These are my notes on playing the second Ace Attorney trilogy PC release.
Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney
Started playing the first Apollo Justice game. I’m delighted how little they changed things. It’s really charming when a franchise manages to hold on to its unique characteristics instead of trying to “improve” everything uniformly and in the process join the undistinguished masses of games.
They present a pretty cool murder method: Person sents letter to the target, with a stamp inside it so that the target can respond without buying a stamp of his own. Only turns out the stamp contains slow-acting poison. So the victim licks it, puts the mail in a box and then dies. Mailman takes away the evidence. Okay it does sounds a bit farfetched now that I wrote it down.
Finished Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, the first game in the second trilogy. It was okay, but definitely lacked the punch of the first trilogy.
Hard to put my finger on it, but maybe I’d say it just wasn’t as “ridiculous” and therefore surprising as the earlier games. It used the evidence in less complex ways, often only once or twice, whereas in the first games the pattern was for each piece evidence two interesting but straightforward uses and then one total curveball — and there was nice rhythm where you would use some evidence lots of times and then one early clue would be all but forgotten until the surprising moment you needed to use it. And whenever I couldn’t figure out the correct answer and I would look at a guide a practically had to slap myself for missing it.
But now in this latest game the clues were often ambiguous, like “I can sort of guess I need to use this piece of evidence now but it’s not clear that’s correct so I might lose a point, which means I better save the game” and that breaks the flow of the game a bit.
And sometimes the plots of this game unravelled so easily in my head that I would basically spend ten or twenty minutes just clicking buttons and skimming the guide to get faster past the boring parts. In general too, this game felt a bit dumbed down, with things being repeated a few too many times and the joy of solving spoiled.
Dual Destinies
Started playing Ace Attorney Dual Destinies. I was initially a bit off-put by the use of 3d because of bad experiences from anime, but maybe it’s actually kind of well done here.
Playing Dual Destinies. This 3d animation is actually really good. I can’t believe I dropped this for like two weeks because of a bad first impression. The story and gameplay though seem a bit too simple this time.
Playing Dual Destinies. Finished the game, save for the extra chapter. Pretty good. It’s so funny and positive. I loved the 3d animation in the end. Blackquill was especially great, the prosecutors always are in the series. I thought the anime cutscenes weren’t really necessary though — it’s a bit clashing when they have rather different styles and are the only pieces with voice acting, save the interjections. However, I am a bit dissapointed in how easy and straightforward the game was. In the first trilogy there was some really cool out-of-the-box thinking required that I feel they have failed to recreate. Maybe it’s also that after playing so many games in this series I’m starting to recognize the writers’ tricks and techniques, thus robbing myself of surprise.
I think this was the first game to pull the rug under the player to reveal one character was a bad guy all along. I usually enjoy the kind of writing where “anything goes”, but it still has enough internal consistency that you can accept the events. The Phoenix Wright games on the other hand have a little bit too much consistency. You can always immediately tell who the good guys are, and then whoever is left must be the culprit. In fact since it would be so obvious they just show the culprit in the chapter opening anime and turn the who-dunnit into a how-dunnit. So this particular game broke that pattern a bit, but not really in a satisfying way. The reveal came too late and did not feel like puzzle pieces locking together, but a clumsy attempt to surprise the player.
Finished the Dual Destinies special episode with the orca as defendant. Pretty wholesome ending. This game series reminds how all fiction I normally consume is so dark and bleak.
Now checking out the “extras” for the game content I’ve seen so far. These are very nice. The 3d animation gallery mode is great — the 3d animations in the game are so good I had to make a video of my favorites using that tool.
Unfortunately the first trilogy does not seem to have similar tools.
