Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club (Switch, 2024)

Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: soundtrack album (extremely incomplete), YouTube (part 1 + part 2), extracted audio

Credits

Music Composition: Takeshi Abo

Info

Now for the brand new fourth game in the series! This is mostly an original score by Takeshi Abo, with a few reprised themes and jingles from the first two games. It’s also a longer soundtrack than the first two remakes’ put together.

It feels kinda bad to say that I liked this soundtrack the most because Abo wasn’t shackled by original compositions that I don’t like very much and was freer to do his own thing, but well, that’s exactly what I think about this soundtrack, so here we are. It still does sound a bit like the music he arranged for the remix soundtracks, but he managed to slip in some odd time, fusion chords, ambience, and other stuff that wasn’t as present in the other games. Also a whole bunch of sappy piano which I don’t care about that much, but you can’t win every time and sometimes the sappy piano track has some nice chords in it so it’s fine. This doesn’t ever get quite as wild as Abo does in the sci-fi VNs by MAGES. with a semicolon in the title (Steins;Gate etc.), but it’s still a dark and synthy Abo soundtrack and I do love me a good dark and synthy Abo soundtrack.

This game’s soundtrack is split into two parts on both the soundtrack album release and YouTube uploads; I suspect this was done for reasons would be extremely spoilery to explain, but I haven’t played the game so I don’t know for sure. So if you want to listen to this but not ruin things later, maybe don’t look too deeply into why it’s organized like this? I’m sure not!

Recommended tracks:

  • Scene of the Crime” is a chill funk investigation theme

  • Urban Legend” has the Taco Bell sound in it a few times

  • Inquiry” is a pretty theme that busts out the fretless bass halfway through

  • Hurry!” sounds like shmup music

  • Tension” has some syncopatedly-phrased layers that kind of make it sound a little polymetric, though it’s not really

  • Yamanba Pass” is a mildly tense atmospheric theme in slow 7

  • Poor Kid” is short but full of big pitch bends on everything so it rules

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