case by case: gaa 2-4: going for barok
Seriously, there are so many of these.
Welcome back for the penultimate1 time to Case By Case, my ongoing playthrough and subsequent writeups of the entire Ace Attorney series! Last week on the second Great Ace Attorney game, we got to go to the Kirkland signature World Fair; this week, it's part one of the big two-part finale. Spoilers below.
Actually, before I do the spoiler thing, can I tell you a story? I had somehow constructed from my memory of a Doctor Who episode about a frost fair on the frozen Thames an additional case in which Gina Lestrade was showing us around this frost fair and then a murder happened. So I was a little puzzled at having reached the final point I had played up to and not encountered that ghost of a memory, until I spent some time thinking about it and realized where it had come from. This is neither here nor there, but I thought it was funny and I wanted to share.
So! We are here at last. The end of the beginning of the end. This is the first part of a two-part series, but mercifully they have broken this one into two chunks. We open up with a pretty straightforward locked room mystery: our old pal Inspector Gregson has been murdered, and our other old pal Prosecutor Van Zieks was the only other person in the room at the time, so it must be him! Our third old pal Kazuma Asogi, Ryunosuke's BFF, is the prosecutor, because he wants revenge on Van Zieks for that whole "branding his father a serial killer" thing.
We actually fairly quickly open the door on the locked room--time of death is immediately suspect, and we are pretty early on given an idea of the mechanism by which a gunshot sound could have been faked . . . by the end of this case we haven't exactly exonerated Van Zieks but also there isn't a whole lot to go by here. But the theme here is that Kazuma is out for vengeance and will prove that Van Zieks did it by hook or by crook, while the bulk of our investigation focuses on learning What Really Happened ten years ago at that serial killer incident.
This is about a six hour case, and about four hours of it are investigation. There is a lot of information being presented to us here, much of which is novel, and not a lot of which involves us doing some investigation. But for all that, this ends up working pretty well, for a lot of reasons.
The fact that the victim is someone we have known since the last game lets us really feel the impact of his death; usually the victims are dead before the start of the case, and we only get to know them through the memories of characters talking about them. But we know Gregson, and have by now developed a certain fondness for him. So him being gone feels impactful directly to us as the player character in a way that few murders in this series do.
This is somewhat undermined by the big revelation that Gregson is apparently the tactical and logistical mind behind the Reaper serial murders. (It is clearly, we are told, an organization, and we know that Asa Shinn (aka Jezaille Brett) was responsible for the actual murders, and Gregson apparently provided her the appropriate intel, and people seem to believe there is someone above that calling the shots. My money's on Stronghart, personally.) It's a little bit harder to feel that sense of tragedy when the dead guy has a body count in the double digits, even if he didn't personally pull the trigger, y'know?
Other revelations include: Iris's dad was probably not actually the John Wilson who was murdered way back in GAA 1-1 (she had based that on a misguided understanding; the TL;DR is that Susato's father, Professor Mikotoba, was the guy who was Sholmes's partner back in the day, but he is also probably not actually her father either, but we'll find out about that next episode); that Asa Shinn is the murder lady carrying out the Reaper's will (which does raise the possibility that Dr. Wilson was, perhaps, a murder man); that the Professor's alleged last victim was apparently killed in a duel, and not, as the rest of his victims, by having their throat ripped out by a dog, that Lord Stronghart has been ordering his coroners to omit details on autopsy reports . . . I'm probably missing some things. There's a lot here.
It was almost tempting to write this one up as a single long case, broken into two pieces--it's certainly hard to talk about the case as a whole yet here--but ultimately I enjoy this experience of being partway through, having some information and trying to piece it together in advance of the next case. And I do have thoughts on this one on its own, as well. I'm curious how this case's density of exposition will affect the pacing of the next case; this one manages to avoid feeling like it drags too much, but it definitely did flag a little bit at the end.
But regardless, that's all I have for you this week. I hope you are looking forward to the conclusion next week as much as I am. Until then, friends.
I mean, except for the obvious conclusion/summary/whatever post that I will definitely be doing. So two more posts after this, I guess. Penultimate regular installment.↩