Ace Attorney Retrospective Aside - Dual Destinies' Perfect Structure

I'm playing through Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies in preparation for the next entry in my Ace Attorney retrospective. Dual Destinies is my second favorite entry in the series, right after Trials & Tribulations, but I've never been quite sure of why. In many ways I think it's weaker than my next favorite, the original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, but I definitely like it more. I've currently got up to the third case, Turnabout Academy, and I've finally figured out the reason for this odd bias. By slightly shuffling the order and roles of the cases from the series' standard, Dual Destinies actually perfects the structure of an Ace Attorney game and makes its overarching story have a lot more momentum than any other entry in the series.

The standard Ace Attorney game structure has been almost set in stone since the first game, so I'll take a look at what the purpose of each case in that game is. The first case is The First Turnabout and it's your tutorial case. This is a case which is typically one trial block; you begin play as a nervous attorney in the trial lobby, come into court where you're given a basic tutorial, and solve a case that's mostly unrelated to the rest of the game's plot, and where you don't face off with the game's main prosecutor. There's no investigation here; you're dropped into a trial with a bunch of evidence, and the case is simple enough that you can put it together from there. The first case is there to introduce new players to the central and least intuitive element of the games, the trials, without forcing them to go through a slower and less exciting investigation segment first. It also serves to (re-)introduce the central characters to the player without piling on the pressure of actually important plot information happening.

You then proceed into Case 2, the stakes-setting case. In the first game this is Turnabout Sisters. Mechanically you're only doing one investigation block and one trial block, but usually this is the beginning of the actual story. This is typically where you meet both the heart and central character of the game. In Turnabout Sisters your mentor Mia Fey is killed and you're forced to defend her sister Maya from Edgeworth. In the original trilogy these are the cases that introduce (and often have you defend) Maya, who is the emotional heart of the trilogy's story. In Apollo Justice this is your first case working under Nick, who is the real main character of that game. This is also where you're introduced to the prosecutor for the game (who in the original game also doubles as the central character). These cases are usually the first case where it gets personal; someone you know from the first case gets killed, or someone you've been given reason to like gets falsely accused. The purpose here is to highlight the game's central issue. Whatever bad thing that's happened is usually because of the issue that the game is dedicated to highlighting. In Turnabout Sisters, for instance, the trial is hard and the stakes are elevated farther than they should be because Edgeworth is willing to play dirty because he believes in getting a conviction at any cost, including persecuting Nick, who is obviously innocent, which is a natural lead into Edgeworth's warped perspective on the law and what the underlying systemic problems are that cause it. As a result of all these factors, Case 2 tends to be the darkest case aside from Case 4.

Then you jump into Turnabout Samurai, Case 3, the filler case. I say filler with the best of intent. This case tends to not be directly relevant to the games' central storyline: Turnabout Samurai has little to do with why Edgeworth is the way he is and Justice For All's Case 3, Turnabout Big Top, has little to do with figuring out that the law is messed up, but they're usually there to reinforce the games' themes. Samurai had Edgeworth suddenly realizing he'd been prosecuting the wrong man, and Big Top was a situation where the law was forced to punish a sympathetic character. Case 3 is usually there to provide some distance from the game's central issue and tell an unrelated little story... where the game's central issue just sort of naturally crops up, thus proving to the audience that it's an important and pervasive problem that needs to be dealt with or it'll keep creating grief. There's usually some discussion of whatever the game's about in there as a result, and it does advance the overall story, but less so than the other cases. Case 3 tends to try to be more light-hearted than the rest of the cases, providing a little breathing space and giving the impression that the game's world is bigger than just the courtroom.

Finally, you have your Turnabout Goodbyes, Case 4, the ending. I'm aware the original game then has Rise from the Ashes as Case 5, but that's a later addition for the DS version that director Shu Takumi opposed (and which, once he reluctantly agreed to include it, he wanted to call Case X rather than giving it a number so as to not make it seem like part of the game's plot, which concludes with Turnabout Goodbyes). Your ending case does exactly as the name suggests: it concludes the game's mounting tension and resolves whatever trouble's been brewing in the background. How the games do this varies a lot, but it'll typically involve an incident that's been referred to in passing throughout the game coming back in force, sometimes requiring you to solve a case from long ago, like the DL-6 Incident in Turnabout Goodbyes or the Maginifi Gramarye killing in Turnabout Succession. I also want to comment that (aside from the original game) whenever an Ace Attorney game has five cases, Case 4 is almost always a shorter case that leads immediately into the ending Case 5. In these situations, Cases 4 and 5 really play together as one super-case split about a third of the way through rather than two separate cases, and so I'll just collectively refer to both of them as "Case 4" for this piece. This is the case with Trial & Tribulation's Turnabout Beginnings and Bridge to the Turnabout as well as Dual Destinies' The Cosmic Turnabout and Turnabout for Tomorrow (Though not Spirit of Justice's Turnabout Storyteller and Turnabout Revolution, mostly because Turnabout Storyteller is a pointless short case seemingly thrown in at the last minute to give Athena something to do... I'll complain about that in depth when I get to that game). The final case is usually the best and darkest case in the game, as it not only concludes the story that's been set up in the background of the previous cases but resolves any thematic tension and often has you capturing a villain that's been secretly responsible for a lot of the problems you've gone through in the game.

I want to quickly acknowledge that even among the pre-Dual Destinies games this structure isn't strictly enforced. In Trials & Tribulations the first case also partially plays the Case 2 role of the darker case that introduces the game's themes, and it's much more plot-relevant than most first cases. Apollo Justice also has a heavier first case, and then has both Case 2 and Case 3 be filler cases. Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth flips the positions of the Case 2 and Case 3 roles (with Case 2, Turnabout Airlines, being a fun filler where the game's thematic throughline comes up as a tangent and Case 3, The Kidnapped Turnabout, introducing the game's themes in full force, as well as the game's female assistant). The point isn't that it's a strict structure that every game in the series adheres to, but it is a general outline that would allow you to make good guesses as to what the role of every case in an Ace Attorney game is, with a small margin of error.

