case by case: 3-4: fostering a grudge
Happy Earth Day! Today we are continuing our foray into the Ace Attorney series, where they probably also have Earth Day, maybe. Last week we discovered that everyone in the Ace Attorney universe has prosopagnosia; this week we get to see Mia and Edgeworth's very first case! I know I'm excited. Let's do our usual spoilery dive, after the cut. (Also, today I have learned that if you post something on Cohost and then unpublish it as a draft and then republish it its publication date becomes the date you originally published it, which is probably a bug but is also potentially somewhat useful?)
This one's a quick one: no investigation segments, only two trial segments. As you can imagine, it is, as such, not the most involved case; but the real point of this one is to provide context for the introductory case and provide a prelude for the final case. Which is interesting: this is far and away the most involved a game's metaplot has been in its individual cases. Every case except 3-3 have something to do with the final case.
This one takes place before 3-1: it's our old boss Mia's first case, our future boyfriend Edgeworth's first case, and the first time they meet. (I hope the boss approves of our relationship.) We also get to hang out with our pal Dahlia Hawthorne again--you know, the lady what did a murder and framed Phoenix for it? We're also hanging out with some guy named Diego Armando, who looks suspiciously like this game's prosecutor du jour, Godot, except he doesn't have a weird cyborg mask and his suit's a different color. I'm sure it's just a coincidence.
So we find out that five years prior, Dahlia, her sister Valerie, and her way too old for her boyfriend Fawles, staged a fake kidnapping plot so they could extort a diamond from the Hawthorne family, and then Dahlia and Valerie decide to cut Fawles out of the deal and frame him for Dahlia's murder; then Dahlia, with Valerie's help, adopts a fake identity and presumably lives a pretty cushy life for a teen, since that diamond was apparently worth two million in 2004 dollars. Then five years later Dahlia stabbed her cop sister to stop her from revealing the scam when Fawles escaped from prison so he could ask why.
Anyway, right at the final moment, when you're about to nail down that crucial testimony that finally puts the true killer away, Fawles reveals the little poison bottle we all remember from 3-1 and then reveals he drank the poison rather than betray his beloved Dahlia, and . . . yeah.
I actually didn't remember much about this case, which surprises me because that is a memorable finale. But then, part of why I'm doing this series is I did sort of blitz the series when I got it and that's not really a good way to really take in the details. A short case like this is easy to get overshadowed, even though it does, in my estimation, a great job both setting up the final case while also being a compelling tragedy in its own right.
Anyway! The end is near, the grand conclusion of the first Ace Attorney trilogy. These games are great.