Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy
There are a lot of video games out there, and when about three of them are worth playing, it can be difficult to know which one to check out. Sometimes you grow up playing cult classics on the PC and miss out on the nonsense that Nintendo peddled back then. And then you actually get round to playing Ocarina of Time and realise that Nintendo kids in the 90s must have been unwilling participants in a deep state experiment that convinced them it was actually a good game.
This isn't true with going back and playing all old games of course, but there's a lot of game design knowledge that the industry has collectively learned that you don't really notice in video games today; things such as "teaching your players how to play in an effective manner" or "making sure the controls don't feel like you're rubbing a cactus against your face". These things are only made clear when nostalgia is not a factor and you experience the game for the first time.
I went back and played Phoenix Wright over the New Year and I am pleased to report that it doesn't suffer from any of these problems. I mean, it would be a bit difficult for it to suffer these problems since it's essentially just a visual novel, but I'm not going to complain - it's very good!
Describing Phoenix Wright as a detective game doesn't seem... wright. You play as a defence attorney who's clients are in an indefensible position, having allegedly committed all kinds of murders with seemingly solid evidence and airtight testimonies to support it. It is your job to pick apart the evidence and testimony alongside conducting an investigation of your own (pretty sure that's not your job though??) to prove your client's innocence.
This is what sets it aside from the traditional detective games of yore. You have an easy baseline to work from - your client didn't do it. In fact, on occasions you get to see who the murderer is before the case even starts. This allows the game to purely focus on the evidence. It's not really about solving who did the murder, but using tiny shreds of evidence and testimony to paint a picture in your head as to what actually happened.
And it is completely absurd. Absolutely batshit insane.
It gets a tiny bit ridiculous in places.
Make no mistake: this is not a serious game where events develop in a vaguely coherent way. There are plot holes. If you go off in your own head and develop your own theories about what happened, you'll be lost in the woods. Instead, Ace Attorney is about riding the wave of ridiculousness and seeing which direction it's going to take you next. Everything exists to serve this idea. The characters, the animation, the dialogue and even the music conveys the feeling that you, the player, are the only sane person in this absolute kangaroo court of a universe.
One of Ace Attorney's biggest strengths is the characters. Someone on the localisation team must have had an absolute field day with coming up with the names. The first witness you meet is a man called Frank Sahwit. If you don't get the joke, then read that last sentence out loud. Each character is instantly memorable, for better or for worse - it was impossible not to make up a voice for each of them when I read their dialogue in my head (it's been a long pandemic, okay?) and each line will have you laughing in some way, either because it's genuinely funny or because it's just that bad.
At the centre of it all is Phoenix Wright himself - a perfect way to embody the player. The great thing about Wright is that he isn't actually that smart. His super powers are being extremely confident and convicted in his belief that his client is innocent. But from the start of the trial to the end, there is a lot of messy bumbling around that isn't just from the player's side: sometimes, he's just wrong about something. It is canon and brought up multiple times in the three games that Wright simply goes off on unrelated tangents and hastily pulls testimony and evidence together to support his point instead of owning the libs with Facts and Logic. This is such an excellent choice to make for your protagonist because... well sometimes the player is going to get something wrong. Surprising I know! Even though there were times where I messed up when pointing out a contradiction, it didn't feel out of place. The game expects you to fail at times and moulds the character of Phoenix Wright to accommodate that.
Every hero needs someone to fight against. This is where you'll find the trilogies' three finest characters. The prosecutors are Wright's opposite in almost every way - while Wright fights with his heart, the prosecutors fight with their heads. Hopefully not all of them at once. If anyone wants to send me a fanart of the three prosecutors as heads of a hydra, that'd be hilarious. Anyway. They are all brilliant and it's where most of the characterisation has taken place. After all, in order to prove the player's worth, you need a worthy opponent (pun intended) to show just how smart you really are. These characters do not miss a trick in the book. Any objection is always met with a fierce response to match. Von Karma's whip has a terrifying, if a little overused presence; Edgeworth's scathing ripostes are instantly iconic; Godot's caffeine addiction will make you Google just how many cups of coffee it takes to kill a fully grown man. Your fight against them is an uphill battle to say the least, but it makes it even more satisfying when you do finally topple them.
Look, I'm not going to sit here and muddle my boy, Miles Edgeworth, into a paragraph with two other characters. He is obviously the highlight of the entire series and a fan favourite to boot. He invokes panic that no whip or mask can ever hope to conjure. It's everything. The cocky poses, assertive animation and steely dialogue that makes this character so special - a lightning in a bottle moment that was never successfully replicated with the other characters. His arc from the beginning to end is genuinely a good bit of (video games) writing. There seems to be so much more thought put into this character compared to the others - many of his animations were made to mimic that of his mentor, for example. There's even a section where you get to see a younger Miles on his first case where the animators made the connection even more obvious. Special music plays when he returns in the second game! The developers know that people love him.