This is a good structure that works fairly well. The first case is a tutorial, and the other three cases form a classic three-beat to some extent: Case 2 introduces the game's themes, Case 3 reinforces them, and Case 4 is a subversion by having the characters solve the issue. It allows the games to have variety by making each case have a different tone and structure, and the fact that it means each game is very deliberately building up to its ending allows for some truly astonishing final cases -  I can't say enough good about Turnabout Goodbyes, or Farewell, My Turnabout or yet alone the amazing Bridge to the Turnabout. It does, however, have some flaws. I'll have you note that out of four cases it's only two that are primarily concerned with the game's overarching plot, and these two cases aren't usually back-to-back. This makes the games feel a bit meandery and without purpose, and it's often hard to discern what the overarching point of the whole thing is until you're smack-dab in the middle of the final trial. Oftentimes it's only in retrospect that you see that there was a throughline there all along. It's also got the unfortunate implication of the Case 3 blues. Almost every third case through the entire series before Dual Destinies came along is considered by the fanbase to undisputably be the worst case of its game (and the one exception, Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is only that way because its second case is unusually bad, splitting the fanbase). They usually have an oddly unfitting tone, are populated entirely by one-off characters, and only loosely help advance the game's plot. Seeing as the cases of each game get progressively longer, this means that an upsettingly large proportion of every Ace Attorney game is dedicated to the worst case in that game.

The individual changes that Dual Destinies makes to the formula are rather subtle -  in fact, most of them are actually changes that have been made separately by prior games in the series - but together they actually congeal into a structure that feels significantly different and better than the rest of the series. The first case in Dual Destinies is Turnabout Countdown. Admittedly it is (in my opinion) the worst case in the entire game, but it plays differently than any other first case. Dual Destinies adopts Trials & Tribulations' idea of non-chronological storytelling, but rather than just having some cases set a few years in the past it mixes up the order of cases which are set very close to each other. Turnabout Countdown actually takes place between Case 4 and Case 5 of the game, and it introduces us to characters already halfway through their arcs. Apollo's going a bit dark, Athena's not a total newbie anymore, and Nick's gotten his groove back after being re-instated as an attorney. Rather than being a full introduction to our characters, Turnabout Countdown serves to show us where the characters we'll properly meet in Case 2 end up shortly before the end of the game itself, and builds up intrigue as to what got them there.

Case 2, The Monstrous Turnabout, which is chronologically the first case in the game (not counting the DLC case) then winds up doing some of the jobs of your typical Cases 1 and 3, introducing the characters to the player and allowing them time to spend time together in a case that's only vaguely related to the game's main plotline. We get to see how Athena, Apollo and Nick interact before the rift starts forming in the Wright Anything Agency, and we investigate a goofy and light-hearted little case that allows series newcomer Athena to ingratiate herself to the audience in a (relatively) low-stakes situation. Because Case 2 is longer than Case 1 (and isn't all trial) it means we get to spend more time (and be more relaxed) than usual while getting to know Athena and her relationships with Nick and Apollo (as well as the new status quo that has formed in the Wright Anything Agency since the end of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney), but because it's shorter than Case 3 (and there's no narrative momentum building) the episodic and unimportant nature of the case doesn't have time to grate the way it does in something like Turnabout Big Top. Then Case 3, Turnabout Academy, plays the role of the typical Case 2: while there've been murmurings prior to this about "the dark age of the law" this is where we get to hear about it in depth and face its consequences, and this case is darker and tenser than Case 2, though looking back at Case 2 it's clear that a lot of the issues that Case 3 makes explicit were lurking in the background and causing trouble without us realizing - think about how easy it is for Mayor Tenma to justify getting himself found wrongfully guilty, for instance. We learn about the unfair stuff that's going on, and then Case 4 (ie The Cosmic Turnabout and Turnabout for Tomorrow) acts as the final case usually does, being dedicated to learning more about and ultimately resolving the dark age of the law issue.

It's only a very minor series of changes: essentially it's just swapping Cases 2 and 3 a-la Ace Attorney Investigations while moving the character building responsibilities from Turnabout Countdown onto The Monstrous Turnabout (which I remind you despite being Case 2 is essentially acting as a traditional Case 3) and some of the thematic responsibilities from The Monstrous Turnabout onto Turnabout Countdown, but the effect is enormous. Dual Destinies winds up back-loading most of its thematic throughline into the final two cases (or three if you consider Cosmic and Tomorrow as two different cases). The fact that they're consecutive really lets the momentum of its themes build, and the fact that they're the final two (which I remind you means they're by far the two longest cases) means by far the majority of its game time is spent dealing with the dark age of the law. However, the genius move to have Case 2 take on the character-building responsibilities instead of Case 1 means that we also get to see these characters interacting in low-stakes scenarios almost as long as we'd do if Case 3 was dedicated to that purpose, which means we're losing very little by not having Case 3 be a goofy side-story. Meanwhile, Case 1 does a lot more heavy lifting than usual, setting up intrigue that makes us interested to see how Cases 2 and 3 lead to the situation at the start of Case 1, so even Case 2 feels more plot-relevant that it really is. It provides a much more fluid and graceful experience than the previous games, and I think is the single aspect that positively impacts my opinion of Dual Destinies the most. It simply lets the game feel more coherent and less jumbled than usual while having very little negative impact - it's possible the somewhat weird tone and rushed pacing of Turnabout Countdown, which make it easily the worst first case in the series, are a consequence of how much weight that case has to bear. At the small cost of making its first (and by far shortest) case weaker, however, Dual Destinies seemingly effortlessly fixes every problem the series has had with its structure since its inception, and the game is overall massively stronger as a result.

I'll be back with actually discussing Dual Destinies as an Ace Attorney game soon(tm).

Ace Attorney Retrospective: The Spinoffs

I wasn't originally going to cover the Ace Attorney spinoffs in this series. Not being main series games, they don't really continue the series' thematic throughline. That said, having recently replayed Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth in close proximity to Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, it struck me just how similar the two games' intentions were, and how much better Investigations handles its thematic core. I also finally got around to actually playing Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, and while that's by no means a bad game boy did I dislike a lot of what it did (also, I'm not fond of the Professor Layton series), so I want to vent a bit. Those are the only two games I'll be covering here, since the rest of the spinoffs unfortunately don't have an official Western release, and though I've heard the fan translation of Investigations 2 is amazing I just feel wrong playing an Ace Attorney game without paying for it.

