case by case: AAI 2-4: dead ringer
Welcome back, for the penultimate time on Cohost, to Case by Case, my ongoing quest to play through and subsequently write about every case in the Ace Attorney series. Last time we learned that it is not, in fact, a piece of cake to bake a pretty cake; tonight, it's time for Miles Edgeworth to face the consequences of his actions! Spoilers below.
I have to start with the obvious: it is objectively extremely funny that the big crime ring that has apparently been an ongoing thing for at least 12 years has been a black market auction selling off old bits of evidence in criminal cases. It includes some objects that are presumably valuable (I guess the cops just never give it back to the owners?) but also things that are clearly only of sentimental value. It also doesn't appear that the point was to attempt to subvert justice by making evidence vanish; it's just, you know. There. I'm not complaining, it gets the idea across, but it sure is funny, to me.
Anyway. The time has come for Edgeworth's big showdown with the Committee for Prosecutorial Excellence; Kay falls down a hole and develops amnesia; and we discover, shockingly enough, that the Committee Chairman is the guy who is running the aforementioned smuggling ring. Also that he's evil. This is our first time meeting him so neither of these are earth-shattering revelations, but we do find out that he's Eustace's father, which is a little more interesting. We do have one thing in common with him, though: he also thinks Eustace is useless.
The revelation that Gavèlle has been working undercover to bring down the corrupt chairman was interesting. On the one hand it's fairly expected: despite serving clearly corrupt interests and propping up a clearly inept prosecutor, she always seemed fairly reasonable; a truly corrupt person could have sidelined Edgeworth much harder than she did. But it's hard to say to what extent her actions in support of the aforementioned clearly corrupt interests were things she did because she needed to in order to get the Chairman where she wanted him, rather than things she did because she felt she or the Committee were in the right to do them. She's an interesting character! I still feel like judges shouldn't be doing the things she's doing but I guess they wanted to mix things up a bit.
Edgeworth's decision to turn in his badge also makes sense, even if I wasn't expecting that exact sequence of events. As I said last time: he's going to choose the truth, no matter what it costs him.
This is one of those cases where the murder man is fairly obvious immediately. Which makes sense here: we already know the Committee is corrupt. There's a brief moment when Gavèlle is floated as a possible suspect, but I don't think we're meant to seriously consider the idea for long.
I feel like I probably should have seen the twist that the autopsy report was falsified coming--the fact that the doctor only speaks through her granddaughter should have registered as suspicious to me. That felt a little strange to me: it wasn't a mind-blowing revelation, but it also felt like it came out of nowhere. That is, the autopsy report wasn't really a major factor in our investigation until just before we needed to find out it was falsified; usually they're better at leaving a hint earlier that something is amiss.
But! This one was fun. Edgeworth is having another crisis of faith w/r/t walking the path of the prosecutor; we get a phone call from our pal Shelley de Killer saying that we haven't unmasked the real mastermind behind all of this yet, and something about that suggests that we're about to have a lot of things that happened so far in this game recontextualized for us.
And that's all for today! The next and final case will be . . . probably Saturday, I think? I'm rather busy this week and I'd rather do the finale on a day when I don't have anything else going on. Apparently there's kaiju in the next one, so that should be fun. I will see you all then, friends.