case by case: the cohost memorial turnabout
All right, friends. The end is near, and I'm done with all of the modern-timeline Ace Attorney games, which means it's time to do what will undoubtedly be a poorly organized writeup of miscellaneous thoughts on the series, and also on this series! Honestly I'm not sure why I didn't make dedicated posts to write about the games as they happened, but hey, one lives and learns. As is appropriate for an Ace Attorney finale, this will be longer than usual, but I'll break it up with subject headings. There will be some general spoilers after the cut.
Case by Case
I didn't really have a plan or a point to make when I started this series; I just wanted a project to work on, and an excuse to play through the games on a pace that would not burn me out, and that I would be able to stick to. So I set aside Monday evening (chosen at the time because my fencing classes had moved from Monday to Tuesdays and I felt weird having nothing going on on Mondays) and decided to just work through the games. At the time I had played through everything available on Switch except the Orca case from Dual Destinies (which I had watched a streamer play through most of), Spirit of Justice (which I had on 3DS but just never started because who knows why), and the final few cases in Great Ace Attorney 2 (which I burned out on after having played altogether too much Ace Attorney in a short span of time). And it felt like a good idea to start from the beginning. So let's do that here, shall we?
The Original Trilogy
It's hard for me to think of the original trilogy as three separate games. I could probably conjure up some thoughts on them as separate entities, but they end up feeling like such an integral unit. This is the series at its best, unburdened by its past or its status as a franchise; it gives us a great narrative arc for Phoenix Wright and for Miles Edgeworth, and these are the arcs which will set the tone for the rest of the series. The investigation segments in these early games are iconic; the Magatama remains my favorite of the minigames we've been introduced to, and these little illustrated scenes are fun to look at and poke our way through.
I think it's still safe to say that these are the games where I was most likely to get genuinely stuck on something. And while being stuck isn't a fun experience, I do genuinely feel that a puzzle/mystery game's experience is enhanced by having the potential to get stuck. The joy of unraveling a mystery comes from that point of pushing past the friction; and if there isn't enough friction that you could potentially not be able to push past it, it loses a little bit of that sense of satisfaction.
Apollo Justice
They were originally planning to end the series at AA3--I can only imagine they felt the series was lightning in a bottle, the character arcs were completed--where can you go after that? How can you recapture that magic? How can Phoenix Wright's story continue, after he has already become a legend?
The answer to the question about Phoenix is nothing short of inspired. It's seven years later; he's been disbarred; he works as a professional card shark at a Russian bar; he drinks grape juice by the crate. He is unshaven, he's wearing a dingy hoodie and a deeply weird beanie (which is now available on Fangamer, by the way; I'd been looking for that for years). He is the sketchiest man you have ever met. His presence is immediately evocative of a story, and we get to unravel that through the course of the game, but perhaps more importantly, the game does not treat him like a legend. He doesn't suck all the air out of the room. This is how you tell a story about a character like that.
The answer to the other questions is: we get a new protagonist--Apollo Justice--and we raise the stakes. Now the story is about a decayed sense of trust in the legal system that spawned, at least in part, from that one time Phoenix Wright allegedly forged evidence in a trial.
Apollo is . . . fine, as a character. He's like a humorless version of Phoenix. I don't really like his body language expert gimmick, but they're trying something new, and they deemphasize that pretty heavily in subsequent games. I think they struggled to find a distinct identity for Apollo, and I think that is why he keeps gaining more backstories until he can finally become the world's most special boy; there is an irony to the fact that his overall narrative arc is "emerging from the shadow of his mentor, Phoenix Wright," because as a character that is the thing he struggles with the most.
I have nothing but respect for the fact that in this game's concluding case, they introduced The Jurist System, in which there are juries in trials now, and then just never mentioned it again in subsequent games. Sometimes you just have to abandon an idea! I don't know why they did it--I suspect because it would undermine the series' core gameplay--but we get one trial and then it never comes up again. Canon is an empty concept and you should abandon it if it gets inconvenient to what you want to do next.
This game still felt like the original trilogy, albeit a little more serious in tone (despite having the weirdest imaginable prosecutor)--darker and more melancholy. The elevated stakes in this game feel fine, and tonally appropriate, but this is also where you can start to see the weight of the previous games: we can't just go back to a story about one woman trying to become the head of her family through judicious application of murder. Now we need stakes with implications for the entire legal system.