I briefly mentioned in my Apollo Justice review that its themes seem more fit to an Ace Attorney Investigations game, and that proving that the way it approaches justice - where the guilty being punished is the ultimate goal - is flawed was a major point of the original Ace Attorney. This was done largely through Edgeworth's arc. Edgeworth was the representative of the punishment at all costs philosophy, and when he became a victim of the unfortunate implications of that mindset in the fourth case he changed his ways and became obsessed with finding the truth above all else. The main thematic core of Investigations is the synergy between his job as a prosecutor and his pursuit of the truth. At this point in the series, Edgeworth and Nick have become paragons and role models in the mold of Mia Fey, the pinnacle of their profession both in competence and in purity of intention. For Nick, this makes his job quite simple in principle: He's got to believe in his client with all his heart, and try to prove prosecutors wrong. If he can't prove them wrong then they're right, and Nick has to accept he's been defending the culprit. Investigations instead shows us all the work that Edgeworth goes to in order to allow defence attorneys to do their jobs this way. It's surprising how much of Investigations is spent defending people from blame. Edgeworth's job isn't to show up and accuse whoever's most immediately suspicious. He spends a long time considering options, discussing the case with his colleagues, and using his fearsome logic to construct a version of the crime that doesn't have any glaring holes in it. By the time a defence attorney's been hired, Edgeworth's already done a regular Ace Attorney case's worth of work.

The thing I mentioned in passing about how Edgeworth spends a long time discussing the case with colleagues is maybe the most significant. The difficulty in Investigations doesn't come from the actual investigations themselves. Ultimately, building up a decent picture of what went on on the crime scene is fairly easy. The problem comes in interacting with other people. Other investigators who, just like you, want to see criminals brought to justice come up with other theories and arrest the wrong people, causing you a lot of trouble in having to talk them out of it. People above your station don't allow you access to vital crime scenes because they're afraid you're incompetent, they suspect you of the crime you're trying to solve, or they just don't like you. These are all good people working toward the same goal as you, but for one reason or another you get in each other's way and make the investigation harder for everyone. The structure behind solving crimes is complicated and rigid, and often so enveloped in its own internal rules that it gets in the way of its actual purpose. My only complaint here is that Edgeworth is always right and never gets in anyone's way; a scene where he does to someone else what Shi-Long Lang spends most of the game doing to him, or maybe one where he realizes he's been trying to talk someone out of arresting the right guy would be a great reinforcement of this theme.

There's also numerous examples of the way the law's grasp exceeds its reach. This is blindingly obvious in the games's fantastic final case, Turnabout Ablaze, where you figure out who the killer of the case (and ringleader of an international smuggling ring you've been struggling with for the whole game) is, but due to legal shenanigans you're unable to do anything about it, and spend an astonishingly long time arguing his guilt with him even though it's already abundantly clear, but Turnabout Ablaze isn't the only instance of this. In the first case, the culprit is allowed to run the investigation into his own crime, and is only caught because you bend the rules, and in the third case the culprit almost gets away with it thanks to the influence of his millionaire dad. The entire game revolves around the phantom thief Yatagarasu, who is revealed to be a group of three people in law enforcement who banded together to steal and expose evidence which would be illegal to present in court but which would get the right people in trouble if the press were to get a hold of it. Investigations knows there's faults with the legal system, and that it's a complex thing that's incredibly hard to make work, but it ultimately comes down on the side that it does. Edgeworth does get the culprits in the end, and in the final case it would've been impossible to bring the culprit to justice without the assistance of all the people who'd been making his investigations harder than they needed to be up until that point. In this game, getting justice is hard, and the red tape involved with it makes it a pain to achieve, but ultimately this cooperation and accepting all this tangled red tape is the only way to get there. The Yatagarasu ultimately fails at its job, being torn apart by a lack of proper regulation and control, which allows a spy to get in and cause massive harm not only to the Yatagarasu but to the world, playing a major part in the destabilization of Zheng Fa. The strictness of the law is painful, it makes putting bad guys in jail harder, but it's the only way that we can hold our society together.

Unfortunately, there's really no such thematic coherence to the other game I want to discuss, Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, which I'll just refer to as Vs from now on. For a long time I was reluctant to pick this game up, because I am a weird completionist and felt uncomfortable playing it until I went through all the Professor Layton games prior to its release, of which I hadn't played a single one. Eventually I caved and picked up Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask, which is from what I can tell one of the better regarded Professor Layton games. It's fine. I really enjoyed the puzzles that make up most of the game time, but I found the way they're tied into the story and world really irritating. Occasionally there'll be something that makes sense: the first puzzle you come across involves a clown who's tied up in his balloon strings and the game makes you untie them, but the majority of the puzzles is completely unrelated to the game's story and world. You'll walk up to someone, they'll just literally tell you they have a puzzle for you to solve, and then you'll be dividing a chessboard up so that each portion has the same shape and same pieces or hitting totem poles with hammers to make them the same size or something like that. I think it's an odd choice that the Layton games have such a focus on story, considering their primary gameplay is almost completely divorced from the story.

I also wasn't a fan of said story. Most of the characters are really archetypal, especially the main duo - Professor Layton and his assistant Luke. His other assistant, Emmy, has some more personality being a bit snarky but she's apparently not in many of the games (most relevantly, she's not in Vs), which is a shame. Miracle Mask centers around a mystery involving the identity of someone who's causing trouble in a resort town, and it's just not a good story. Once you get to know the main players in the story it's blindingly obvious to anyone with a passing knowledge of mystery stories who the culprit is, not from any clues in the game itself but from simple metatextual knowledge. It can't be the shady business guy because it's too obvious, it can't be the first person Layton suspects because otherwise there'd be no story, etcetera etcetera until you eliminate all but the culprit. Meanwhile, Layton stumbles around doing nothing for most of the game and actually goes offscreen to have all the conversations that give him the clues he needs to figure out who it is. Like, late in the game he while you, as Luke, faff about with some files Layton goes to the next room and discovers a character who's been held captive while another character's been pretending to be them for most of the game. He then waits almost an hour to tell anyone about it. That's because the game is absolutely in love with Layton. He's the cleverest, bestest, cleverest, nicest, cleverest guy who ever lived. As such, it needs to have Layton discover information that the audience doesn't get. Its mystery is really easy to solve if you know everything Layton knows, but it wants the ending to be a reveal of the fact that Layton actually had figured out everything that was going on all along. As a fan of mystery stories, this really irritates me. The basis of a good mystery is handing the audience all the information that the detective has, and getting them to try to beat him to the solution. That's why Ace Attorney works so well as a mystery-solving videogame: the gameplay is about applying the information you learn and figuring out where it fits in.

