case by case: gaa 2-5: genshin impact
Susato has betrayed me.
Welcome back, my excellent good friends, to the final regular installment of Case by Case, the series in which I will have, as of the end of this very post, gone through every extant case in the Ace Attorney series. Last week was part one of our two-part finale; this week, you do not need to be a famous detective to deduce, is part two! There are no new murders this week but we are actually solving, like, twenty old murders, so even if you're only getting ten cents on the dollar for used murders you're still making a profit on this one. Anyway, spoilers below. So many spoilers.
I don't know if I was just having an off day, or if it was the byproduct of having taken a week off, or if it was the case's fault, but this case had a much higher density of me squinting at the screen and muttering "what do you want, game" than any previous case in the series. GAA does on average have a higher than average density of those (often stemming from demanding that you interact with an object in a very specific way before it can be used as evidence), but this one . . . just several places where I felt like I just did not have the thread. I usually don't bother writing about those because they always crop up but this one it felt noteworthy.
This case sure did not sit still. While the broad strokes of what happened fell in line with my predictions1, we also got the revelation that Judge Jigoku is the guy who murdered Gregson, apparently at the orders of the Reaper, which . . . honestly, good combination between well foreshadowed without being obvious. Nicely done. We get a signed confession from Jigoku pretty early on, and then Kazuma decides that this should now be the trial of whether Van Zieks is, in fact, the Reaper, so we've got a ways to go.
In the process of getting Van Zieks's testimony over whether or not he has been organizing assassinations against defendants he fails to convict for the past ten years, the information ultimately comes out that the evidence that convicted Kazuma's father, Genshin, was fabricated, and that this basically could have only been done by Lord Stronghart. And oh yeah, Stronghart is presiding over this trial now. Our judge friend has been temporarily relieved of duty. So that's a bit of a conflict of interest, oops! And speaking of conflicts of interest, Kazuma admits that he accepted an assassination contract against Gregson and is also allowed to continue prosecuting. This is a very strange trial.
This trial really does succeed at tying everything together. The very first victim in GAA 1, Dr. John Wilson, was the doctor who falsified the autopsy report that got Genshin Asogi convicted; Gregson was the inspector who pushed to make sure that autopsy happened and helped make the falsification; Kazuma's whole important task he needed to carry out in England was, in fact, assassinating Gregson; just about everything that was left unexplained previously gets an explanation in this one, and yet it manages to not feel overwhelming. Pretty impressive.
We are able to bully Stronghart into continuing the trial even though he is now the prime suspect (Sholmes later on has to remind us that Van Zieks is the defendant here technically); the gallery being full of esteemed members of the judiciary means he can't just behave arbitrarily, as much as he'd clearly like to. This trial ends in that most classic Ace Attorney climax way: we have our victim pretty early on and most of the case is just breaking him down. Oh, what's that, a confession? No. That confession is concealing deeper guilt. We have to keep going.
And as befits a big grand two-game finale, this one has a deeply silly climax, in which we find out Sholmes is hanging out with Her Majesty the Queen of the British Empire and has been using his holographic camera device to record the entire trial's proceedings and send them back to her. And this revelation comes right after Stronghart does this big ol' speech about how, yes, he has been tricking people into doing murders for him for over ten years now, but really it's for the best that no one ever finds out about that; he gets the gallery chanting his name because, sure, he's a psychopath, but he's a psychopath in the name of reducing crime, what a hero, etc.
It turns out good ol' Queen Vic doesn't like the idea of a high ranking member of the judiciary carrying out extralegal assassinations in her name! She strips him of his authority, and our old pal The Judge is back to declare Van Zieks innocent, hurray!
All credit where it's due: the obligatory cheesy ending where Ryunosuke, after everyone congratulates him on his brilliant defense in the courtroom, gives an impassioned speech about how he only got to where he is because of the friends he made along the way . . . I am a sucker for that at the best of times, but it strikes a deeper chord when you've had two games of working towards this moment.
There is a lot going on in this case, especially because it is, as previously established, really just part two of a twelve hour case, but . . . let's try to give our impressions.
The case treats Gregson as a fairly sympathetic character, being extorted into organizing assassinations by Stronghart; he even shows up posthumously in the credits sequence, which . . . I think is the first time that has ever happened? I don't think the mainline series would treat a character doing the same kind of things as sympathetic, but the overall themes of GAA are very much trying to ask these questions. We have seen guilty clients found not guilty and subsequently murdered; we've seen trusted officials falsifying reports; we've seen authorities suppressing information; the serial murders that lie at the heart of this case's story are, at root, attempts to solve problems that an obviously corrupt legal system cannot solve. While the game ultimately comes down on the side of "no, we should not do extrajudicial assassinations to solve our legal system's problems", it also doesn't reject the idea out of hand.2 I am overall glad to see our pal Gregson is not being treated as a monster now. He leaves a complicated legacy behind him; it's appropriate, given the overall tone of GAA. This case also concludes with Ryunosuke rejecting the premise that the truth always leads to happiness; this case has exposed many painful truths for many people. But, he concludes, we should seek truth anyway. I can absolutely get behind this messaging.
It's nice seeing all of the loose ends tied up; it was very fun briefly playing as Mikotoba and doing a version of Sholmes's Dance of Deduction where Sholmes seems to be taking it a bit more seriously. This half of the case was fairly well paced, all told; many cases tend to buckle somewhat under the weight of spending several hours just trying to get this one guy to admit that he did the murder that he so obviously did, but this one manages to keep it feeling pretty lively.
And before we reach our conclusions about this case and this game: let's talk about Prosecutor Dracula, Barok van Zieks. He is a fascinating character; I enjoyed getting to know him and watching him come to respect Ryunosuke. The racism towards the Japanese is . . . kind of uncomfortable, but this is a Japanese game and the text expects us to think of him sympathetically. And the fact that it stems from what he believes to be an immense betrayal . . . it adds some depth. He is a complicated character, and I don't think we're meant to think that he is blameless in his actions, and that's fine.
Overall . . . this is about as solid a finale as you can get. It is helped immensely by the fact that it is the finale for two story-driven games, and has payoffs reaching all the way back to the very first case, but it is absolutely possible to fail to stick the landing, and this one manages it rather adeptly. A strong finish to GAA, and it's easy to see why I have known so many people who consider these games their favorites of the series.
As for me . . . well, I'll be posting my conclusions next week, but as for GAA as a series: I want to see more like this. While I think I prefer the puzzles of the original trilogy, the focus on character and storytelling in GAA is novel, and these games feel like they are trying to do something new and innovative. The darker tone, the more nuanced morality, it is all in the service of doing something that wouldn't work as well in the mainline games. And there is so much value in that.
And with that, that is all I have for you this week. I will be back next Monday for my conclusions, after which I expect to be taking a week off while I consider what to do next in this space. Because while Case by Case is coming to an end, I would like to continue doing something here on Mondays. I have some thoughts, but I'm also open to suggestions if you have any.
Thank you all so much for reading, and I will see you next week.
You, of course, have no reason to take my word for it, but I was originally going to call me shot on Stronghart being the Reaper two cases ago, but decided not to until the previous case; similarly, in the previous case I had a strong feeling that Van Zieks's brother was actually the Professor but I opted not to make that shot call public.↩
I recognize that the ethics of violently resolving problems that a corrupt legal system refuses to is extremely topical right now, but I'm not going into that here in my largely whimsical series about my funny murder adventure games.↩