Dual Destinies
I don't know if I made it clear when writing about these, but I love Blackquill. In my prosecutorial tier list, it's Edgeworth and Blackquill up there in S tier. (The Paynes, of course, are SSS+++ god tier, but other than that S tier is unsurpassed.) The way he snarls and threatens his way through the case elevates every scene he's in. This man is unhinged. It's amazing.
This one more or less picks up where Apollo Justice left off; they give us Athena as a new new protagonist, and we continue fighting the Dark Age Of The Law â„¢ with the whole gang in tow. I think that adding yet another new protagonist suggests they were also worried that Apollo doesn't really have what it takes to carry a full game; I also think this solution works, and I'm not saying that as a diss on Apollo. This way, he gets to have a little villain arc, and while at the time I was unconvinced on that I do think that villain arc Apollo is also the most compelling Apollo we have.
Phoenix is back and they have had him mostly settle into a mentor role for the two new characters; it's not as beautifully inspired as gambler Phoenix but it works, and they do a good job of making sure he's still just part of the cast, and when he's our playable character the challenges feel appropriate for him. And as for Athena . . . she feels like she needs more time in the sun to really shine. She has some great moments, but her arc is really Blackquill's arc, and I'd like to see her develop on her own.
I enjoyed Dual Destinies but it did end up feeling lesser than the original trilogy; the investigations felt flat (due in part, ironically enough, to the transition to 3D), and it was a lot harder to find a part where you could genuinely get stuck. And while the individual cases were enjoyable, one could feel the overarching story beginning to creak under the weight of its need to raise the stakes from all of the previous games.
Spirit of Justice
And that brings us to Spirit of Justice, the game where Phoenix and Apollo bring down a tyrant using Japanifornian defense attorney skills. Apollo picks up a new backstory, there are revolutions, and . . . look, I still had fun with this one, but it isn't surprising to me that a lot of folks I know did not enjoy it.
It doesn't help that Sahdmadhi is . . . just a wretched character. He has spent his legal career knowingly abetting a tyrant's corruption, with eyes wide open, because he is worried that if he doesn't his secret little sister won't get to be queen in the future. He's not even doing something that's justifiable by virtue ethics; he knows he's doing the wrong thing. He knows he's sending countless innocents to their deaths; he just thinks he's powerless to stop it. He did this with eyes open and has learned nothing from the process. His redemption did not feel earned.
Contrast that with his aforementioned little sister, who thought that hatred and bigotry were the right thing to do, and who, when confronted with the realities that her teachings were demonstrably leading to innocents being harmed, actually comes to question her beliefs and ultimately commits herself to a better way . . . maybe I'm more sensitive to this because I grew up in a deeply toxic conservative religious environment, but this is what it looks like when someone breaks free. It was so well portrayed.
But despite that, there were some fun cases in this one. I loved Simon Blackquill, assistant to the defense; the one with magicians was deftly done; and, though I am about to talk about its weaknesses in the next paragraph, the whole revolution story arc was handled with surprising deftness. The big brain blast moment at the end where we revealed that the tyrant queen actually did not have any political legitimacy according to the culture's most sacred traditions? That ruled.
But the revolution story arc was also very clearly the game once again trying to outdo itself, and this time, it's starting to buckle under the weight. We have Fixed Japanifornia's Legal System in the previous case, so now we have to bring our legal expertise to a deeply corrupt foreign country and use that to fix it? It strains one's ability to suspend disbelief, and it is so focused on being epic that it makes it harder for the little character moments to shine through. Not that it doesn't have those, but . . . well, remember when the big plot was Morgan Fey trying to steal the family from Maya?
The Apollo Justice Trilogy
If the 3DS games have a failing, I think, it's that they feel like they are being written for the franchise, not for the story. (I should probably write about that distinction sometime in more detail.) When the original trilogy came out, it wasn't being made for fans of the series because fans of the series didn't exist yet; it was just trying to tell a good story. By the time Dual Destinies rolled around, it carried all the expectation and weight of the rest of the series on its shoulders; the target audience was fans. And while I don't think that this form of writing necessarily produces bad stories, it does necessarily produce worse stories. I liked these games; they could have been better.