Every line from Edgeworth is a certified 10/10 banger.
So yeah, I hope I've made it clear that this game is very much about the characters rather than the cases. The cases are there to support the characters, not the other way around. There are some excellent logic puzzles to be solved, but it would be a rather sub standard game without the reinforcement of its cast.
Ace Attorney has a problem. Since the game is all about riding a wave of silly revelation after revelation, that wave has to have momentum. Because of this, the first game is actually quite easy. There were only a few occasions where I truly got stuck. Getting stuck is the game's lowest point. There is no momentum at all, and unlike the "Ah-ha!" that every puzzle designer wants to hear from the player, when you do stumble upon the evidence that you need to present, it's usually the dreaded "Oh come on, really?!". What the designers went for was a exponential curve. That's right nerds, we're doing mathematics now. To start with, you are in the dark about the case, uncovering small bits of evidence that supposedly have no meaning. You poke a small hole in a testimony that it was indeed raining at the night of the murder, even though you said it wasn't, you big fat liar! Eventually, everything falls into place. The miniscule contradictions in the testimony turn into gaping lies. Evidence that was inconsequential before suddenly starts to become relevant. Miles Edgeworth begins to sweat a bit (probably because Phoenix has unbuttoned the top of his shirt). You enter a flow state of busting lie after lie after lie, all cumulating in a dramatic breakdown of the true culprit in the most satisfying way possible. It's that episode of Brooklyn 99 that takes place in that one room, but that's the entire game. It's incredible! I don't think I've played anything like it.
Unfortunately, the series shifts gears in the second game. I don't think the developers really understood what made the first one so special. Instead of gradually ramping up the complexity as the game progresses, Justice for All's cases are long and convoluted. The pacing is terrible and the cases are so bizarre and confusing that you can get stuck for tens of minutes at time, mindlessly scrolling through pages upon pages of evidence. The whole setup of the cases is different too. Justice for All bombards you with items that are so similar to each other, you often make the mistake of presenting it in a valid context, but it's not what the game wants, so you fail. Rather than making you feel smart, the game makes you feel frustrated.
There's nothing wrong with having difficult puzzles in your game, but the systems need to support it. Nothing really changes mechanically between the three games. If I could perhaps present my evidence and give a justification to why I thought it was relevant, it would make it less annoying. But these games had infamously low budgets and development times, so why not play to the strengths of the original?
There is a contradiction in my testimony earlier too - the game does add one thing, but it kills the pacing entirely. You are given a magical mystical item (you're friends with a bunch of spirit mediums, it's no big deal) which tells when people are lying. Amazing! It's time to take this to a judge right away. We have solved the very problem of law. Just have one of these in every court room and Phoenix can spend the rest of his days sipping margaritas and opening up fascist pipelines on Twitter because he'll be made that rich with this discovery. That doesn't happen though. Instead, it opens up a series of court room style puzzles where you have to present evidence to the liar in order to get... more... evidence. Absolutely ridiculous! How am I meant to prove someone is lying when I don't have a desk to slap my hands on? How am I meant to find a calm, happy place when I don't have Miles Edgeworth's chiselled jawline at the opposite end of the courtroom? These are no conditions to do work.
In lieu of having a pacing curve that peaks and troughs between courtroom and investigation, the Big (point and) Click Energy moments are spiked by having to play 20 questions with a witness. I don't want my investigations marred by such matters. I like entering the absolute salmon brain of Detective Gumshoe or hearing Maya talk about her desire to eat every piece of evidence that's not nailed down. There is plenty of excitement for the courtroom such that there doesn't need to be any here.
These problems continue throughout the second game and well into the third, but I am pleased to report that this story has a happy ending.
Character tier list. Edgeworth is best boy. Do not tweet at me if you disagree. Instead, leave a comment.
While Ace Attorney's attempt at an overarching plot is nothing special, it comes to a head in the final two cases. These cases are different from the others in ways that I won't spoil, but it sees a slight return to the tradition of the first game. The penultimate case works really well as a setup to the final one and gives you the context to wade through the webby mess of complexity. The evidence list still rivals that of a Karen's weekly shop, but it feels different this time around. The events that take place seem slightly plausible, though the word "slightly" is doing a metric-tonne of work in this sentence. The detail on display combined with the stakes of the plot puts it head and shoulders above anything that the second and third game has to offer. You could easily make an argument that it's the highlight of the entire trilogy, though I might not agree with you. It does an excellent job of closing out the trilogy and I'm really happy that's the case. It would have been disappointing to see the series peter out as it went on.
I was not expecting to be as invested in this game as I was. Don't get me wrong, I still think it's incredibly, incredibly dumb, but it's the good kind of dumb. When the game moves at the pace the designers wanted it to move at, I don't think there's anything like it. Unless you count Danganronpa. But I'm not going to count Danganronpa.