Wait, this was meant to be about Ace Attorney and not Professor Layton. Damn.

The reason I complain about Miracle Mask so much is that that game is very emblematic of my problems with the Layton games (all two that I've played), which makes it representative of the issues I have with Vs. I played Vs as an Ace Attorney game, which may have been a mistake, but it led to incredible frustration when in the final trial Layton goes off-screen, figures everything out (or rather gets the solution handed to him on a silver platter again), and then leads you (playing as Nick) by the hand like you're a stupid kid. It's highly unsatisfying to have your victory taken away like this; so much of what makes Ace Attorney enjoyable is being the one to crack the case even though everyone had as much information as you. Having this perfect ubermensch in a top hat know everything already and spending your time trying to catch up to him doesn't feel triumphant or satisfying, it feels like you're an idiot. This is a problem throughout the game: Layton is consistently ahead of Nick in most cases. He stumbles into important information earlier, he cracks the cases before him, and he's the one that hauls his ass out of a bunch of tough situations in trials (think Franziska and Gumshoe's crowning moments in Farewell, My Turnabout, but in every case). I'll admit that a large part of my annoyance at this is that I much prefer Nick as a character to Layton, but I also think it's just bad writing. Nick really isn't needed in this game. Sure, he does the trials, but the way trials are mechanically set up in Ace Attorney they're almost entirely about logic and deduction, and the game makes it clear that Layton is mostly ahead of Nick in these attributes. Other than a chapter near the middle of the game where Layton is missing, none of Nick's accomplishments feel like his own. As an Ace Attorney fan it feels like Nick is being shorthanded, and as a Layton fan it feels like Nick is a pointless hanger-on.

There's also the fact that Vs doesn't fit in as an Ace Attorney game. Admittedly it's also a bit out of place for a Layton game as far as I understand it, but it's more in line with that series' tones. I also think it does a great amount of damage to the Ace Attorney world, especially considering there's never been an indication that this game isn't canon (though I choose to believe it isn't for my sanity). If Vs is canon, then while the US is basically as it is in the present day (albeit with some odd Japanese cultural elements seeping in and a messed up court system), the UK is a Victorian-inspired steampunk land where everyone is a Dickensian caricature and half of human interaction involves solving puzzles. The big twist at the end of the game (spoilers: I'm about to tell you the big twist at the end of the game, skip the rest of the paragraph if that bothers you) is that the seemingly magical medieval city that the story had been set in was actually just an experimental city where people had been drugged into thinking they were in the medieval era and hypnotized to not see the color black, which is used for stuff to remain invisible to them and thus create the appearance that magic exists. There's some stuff that's a bit of a stretch in Ace Attorney (The Phantom from Dual Destinies, or the Khu'rain justice system for instance), but nothing nearly of this scale or goofiness. There's numerous contradictions left in the overarching story (Why was Nick, Maya, Layton and Luke's arrival at Labyrinthia predicted in the Hystoria if it was unplanned? How do the more physically impossible spells like Godor work?), which to an Ace Attorney fan is absolute heresy considering the series' gameplay is entirely dedicated to finding and pointing out contradictions in stories.

I also think it's mechanically the weakest Ace Attorney game. I actually quite enjoyed the Layton-esque portions of the game, as the puzzles and brain-teasers were very fun to solve, but a bunch of the Ace Attorney stuff here isn't very good. The first case is the most traditional Ace Attorney case, and I absolutely loved it. After that, you get new mechanics like presenting spells (which is literally just presenting evidence but you have to go into a different, fancy-looking menu that takes way too long to navigate) and mob cross-interogation, which is an awful mechanic. The way it works is, like in any other Ace Attorney game, you press a witness. This city is based on medieval witch hunts, which means you're interrogating a mob. Because there's other witnesses at the stand, they'll sometimes react weirdly to something another witness says when pressed. You can then interrupt the initial witness you pressed and ask the other person to explain why they look thoughtful or confused. It's not an interesting mechanic, it essentially just means sometimes you have to scroll over to another person (who's been clearly indicated for you both by audio and visual queues) in the middle of someone else answering your question.

Another issue I had was that your collections of evidence are miniscule, which I initially hailed as a good thing because I thought it may avoid the Rise from the Ashes problem of having too much similar evidence, which sometimes makes it unclear which one the game wants you to present even if you've spotted the contradiction. It's not that large collections of evidence aren't good for the series (later games prove that they're in fact quite good), but since Vs is split between two styles of gameplay I saw how simplifying trials in this way may have been a good idea. Unfortunately, the game goes too far, and you have so little evidence to pick from that it becomes astoundingly easy to spot contradictions. Double unfortunately, in a stunning example of taking the worst from both worlds, there's still often situations where there's two pieces of evidence that relate to the same contradiction, leaving you to guess which one the game wants. This was somewhat excusable in early games where there's tonnes of evidence and they hadn't had time to iron the kinks out, but Vs came out after Apollo Justice, which ingeniously solved this problem by often accepting either of the possible pieces of evidence.

All this led to me being a lot less engaged by Vs than literally any other Ace Attorney game. It's saddled with bland characters on the Layton end, a complete undercutting of a lot of what makes Ace Attorney enjoyable by making Layton always be ahead of Nick (despite how often Layton says that he needs Nick's help it's never actually shown to be the case), and both weaker mechanics than most Ace Attorney games and weaker cases where the twists are either too mild or too ridiculously over the top (The third cases' main twist is "This person wasn't a boy, she was a girl!", which is a minuscule twist in Dual Destinies' third case, and the game's final twist is the big ludicrous spoiler I gave away a few paragraphs ago). There's a few outstanding characters here and there - I really like Espella and the prosecutor for the game, Barnham, plus Emir is a fantastic comic relief side-character - but it's missing a lot of what an Ace Attorney game needs. It's still passable; even bad Ace Attorney is good and the Layton end of the game is solid (gameplay-wise at least), but considering that no other game bearing the Ace Attorney name has left me less than ecstatic it's highly disappointing nonetheless.

This series may go dark for a bit. I'm replaying Dual Destinies right now, and that's the next game I plan to tackle. That's one I really like.

Also why the fuck is it called Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney they work together for the whole game you fuckwads.

Ace Attorney Retrospective: Apollo Justice

After a long, long time, it's back! Both this blog (which I've not updated in seven months), and this series leading up to my timely review of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Spirit of Justice, which I believe I haven't updated in two years.

Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is an interesting game. It's the game that had the unenviable task of following up Trials & Tribulations, which is not only one of the best games of all time but also a game that put a capstone on the original Ace Attorney trilogy. It didn't close the door for future Ace Attorney games per se, but it went out of its way to tie every loose thread it could, and it left most of its characters in places where bringing them back would feel unsatisfying and cheap. As a result, Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney might just be the most unique game in the series, excluding spinoffs. I'd also argue it's the most interesting, bravest, mechanically soundest, and worst game in the main series.

Before continuing to criticize the game, I want to make clear that thinking this is the worst Ace Attorney game does not mean I think this is a bad game, in the slightest. I really love Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney. It's still a game worthy of the Ace Attorney name, and has most of the things that make the franchise great going for it. Slowly unravelling cases through ludicrous yet believable leaps of logic and eventually realizing that the truth of the matter is the opposite of how it first appears is still incredibly satisfying, the game is still populated by a large number of colorful, memorable, and likeable characters, and the presentation is still second to none. Even among Ace Attorney games, Apollo Justice distinguishes itself by being absolutely gorgeous. As much as I like the 3D models in Dual Destinies and especially Spirit of Justice they don't come close to the fantastic 2D art in this game. This is the only mainline Ace Attorney game to be released on the Nintendo DS, which makes it look much better than the previous ones, which were originally GameBoy Advance titles in Japan, and it makes full use of the increased capabilities of the DS. Apollo Justice also has the most in-depth mechanics of the series, making extensive use of constantly changing mechanical gimmicks to keep each case memorable and unique. Apollo is a great protagonist, similar to Nick in just the right ways but still distinct by virtue of his very different approach as an attorney. I was surprised by how different playing as Apollo felt in this game, something that's lost when playing as attorneys other than Nick in future games. Where Nick'll grasp at every tiny incosistency that comes his way until something finally sticks and completely turns the case around, Apollo'll patiently play defense until there's a clear weak point he can strike at, which sometimes leads to him missing good chances to turn things around. It feels much more scheming and manipulative, but equally tense and equally prone to shoving you into seemingly dead-end situations. Trucy, also, is a fantastic assistant who doesn't linger in Maya's shadow, providing a much less goofy helping hand while remaining resolutely hilarious throughout. I'd also be remiss to not mention the game's prosecutor, Klavier Gavin, who's a pleasant and chill guy who maintains a friendly rapport with Apollo outside trials and shows that he cares about the truth by often pointing out incosistencies in his own witnesses' testimonies. Klavier feels like what Edgeworth would be after his arc in the first game if he wasn't so stuck up.

The game's greatest flaws are in its themes. Right off the bat, the game presents itself as a darker take on the Ace Attorney universe. The first trial is a murder case in a dodgy and semi-illegal poker bar, where the defendant is no other than Phoenix Wright himself. The color palette is darker and gloomier than before, and the music is largely composed of tense synths and blaring bassy electric guitars. By the end of the first trial, you've been led to believe it's possible you've accidentally used forged evidence, and you've discovered that your tutor, Kristoph Gavin, is the killer in your case. Kristoph Gavin continues to be a menacing presence throughout, marking the first time in the series a defence attorney (which so far has been equivalent with good guy) is flagged as an unapologetic villain. Your future cases have you working for the mob, convicting a police officer for murder through legally grey means, and getting a serial forger of evidence off the hook. The first trilogy's spirit mediums are replaced with magicians, who are explicitly using trickery and are not actually magical. It's all got this air of being in a moral grey-zone, edgier and darker than the series has been before, and the game often talks about how its world's legal system isn't equipped to properly take care of all criminals.

Before addressing the ways the game struggles with this presentations of its world, I want to point out that this isn't a good theme for a mainline Ace Attorney. These games do comment on the legal system a lot, but they come from a place of compassion and understanding. Nick's secret to success in the first three games was unconditional trust in his client. It's by bouncing this off of the suspicions of the prosecution that lawyers and prosecutors work together to find the truth. Apollo Justice instead is obsessed with punishing the guilty, and it portrays this as the only way to achieve justice. This isn't the way the series has operated until now, nor is it how it will operate in the future. In fact, a good part of the first game was dedicated to proving this way of thinking wrong. The themes that Apollo Justice tries to explore seem considerably better fitted to a game where you play as a prosecutor, and in fact are touched on in Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth considerably more satisfyingly than they are here.

The implementation of these themes is simply clumsy. The hyper dark and realistic tone of Apollo Justice clashes with the goofier elements of Ace Attorney in a way that the earlier games avoided by being a lot more light-hearted and lighter of touch with their theming, but that's not even the game's main problem. The fact is, Apollo Justice is still an Ace Attorney game, and so it still needs to be fun to play, which is simply not accomplishable while keeping the grimdark tone that it wants. In the second case, yes, you work for the mob, but it turns out they're a bunch of lovable goofballs who work in the best interests of the community. In the fourth case, yes, you get a forger acquited whose fake evidence probably got a lot of people wrongfully convicted or acquited, but she's actually a really nice mentally stunted girl who legitimately didn't realize she was doing any harm. You're struggling through this dark law adventure, but your rival and opponent is a genuinely good guy who you become quick friends with, and the Judge remains the same well-intentioned goofball he's always been. Even when the law isn't equipped to deal with your problems you still manage to scrape by and get justice, and ultimately everyone who's good gets good results and everybody who's bad gets bad results.