This is also, to a lesser extent, true of Apollo Justice, but that one didn't feel, to me, as if it were trying to tell a story for the fans. You could feel it trying to wrestle with the original stories, but it felt like it was doing that more as a story than as a franchise. And I will always respect it for that.
Ace Attorney Investigations
These games had always been on my radar, but at the time I started writing Case by Case, AAI2 only had a fan translation, and the first game was stuck in DS jail. I had considered finding a way to play them after I'd finished GAA, but then they announced this collection, and it happened to come out at the perfect time, right after I was due to finish Spirit of Justice. It felt like it made more sense to play all of the games from the modern time period together, so I worked that into the schedule.
And what a breath of fresh air these were! The investigation format was clever; the logic and mind chess mechanics made for great ways to change up the feeling and pacing of investigation segments; the stories felt like Edgeworth stories. The first game was a sprawling "bring down the crime ring" story, which would have felt very out of character for Phoenix and co.; the second game was a more personal story where Edgeworth had to confront what being a prosecutor meant to him, in a world where the law is so frequently corrupt.
And yet, they still felt like Ace Attorney games. The structure was still there, the basic vocabulary we use to interact with the game is the same. That fine balance of different-but-still-the-same is a tricky one to walk, I think, but it pays off abundantly here.
Part of the reason these games are able to be so successful, I think, is that with a focus on Edgeworth, there is no pressure to be one-upping the stakes of previous stories. We haven't had Edgeworth games before. Focusing these games on a different protagonist, with a different cast of characters, allows the stories to breathe, without being weighed down by the rest of the series. And that's the secret to keeping a series feeling vibrant: you have to keep moving.
Ace Attorney
"An attorney is a friend to the friendless," as Gregory Edgeworth is quoted as saying in AAI2. This is the heart of these games: it's not an accurate depiction of a legal system; at its heart, just about every one of these cases is a story about defending someone who cannot defend themselves. And you don't do it with violence or bluster, you do it with the truth. You use critical thinking and evidence-gathering to bring down the lies until, finally, the truth is unveiled. Each story is a little tragedy; each defendant is someone who needs our help; each resolution is a little restoration of justice to someone who had been denied it previously. And we get to see the way our cast of characters can begin to recover with the help of their communities--communities that we are now a part of. There is a pervasive spirit of optimism woven through this series (helped along by its cast of absolutely wild characters), and that is integral to the vibe.
But equally important: these stories are told by unraveling their mysteries. Though not every case succeeds at this, by and large it never feels like we are just sitting here and having text dumped at us. We are investigating; we are cross-examining; we are rebutting arguments. And with every action we take, we uncover new information and get closer to finally arriving at the truth.
It's obviously not the case that these games are inimitable--there exist several imitations, after all--but there is a magic to the formula, to the cast of characters. I would happily recommend any of these games to anyone who is curious; and if you're wondering where to begin, I'd recommend you do what I did, and start at the beginning.
Epilogue: Great Ace Attorney, or: The Future of Case By Case
I am very sad that I won't be able to play through Great Ace Attorney on Cohost; it will, of course, be on my new website, but . . . well, I liked it here. A little preview for you, then, of what I'm looking at over there.
GAA marks a sharp tonal shift in the series. Unlike the vaguely contemporary setting of the main series, GAA is set in a definite historical place and time, and our main character is a Japanese student in early 20th century England, where we will experience the sort of racism you would expect a young Japanese man to experience in that place and time. Our first client in England is clearly not a good person, and we are forced to defend him by the local legal system. The optimism of the series is still present, but there is a much more pervasive darkness there, as well. It's a fascinating contrast, and one I'm hoping to be able to explore more as I delve into the series.
And then after that . . . I don't have any more Ace Attorney lined up for you yet (I will play Layton v. Wright if that makes it to modern consoles, and I will of course play any new games that come out), but I have some other plans for other series that you will perhaps enjoy (and if there's something you think would make for good weekly installments like this please suggest it!). I like having a little weekly project to work on. So I hope you will continue joining me over at the vaudeville ghost house; and regardless, thank you so much for reading. I hope you have enjoyed this as much as I did.