Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club might not have been the M-rated Switch horror game that many first assumed it would be, but the dark return of the Famicom Detective Club series was still a huge shock on multiple levels, and even producer Yoshio Sakamoto was surprised that it got approved so easily by Nintendo.
In a new interview with Inverse, Sakamoto is asked about the game's mature themes, to which he reveals that "there was no other way but to go in the direction we did" in order to convey the theme and message he wanted to get across. With that said, "this game is clearly doing something different from most Nintendo games, so I expected that we would have a hard time getting approval from Nintendo teams internally," he admits.
