extra layers and updated with a modern Abo sound palette of synths (leads, pads, and his favorite: mallets), piano, and spooky noises. When the tracks are extended to develop them further, it’s done by looping them and then doing different things on top each time around. Abo’s dark style and instrumentation definitely fit the original material well, so I think this is a solid upgrade over the FDS soundtrack. Pretty much everything I like about this soundtrack is either some sound design or extra partwriting that Abo added to the original music.

The reason that person on VGMdb thought Yamamoto worked on this soundtrack is that a few pieces fairly conspicuously use sounds similar to the Metroid Prime soundtracks and have a similar dark ambient tone to them. Nintendo games frequently end up having people like music directors also contribute to the soundtrack, so it’s fairly plausible that Yamamoto could have written something here. However, Abo says on his site that he did all BGM arrangement for both remakes, and the songs with Prime-y sounds do otherwise compositionally sound like Abo to me (even of the Metroid composers, I think they sound more like what Minako Hamano would do than Yamamoto), so I think he was just being cute and intentionally homaging Yamamoto with his sound choices.

Recommended tracks:

  • Fade to Consciousness” plays through the track pretty straight before going full VN mode at 0:46 with the piano and bass

  • Murder Case” gets a bit of a percussive groove going

  • Kiku’s Hand Mirror” embraces the phrasing of the original with more layers also synced with the 3 rhythm

  • Real Criminal” has some really nice chaotic strings added at 0:41, and I like the polyrhythmic chime added in the background at 1:01 too (Abo can’t resist the polyrhythm)

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