Emio: The Smiling Man

Despite being the first R-rated Visual Novel from Nintendo, Emio: The Smiling Man offers a surprisingly touching story about grief and loss, focusing not on violence, but on the emotional pain, the guilt, and powerlessness those close to its victims feel.

“It was a nice day. The kind of day where you want to take a deep breath and savor the moment,” the game starts, before presenting us to the scene of a murder. The victim, a fifteen-year-old boy, Eisuke Sasaki, has been found dead with a paper bag over his head and a smiling face drawn on it. The case resembles an unsolved string of murders from 18 years prior, when the main suspect got away and became an urban legend: it’s said that a man wearing a similar paper bag may approach girls crying alone at night and give them “a smile that will last forever.”

We play as an assistant private investigator, who we can fully name but has a personality of his own. The boy has a crush on his colleague, Ayumi Tachibana, for example, and – being young – is often too quick to arrive at conclusions that may not withstand just a bit of further inspection.

While they assist the police with the murder, they become close to the two detectives on the case: Daisuke Kamihara, a womanizer who’s always in a good mood, and Junko Kuze, who is as beautiful as she is stern. If Kuze seems to come from a noir story, being an obsessed, troubled detective who’s haunted by the memory of her older brother, who disappeared when she was a kid, Kamihara seems out of Brooklyn 99, always cracking jokes and keeping the mood light. They make for an odd but fascinating pair, as one balances the other’s flaws. As their boss explains to the protagonist, “Kuze is wound tighter than a coil. She needs that loose energy that Kamihara brings.”

There’s more to Kamihara than meets the eye, however, as his cheerful attitude hides a deep lack of self-esteem. Kuze is publicly seen lashing out at him all the time, and Kamihara thinks he really deserves the constant criticism, believing he can’t do anything right – he’s a terrible shot, for example, which indeed is a problematic trait for a detective to have. So, when we question Kamihara about Kuze’s behavior and why she’s always roasting him, he answers, “Probably because I’m completely useless. So it’s, like, her job to give me a hard time.”

Despite the constant scolding, Kamihara basically idolizes his partner, admiring her strength and cold demeanor, and often says he would do anything for her. When the investigation sheds some suspicious light on Kuze’s behavior, then, and our protagonist is not subtle in accusing her of some wrongdoings, it’s the first and only time we see Kamihara’s mood darken as the detective becomes harsh in his defense of his partner.

Kuze, meanwhile, is marked by her unwavering search for her missing brother and the pain his disappearance still causes her. She was a little kid when it happened, and her last words to him were unkind, the result of a children’s quarrel. This means that Kuze bears the weight of those words to this day: the pain of losing a loved one is often only surpassed by the guilt of our last interaction with them not reflecting our true feelings. A temporary small grievance can be suddenly turned into an eternal and ever-consuming source of regret. Emio: The Smiling Man is about how that can consume us whole.

One of the game’s key scenes is when we’re interviewing Megumi, a girl in the victim’s school whom Eisuke had a crush on, and she breaks down crying, believing that her last words to the kid had driven him to suicide (to Megumi’s luck, we tell her he was actually murdered). This is when Kuze abandons her icy façade and reaches out for the girl to comfort her, trying to ease her guilt. The detective understands intimately that now that a loved one has passed away, there’s nothing left to be done, there’s no way to make things right again, and some feelings will remain forever unsaid. But she can still be there for the girl while she’s crying and assure her that she’ll eventually, somehow, find the strength to live through it.

This feeling of impotence and regret in the face of tragedy is the thematic pillar of Emio: The Smiling Man. Ayumi Tachibana’s part of the investigation focuses entirely on Eisuke’s school, for example, where she frequently interviews the kid’s friends and his teacher, a dashing man called Fukuyama. The first time Fukuyama meets with Ayumi, he’s clearly just trying to flirt with her, taking advantage of his position as the teacher of a murdered kid to spend time with this beautiful private detective. But Fukuyama starts to gradually crack too, realizing that, as a teacher, he had a responsibility over Megumi and Eisuke – Megumi seems especially close to him, too, in ways he’s hesitant to admit to Ayumi, dodging her questions on the subject. So, if at first, the investigation is a mere pretext for him to get close to Ayumi, in the end, Fukuyama starts to meet her out of guilt, acknowledging that now it may be too late to do anything – at least for Eisuke.

The game’s narrative is enveloped by a powerful, melancholic atmosphere, making us spend a lot of time with these broken characters while they deal with loss and regret. The pacing is slow to allow some space for these feelings to breathe, leaving the very few scenes of violence to the brief climax and the game’s lengthy epilogue.

This epilogue marks a stark change in tone: gone is the sorrowful meditation of the people left behind; now we’re immersed in the sheer horror of the killer’s point of view and the despair driving their actions. The gore and violence come in full force here as we witness physical and emotional abuse, following people who get so horribly scarred by successive tragedies that they can now find solace only in the cathartic release of violence – against others and against themselves.

The decision to keep their story entirely apart in the epilogue is crucial for the narrative to work, since if it were instead spread throughout the rest of the game, the episodes would have heavily impacted its overall atmosphere and tone: the shocking scenes would have taken the spotlight away from the characters and their emotional pain. We would be thinking only about the disturbing instances of violence instead of Megumi and Fukuyama’s guilt.

Emio: The Smiling Man is a character-driven story, after all, with the investigation being just a window to the characters’ struggles and not the point in itself. The game doesn’t even try to build a twist about the title character’s identity, presenting just a couple of suspects. But if it can’t surprise us with the who, it can still certainly shock us with the how: the scene where we see Emio’s real smile beneath their paper bag is out of left field, for example, and truly nightmarish.

There are also some surprising moments of humor in the game. The most inspired one comes when the protagonist meets Fukuyama and becomes jealous of the teacher’s interest in Ayumi. While both characters reminisce about their time with the girl, a track inspired by Westerns begins to play in the background, reinforcing the silliness of their intense “duel” for her affection.

The game’s whole soundtrack is exceptional, and if it’s appropriately eerie and melancholic overall, several tracks are surprisingly laid-back and groovy. We were trying to solve a homicide case until they started playing; now we’re just vibing with the music. The “Interview: Protagonist” track is the absolute standout, capable of bringing a smile even to Emio’s face.

Regarding gameplay, Emio: The Smiling Man offers a lot of options for interacting with the characters and the environment (such as “Call/Engage,” “Ask/Listen,” “Look/Examine,” “Use Phone,” “Think,” and so forth). The bulk of the game is made up of interviews and conversations with people, where we must shift between asking questions, thinking about their answers, and examining their reactions. This is used in some inspired ways sometimes, such as when we must choose the same question over and over again to simulate that we’re pressing the person on the subject, and they only talked because we insisted. However, choices without new answers should have been greyed out to prevent us from losing unnecessary time.

The game also has a journal with every character’s profile, which gets updated with each new discovery. Then, at the end of a chapter, we get to review what has recently happened and use the notebook to answer some questions correctly, selecting the appropriate terms and sentences highlighted in red. The only problem is that this is never used during the climax: there’s no payoff for keeping track of the investigation with the journal, as we never get to “solve” mysteries with it, but just recap what has just happened every now and then. It’s a waste of a great system for a detective game.

Emio: The Smiling Man is a great visual novel that focuses on the people and builds a captivating, melancholic atmosphere that greatly enhances its slow-burn investigation.

January 26, 2025.