case by case: 6-3: that's zeh'lot of murder!
Monday has once again come, and it is a perfect day to unwind with a bit of relaxing murder here in the Ace Attorney universe. Last week we did a little hocus pocus; this week Maya is once again suspected of murder, this time in Khura'in! Let's get to it, shall we?
In this case, now that we've been introduced to the world's most corrupt legal system, we get to really interact with its impacts on not just the way it impacts trials, but the way it shapes the society. The rebels we learned about before, as it turns out, are just rebelling to repeal the "defense attorneys share their clients' sentences" law which has turned courts into a prosecutorial rubber stamp session. (Side note: how did Prosecutor Sahdmadhi earn a reputation as an international prosecutor coming from this sort of legal background? Being a prosecutor from such a corrupt system should be a devastating black mark.)
It takes us a while to tie everything together though: the early bits of the trial we're just once again trying to prove Maya didn't do it. (At this point I'm starting to suspect she gets accused of murder on purpose, as a hobby.) What starts out as a locked room mystery (Phoenix even calls it that at one point!) gradually expands to include random paratroopers dropping out of the sky, secret bases, rebels, and a brief moment where we accuse the victim of being the murderer (because there's two murders), and then we use some spirit channeling to find out that actually the original victim killed himself in order to frame Maya and thereby cover for his wife committing the other murder (in self-defense).
For how few characters and suspects are in this case, there's a lot going on. The case does a good job of exploring this (admittedly quite implausible) society, and the ramifications of its weird laws; and it does so, in part, by showing character growth happening. Rayfa, our young priestess princess who does the Divination Seances which the country has been using to send people to their deaths for the past twenty three years, is, in my estimation, a beautiful example of someone who is being forced to confront the fact that the ideals she has been taught are moral and good are in fact deeply corrupt and unjust. She was, to put it mildly, a vicious detractor of Phoenix and his evil ways of representing people in court; but seeing three-ish consecutive-ish not guilty verdicts on trials she did a Seance for, she has a crisis of faith. It's not only a believable character moment, it helps pave a thematic way for an entire society that has been painted as bloodthirsty and bigoted at best to shift believably.
And narratively, it's now on the record in court that the Minister of Justice has been using secret police to perform extrajudicial assassinations, which I guess is frowned upon in Khura'in (it appears the government invests a lot of energy in convincing the population their whole society isn't deeply corrupt); the groundwork has been laid for reforming this whole system over the next . . . three cases? There's six in this game, right?
We also find out that Apollo's dad is the rebel leader, who used to be a defense attorney, and also that Prosecutor Sahdmadhi is his brother. This was the one thing I remembered from the tiny bits of this game I watched back in the day, and I remain just as unimpressed now as I was then. I don't think Apollo needs to be the world's most special boy to make a compelling story.
Anyway. I liked this one. A case like this could easily have been epic and bombastic, but it was fairly quiet and character-focused; it was, as many of the best cases are, a quiet personal tragedy; this one just happened to have big ramifications for the game's overall story.
And that about does it for this week! Next week, a man evidently gets murdered whilst eating noodles. No rest for the wicked, I guess. I'll see you then, friends.