Apollo Justice doesn't have the balls to actually make good people suffer or get wrongfully convicted, or to have bad people get away with doing bad things.  This is fine in and of itself, since the first trilogy was much the same way, but Apollo Justice presents itself as dark in a way that the first trilogy doesn't, and it all comes across as flat as a result. In fact, the way you wind up convicting likeable characters who committed heinous crimes for understandable and borderline sympathetic reasons in Justice For All (which at face value is a more light-hearted game) is considerably darker than anything that happens in Apollo Justice. This dark presentation incongruent with the game's content means that I actually wasn't able to really discern a coherent theme in Apollo Justice. It seems to be trying to comment on the shortcomings of the legal system, advocating for a jury-driven system, or maybe it's pushing a machiavellian "Ends justifies the means" agenda (once again - something more appropriate for an Investigations game or other spinoff), but its lack of any real bite makes all these attempts fall flat. What's more - and this isn't Apollo Justice's fault - so many of its changes to the Ace Attorney world fall by the wayside immediately once the game is done (like the darker take on Nick, the Jurist system as something that actually matters in trials, the vital importance of Troupe Gramarye and its backstory, or even Trucy being a major character) that it almost feels pseudo-canonical, and any of the darkness it brings into Ace Attorney feels all the more sophomoric and obnoxious as a result. All of this results in Apollo Justice just feeling a bit empty. It's got a lot of what I love about Ace Attorney, and it is a legitimately great game as a result, but it's also the only Ace Attorney I never organically came back to prior to re-playing the series to write this retrospective, and that's probably because it's the only game in the series that's got style over substance. It wants to be dark, moody and brooding, but it doesn't have a real reason for it. It wants to have characters give big speeches about how you can't get this guy convicted through currently legal means, but it doesn't really know why that's a bad thing.

There's also the fact that Apollo himself as a character, while very functional as a main character (especially as an Ace Attorney main character who must be constantly confused and snarky in his internal monologue but appear as a standard milquetoast anime dude on the outside), doesn't have much of an arc in this game. He starts as a nervous newbie defence attorney and ends as a less nervous and slightly experienced defence attorney. This isn't important for this game being good or bad right now, since I never really missed Apollo having an arc as I was playing it. The game focuses more on Trucy and especially Nick, and that's completely fine. The problem is that the two future mainline games - Dual Destinies and especially Spirit of Justice - are going to pretend like Apollo had a satisfying arc in this game, and are going to try and do for him what the original trilogy did for Nick. I'm not going to have a problem with that in Dual Destinies, since I think Apollo's arc works fantastically in that game, but Spirit of Justice's half-arsed attempt to be the Trials & Tribulations of a not-quite-existent "Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney trilogy" is going to be central to my criticism of that game. Just a little teaser for ya.

Thankfully, one of the spinoffs, Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth which I'll be covering next time, does the themes that Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney gestures at way better. Unfortunately, the other spinoff, Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, which I'll also be covering next time, does everything a lot worse than every other Ace Attorney game, including Apollo Justice. So that'll be fun.

Myriad Colors: Phantom World - A Phantom of a Show

Myriad Colors: Phantom World is an anime by acclaimed studio Kyoto Animation, aired in the Winter 2016 season. It came out to mixed reception, with many praising it for its beautiful visuals and interesting premise, whilst a large amount of detractors point to its archetypal characters and meandering storytelling. It's currently sitting at a 7.00 average score on MyAnimeList, with 107,953 users listing it as seen.

Myriad Colors: Phantom World follows Haruhiko, a student in a high school where the students can do what essentially amounts to magic due to an incident at a research facility which caused humans to become able to perceive supernatural entities known as phantoms. He's part of the phantom hunting club, where students are rewarded in coupons and goods for tracking down and dealing with phantoms that inconvenience or endanger people. He works as a team with fellow student and local hotblooded tsundere Mai. Unfortunately, their team has the worst performance record in the school. Yep, Myriad Colors: Phantom World is a magic battle high school show, which anyone who's as much as glanced in the direction of a seasonal anime chart in the past five years will tell you is not exactly an original idea. 

As you'd expect from this kind of show, we need to populate the protagonists' team with a variety of girls, so that there's at least one girl that every weeb might want to buy a figurine or body-pillow of. Because their team is bad, Haruhiko and Mai set out to recruit new members. These include airheaded ojou Reina (who is fascinated with food, because Tsumugi from K-On! was popular and she was an ojou who was fascinated with food), ice queen-type tsundere Koito (who looks like Rei Ayanami of Evangelion fame got a dye-job), loli Kurumi (of the shy, teddy-bear wielding variety, not the sassy precocious child variety), and cancer on wings Ruru (an annoyingly cheerful genki-girl of a fairy who doubles as the show's mascot). I'd usually go into more detail about these characters, but anyone familiar with these tropes can probably write these characters exactly as they're portrayed in the show just based on the above.

I want to make clear that whilst all my problems with Myriad Colors: Phantom World stem from the fact that it makes use of overworn tropes and cliches, that sole fact is not the problem. Plenty of anime I really like is also very unimaginative and uncreative in its premise and characters. My favorite pure shonen action series, even after several re-watches, is A Certain Scientific Railgun, and it's full to the brim of stuff you'll find in a million other shows. In fact, the cast of the two shows is not at all incomparable, with several of the archetypes maping straight onto each other. My problem with Myriad Colors: Phantom World is that it does nothing interesting with the very basic magic battle high school framework it sets up. It's even more frustrating because Myriad Colors: Phantom World actually has a host of opportunities to do something like that, but never actually goes ahead and makes the jump.

The thing that should have made Phantom World special is evident from the very first minute of its first episode, which actually has a massive amount of promise. The episode opens with Haruhiko and Ruru explaining a series of optical illusions, and for the first quarter of its runtime plays with its characters' perception of the environment around them. The first scene involves Haruhiko talking to the camera about all the ways the human brain is unreliable in processing information, and how easily we can be tricked. This, combined with the premise of phantoms - supernatural beings that humanity only became aware of due to a virus leak from a major corporation  affecting everyone's brains - should have made for a fascinating ride. After all, phantoms are constantly shown to be affecting the environment around them in ways that you'd perceive even if you couldn't see the phantom. An action scene in the first episode involves a phantom destroying school property, which becomes something of a minor plot point - how come they didn't do this stuff before humanity became conscious of them? Perhaps humanity's awareness of phantoms is the only reason they exist at all, reality itself buckling in order to accomodate the complexity of the human brain, or maybe phantoms are being disturbed by humanity's awareness of them somehow. Perhaps being supernatural beings, they're distorted to fit human perception, and become violent and destructive as a result.

These are only a few of the directions that the show could've taken its premise. Note that you absolutely don't need to make this show a heavy and deep exploration of this stuff for it to be satisfying. I'm not asking for the show to abandon it's nature as a light-hearted action series and become a deep think-piece. A Certain Scientific Railgun questions its premise - the development of supernatural abilities in children through scientific means - simply by having its villains be people who either believe in the purposes of Academy City too much or too little, as well as including characters struggle with the fact that they're unable to become superpowered. It makes for a satisfying enough exploration of its theme - whether science can or should go too far - whilst keeping the focus of the show squarely on fun action scenes involving creative, vaguely scientific, powers. There's a common and highly harmful misconception out there that making a story be "about" something means the story has to be intelligent and fully dedicated to that something, abandoning fun and action. There's nothing farther from the truth. Railgun is "about" where, if anywhere, the limits of science should be, yet it's still a decidedly dumb show that's mainly there to provide explosions for you to stare at.

