case by case: 5-3: courte is adjourned
It's a fine Monday in June and the time has come for us to discuss yet another case in the Ace Attorneyverse. Last week we hung out with some yokai; this week it's time for a case about cases! I hope you like reading the phrase "the end justifies the means" as much as I do. Spoilers after the cut.
This one is kind of all over the place. The murder is staged to perfectly resemble the murder in a mock trial that was being held at the prestigious Themis Legal Academy, which is I guess a high school which teaches law, and which fact is used as evidence that the author of the mock trial script must have done the murder, because allegedly no one else knew about it. Our murder man du jour is Prof. Aristotle Means, whose influential philosophy of "ethics suck, winning rules" has taken the academy by storm, though for most of the case he's just out here saying "hey Athena can you do me a favor and lie and fabricate evidence so your client is found not guilty?" and, like. I'm not coming to these games for the nuanced takes on moral philosophy but this one gets a little hamfisted about it.
(Quick sidebar. Our client in this case is Juniper Woods, who was also our client in the first case, except this one takes place before that case in the game's chronology. I think the narrative trick of showing us this familiar character acting weirdly cold and distant does a great job of giving the audience the same experience of disorientation that Athena feels upon seeing her old best friend acting in the same fashion. It's nothing groundbreaking but it's neat and I wanted to make note of it.)
But also, while this "end justifies the means" theming is present throughout, a huge chunk of the case is focusing on the not-actually-a-love-triangle-but-the-text-wants-us-to-think-it's-one dynamics between Juniper and her friends Hugh and Robin; we end up ferreting all of their secrets out of them (Juniper is a snitch, Hugh is a fake genius whose parents are bribing Prof. Means for good grades and is also a 25-year-old construction worker who's still in high school, Robin is secretly a girl (unclear if this was a secret to the others in the group here)), for the longest time the game wants us to think that one of them is probably the murderer, they all confess to the murder at some point to save the others . . . it's a bit of a mess. And while this does get us some evidence that is actually helpful, it doesn't really directly tie into the actual murder. Which would be fine, but this is a case where they want us to care about the actual murder because even before we identify Prof. Means as our murder man, it is being used as a proxy war for the whole "end justifies the means vs truth-focused lawyering" dilemma, and our trio of friends' whole deal doesn't really tie into that at all. The end result feels somewhat disjointed.
I don't dislike this case; if nothing else, flawed though her portrayal is, Robin is the closest thing to unambiguously positive LGBT portrayal we've had in the Ace Attorneyverse and that's nice to see. It's got some great moments, some interesting ways of conveying information to us, and a few clues I think do a good job of making you feel clever for paying attention, but it felt like it was trying to do a lot of things at the same time and that ends up making it feel like a bit of a mess overall.
Anyway, that's all I got for you this week. Take your protein pills and put your helmets on, because next week we're going to space! Until next time, friends.