Emio – The Smiling Man, Nintendo’s sequel to the 36-year-old Famicom Detective Club series, has intrigued Nintendo fans since its enigmatic announcement earlier this year. Its marketing has been incredibly unique, as Nintendo has been playing up the mystery of the man named Emio. To continue this trend, Nintendo has released a new trailer and announced a demo for the game, with a very unusual twist.
The Legend of the Smiling Man
The titular Emio, or The Smiling Man, is an urban legend about a serial killer who finds depressed high school girls and promises to give them “a smile that will last forever”. Emio would then kill them and place a paper bag with a smiling face on it over their heads. Nintendo’s new trailer for the game depicts even greater unsolved mysteries surrounding the Smiling Man. These serial killings are more than an urban legend and have apparently happened once before 18 years ago. The police come across as dumbfounded by the resurgence of these killings.
As Nintendo’s first internally-developed M-rated game (external studios developed other Nintendo-published M-rated titles such as Eternal Darkness and Bayonetta 2), we can expect Emio’s serial murders to be quite gruesome. While the trailer does not depict any explicit violence, the protagonist’s dialogue implies that the victim’s corpse is “disturbing”. This comes after news of the game’s ESRB description, which shows that the game’s themes of domestic abuse and violence are extremely heavy. Nintendo has built a lot of intrigue around this game’s central mystery and will likely continue to do so.
Nintendo’s Unique Approach to Demos
Rather than releasing one demo to hook in their playerbase, Nintendo is taking a different approach. They have announced three demos for the game, which will be released once a week and carry over save data from the previous demo. Each demo will emphasize one of the game’s chapters. The Prologue and Chapter 1, titled “A Face” and “The Urban Legend” respectively, will be released on August 19 in North America. Following it on August 22 is Chapter 2, “The Disappearance”. Finally, Chapter 3, “The Language of Flowers”, will be released on August 29.
Effectively, this means the game’s first three chapters (in addition to the prologue) are entirely free to play. Save data carries over to the final game, so anyone hooked by the demos will be pleased to know that they will not have to start over from the beginning if they wish to purchase the full game. Nintendo seems to taking advantage of this pseudo-episodic format for the first few chapters to get gamers invested before purchasing the game.
The Difference Marketing Makes
Nintendo’s usual approach to marketing is to show off their gameplay as fully as possible so that consumers gain a strong understanding of the game’s content before spending their money. With Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club being a mystery game primarily targeted towards older audiences, their approach has changed. In summary, they intend to build intrigue by withholding information and giving us the game itself in small bursts. If this works out as planned, Emio – The Smiling Man may be a big hit.
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