However, Phantom World completely ignores any of the interesting ideas inherent to its central conceit. Every couple of episodes there'll be a throwaway line that hints at something interesting about some of the series' supernatural concepts, like the drama club phantom in episode 9, who is said to start living as a regular human after the episode is done despite everyone's memories of her being implanted fakes, a throwaway that gestures in an interesting direction and is completely discarded. Instead, it chooses to be more of an episodic series, starting off with a character spotlight episode for each of its main cast and then doing a few one-off stories. There's nothing inherently wrong with this approach either, but remember my complaint from earlier: None of the characters are anything beyond the most basic version of that character archetype. This may be a bit unfair, as every character spotlight episode does have at least something interesting to say about their focus. Namely, every single one of them has one factoid about their history that you wouldn't expect - like Mai thinking of herself as a lonely and shy kid as a child - that has no bearing on the character in the modern day whatsoever, and seems to be there entirely so the author can point at it and say "See, I subverted the trope!". There's nothing really wrong about these episodes, but they all go pretty much the exact way you'd expect them to. In most instances, as soon as the phantom of the week showed up and it became clear what they represent in terms of the characters' past, I was able to guess almost exactly how the story was going to play out. I will give props to one of the character spotlight episodes though - Ruru's. Despite the character being the biggest waste of airtime and one of the biggest annoyances I've had to suffer through in recent history, her episode was actually fairly nice and had a few heartwarming moments. Part of it is that stories where people are honest about how much their friends mean to them when they think they're not around always get me, but it's still got a fairly clever and unique setup to it. I still hate Ruru, but she's responsible for the only episode in the show that I never paused to check the remaining runtime.

The series then moves on to just sort of general episodic stories. A hilarious aside I want to point out here is the evolution of Koito's power level throughout the show. Presented at first as an overpowered loner who can easily solo phantoms so powerful that the rest of the core cast combined couldn't deal with them, the show spends a few minutes an episode finding a way to nerf her (usually by contriving a reason for her to lose her voice, since her power requires her to sing), before going "fuck it" and just retconning her power into being a fire attack that's only highly effective against grass monsters as soon as the character spotlights are over and it's no longer OK for her to not be part of the plot halfway through every single episode.

At any rate, this stretch is the worst part of the show, as even the vague feeling that we were getting to know the characters disappears, and the show loses any sense of purpose. Instead, every episode involves the characters fighting a usually uninteresting monster of the week. Due to the show's light-hearted tone (read: the fact that the show refuses to have anything of consequence happen), these episodes are devoid of any sense of stakes or danger. In theory this'd mean that we should be free to just enjoy watching the characters beat up the enemy, but a baffling amount of the episodes actually don't center around a big superpowered showdown, instead having the characters being forced to solve some sort of problem -get out of this magic house, undo this mysterious curse, etc. Because pretty much the only trait that all the characters actually have in common is that they're dumb as bricks, the solution is usually reached by accident (and often is made clear to the viewer way before the characters realize it). So this part of the show is pretty much just watching a bunch of morons you don't really care about fail to solve a puzzle you know for sure they'll solve after banging their head against it for about fifteen minutes - anyone who's watched gaming videos on youtube will know how frustrating an experience this is.

So up to this point, Phantom World is a series of nothing. It squanders an interesting premise, and instead chooses to explore characters that it refuses to flesh out and spend its time spinning its wheels without anything of consequence happening. It tries to go for something interesting in its final two episodes, which are the only two to really connect and form a two-part story, which involve a particularly powerful phantom posing as Haruhiko's mother. The problem is all the development we've had for Haruhiko's mother is that in Episode 3 he mentions that she left his father years ago, and a slight implication of him being hurt by her absence in the episode where he turns into a child. Episode 12 has her show up out of nowhere, and expects us to just be fully invested in their relationship, and it just doesn't work in the slightest. I'd dare say that if I'd been primed to care about Haruhiko's mother at all, I would've loved (or at least liked) the final two parter. The villain is legitimately threatening, the scenes of Haruhiko's communal life with his mother are pleasant, and I'm a sucker for stories about the power of friendship making people band together against impossible odds. Unfortunately, after 11 episodes of nothing happening, I was mostly keen to see the show end, and my reaction to the cliffhanger ending of Episode 12 wasn't excitement, it was annoyance that the show was an episode longer than I thought it was. 

Here's the disappointing truth about Phantom World: My standards for this type of show aren't exactly high. My favorite entry in the genre is A Certain Scientific Railgun, a show that barely makes MyAnimeList's top 1000, and I've greatly enjoyed shows similar to Phantom World despite large flaws, stuff like Keijo!!!!!!!! or MM!. Perhaps most tellingly, I have a soft spot for Dog Days, a show that's similarly populated with cardboard cutout characters and with a story that (in season 2, which is the best season of Dog Days and I will fight anyone who thinks otherwise) has literally zero stakes. I'm more than willing to consume some shonen garbage every now and again and have it pass through my brain without much impact. Even as that type of show, Phantom World fails me, because even motherfucking Dog Days , the epitome of bland and generic shonen, has something to distinguish itself from the crowd: It's set in a world where wars are big Wipeout type competitions where no one gets seriously injured. It briefly looks at what a world like that would look like, and even considers the impact that someone trying to have an actual violent war would make. It's the most cursory of glances, and the answers it comes up with are super uninteresting (and just plain wrong when it comes to the violent war one), but that stuff is legitimately there. Add to that the fact that the absolute lack of stakes makes the action scenes able to put characters out of comission at a whim, making them surprisingly unpredictable, and you've actually got a disposable little action romp with a pinch of heart. Myriad Colors: Phantom World really just has nothing. There's not a character that can't be entirely and accurately described using TV Tropes articles, there isn't a single episode that's interesting and innovative, there's nothing challenging. 

