case by case apocrypha
Hello, happy New Year, and welcome to the first ever apocryphal edition of Case by Case! I had not planned on doing anything in the world of Ace Attorney-inspired games, be they fangames or otherwise, but I learned about one being published on the very day that I finished up the series. It was fate! I had to check it out! So, follows is a quick spoiler-free review of Paper Perjury, and then, as promised, my plans for the future.
Paper Perjury is a quick, charming detective game which draws heavy inspiration from Ace Attorney games. It took me about 9 hours to finish it, so you don't need to worry about a huge time investment. The pacing is solid, the cases are varied and interesting . . . it's fun! You should check it out.
Without going into too much detail, it was fun to investigate a variety of different crimes, rather than just murders (as much as I love my murder investigations); the game also does a few small mechanical things that make for a very fun twist on the formula. There is usually pretty solid guidance on what you should be doing next, without the game feeling like it is just holding your hand the whole time; it's a difficult balance to walk and the game treads it admirably.
The characters are fun, though the shorter cases means, as you might expect, that we don't get a whole lot of time with them. That said, there are still some great little moments in there, and I found myself, at the game's conclusion, really hoping this team comes out with more so I can get more time with the characters.
The interrogation segments (our equivalent of cross-examinations) lacked some of the tightness of an Ace Attorney cross-examination--I am almost never left wondering which statement I should be focusing on in an Ace Attorney game, even if I occasionally find myself scratching my head as to what they want me to do with that statement. Here, pressing statements didn't usually offer me much in the way of clarification, and if I was stuck, there wasn't much there to get me unstuck. This isn't inherently a bad thing--the potential to get stuck is, I think, important to a good puzzle game--but especially in an indie game where you can't rely on an unsettlingly well-documented wiki with transcripts to get you unstuck if you are well and truly lost, it would be nice to have, at the very least, a button you can push to get a stronger nudge.
Overall, I had fun with this. If you want to go support an indie dev and check it out, I think you'll be charmed as well.
And with that out of the way, let's get to the other reason this post is happening: Case by Case's successor project! I am pleased to announce The Very Best, an objective and scientific multi-axis ranking of every trainer in Pokémon X (and maybe, if the whim strikes me, other games of the series later on). This is a project I actually started a while ago but didn't have a home for and also had a much less reasonable end goal of making it into a two-axis tier list, which would require graphical presentations that I just don't have an answer to.
You are probably asking why, and the answer, of course, is I find this supremely funny but also a lot of the charm in the Pokémon series is all the weirdos friends you run into (and steal the lunch money from) out there on your journey, and I think X and Y are severely underrated and I want to highlight them, and also I am dedicating 2025 to trying to finish old projects, and also also there's that Pokemon Legends Kalos game coming out at some point ostensibly this year, I guess. I don't expect this will take more than a few months--we'll figure out the pacing and format as we go--and I hope you will join me on this journey, and then on whatever comes next (currently looking at either some Fire Emblem or some Zelda, or maybe Final Fantasy (I haven't played any of those yet)); but regardless, it's been a pleasure having you and I very much doubt Case by Case is gone forever. But for now, I will bid this series a fond farewell and put on my running shoes (they let me press B to run!) to set out on a journey across Kirkland Signature France with my favorite web browser at my side. I'll see you then, friends.