I watched all 13 episodes of Phantom World over the course of two days. Part of it was that both days I had 5 hour gaps in my schedule with nothing to do, but even on days like that I don't typically get through as much of a show. Even when I'm marathoning a show with the intention of finishing it off quickly, I'll often pause for two to five minutes between episodes to consider what I just saw, or to just let my brain cool down. After particularly big moments I'll sometimes stop watching for an hour or two, just to process the new information and let it sink in. I never stopped between episodes of Phantom World unless I had to do something, since at no point was there anything about the show I needed to process. This show is completely disposable. It doesn't challenge the mind in any way. In that way, it's a complete failure in the artistic sense. Art has to be challenging in some way, it's got to change your brain somehow, be it provoking thought or some kind of emotion. Not everything has to be 2001: A Space Odyssey, but even stuff like MM!, which I'd argue is actively meant to be consumed in a few minutes and forgotten, has some interesting energy to it that makes you feel something as you're watching it. The only thing I can say about any given episode Phantom World is that it's a better way to spend 23 minutes than not doing anything. 

It's sad, really, because it would have been so simple to make Phantom World worthwhile. This is Kyoto Animation, after all, and as such this show is genuinely absolutely gorgeous. But it doesn't mean anything when it doesn't have anything going on. Just anything, any sort of nudge in any direction other than bland, generic mediocrity would likely have elevated Phantom World to something that I'd have left feeling pretty content. The way it is right now, I finished Phantom World but two days ago, and already I'm struggling to remember anything that happened in it. I'm about as able to remember things that happened in Phantom World as I am things that happened in Dog Days, a light and fluffy show I watched three years ago now. Phantom World is disposable mush, and many of its defenders say that's all it needs to be. That's fair, but check this out. Here's a list of feel-good disposable mush shonen anime that actually have something worthwhile about them, and this is just from the limited number of shows I've watched:

Dog Days

Keijo!!!!!!!!

Little Witch Academia

MM!

Space Patrol Luluco

This is excluding anything that has any significant dark moments to it, such as No Game No Life, or moments that I could see making someone sad even for a little bit, like lost matches in sports anime like Baby Steps. It also excludes stuff with bigger ideas, even if they're pushed far into the background, like Kill la Kill and Tengen Tonpa Gurren Lagann, or shows where the action is visceral and/or stressful, like the A Certain franchise and Attack on Titan. I'm also excluding shows where there's legitimate bad blood between certain characters, like Haikyuu!!. It's the incredibly specific genre of feel-good, non-threatening, non-stressful, purely dumb shonen anime. Even if you absolutely need dumb feel-good action to put in your brain, I've come up with five shows from the limited selection of shows that I've watched to completion that manage to be that and still have some substance, some interesting characters, or just something that makes them worth your time. Even slightly expand that very narrow definition, and I can double or triple the amount of shows I can list. Give me full knowledge of every anime in existence and I absolutely guarantee I can make the length of that narrow list reach triple digits with no problem.

Myriad Colors: Phantom World is not the worst show I've ever seen. I've watched true garbage like Garzey's Wing, The Asterisk War and Say "I Love You". It is, however, the last show I'd recommend to anyone. I'd legitimately recomend someone watch something irredemeably awful like The Asterisk War over Phantom World. There's nothing to be gained from it. Myriad Colors: Phantom World is the truest time-waster I've ever seen, a piece of nothing that shows up, eats up to 13 23-minute chunks of your limited time on Earth, and disappears, leaving nothing behind. Bad shows leave you angry or bored, they leave an impression and maybe teach you something about what makes art not work. Phantom World can't do that, there's nothing really wrong with it. The thing is, there's nothing right with it either, nothing to justify spending any time on it at all. I keep saying that nothing that Phantom World does is really the problem with it, but it fails to do anything to make those not-problems be not-problematic. Railgun's generic characters were OK because it put them in interesting situations. Kill la Kill's nonsensical plot was OK because it turned the intensity up to 11. Hell, K-On!, a show by the same student as Phantom World also had a yawn-worthy premise and completely archetypal characters, but it's my favorite anime because of the completely perfect character writing it displays, turning its archetypes into fully fleshed out and believable teenage girls.  Myriad Colors: Phantom World is worthless in the best way possible, a blob of grey flavorless odorless goop that just hangs out and exists. It's sort of scary, to be honest, how a show with such high production values, colorful artwork and interesting core conceit can be lacking any sort of personality like this, despite the fact that the crew that worked on it is massively talented.

Final Rating: 4/10

A 5/10 may seem more appropriate given its near perfect mediocrity, but to me a 5/10 implies a lack of recommendation either way, and I strongly suggest avoiding Phantom World. In a bizarre way, Phantom World is such a perfect example of a 5/10 that it actually backslides into a lower rating.

A Tour of Sunnydale - Prophecy Girl

Sometimes tour guides just mysteriously disappear for a few months for no adequately explained reason. That's a thing that just happens as you take A Tour of Sunnydale.

Prophecy Girl is the twelfth and final episode of the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was both written and directed by showrunner Joss Whedon, in his first directorial credit on the show and third writing credit. His other writing credits came in the opening two parter, a solid pair of episodes. Prophecy Girl is ranked 13th on The Phi Phenomenon, making it the most popular episode we've seen, beating out the previous top dog Angel at number 24.

Prophecy Girl is the first instance of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I truly love. This is the first story in Buffy that's completely impossible to pull off if you think of the show episodically. In a lot of ways, Prophecy Girl is the culmination of all the disparate things that Season 1 had going for it. Though it's a markedly darker and more mature take on the series, Prophecy Girl still sits comfortably alongside things like Nightmares or Witch, due to its unrelenting, unflinching focus on its characters above everything else.

Unlike some of the weaker episodes of Season 1, like I Robot, You Jane, Prophecy Girl never lets itself just become the story it's telling. Every single beat of the episode is there in service of the exploration of Buffy, Giles, Xander and Willow. From the surprisingly comfortable and homey beginning to the tense end battle, Prophecy Girl is concerned first and foremost with ensuring its characters both are consistent with who they were before and keep moving forward and evolving. Our main four all go through transformative and character-defining moments here.

Buffy's arc is by far the most simple to see, as she goes from the girl she's been throughout most of the first season to the slayer she'll be throughout the rest of the show. Whilst her dual identity as both regular girl and super-powered slayer will never stop being a core part of both her and the show's identity, it's here that the two parts of her stop being in conflict. The moment in the library, where she overhears Giles and Angel talking about how she's destined to fight the Master and loose, is tremendously emotionally affecting -largely due to some possibly career-best acting from Sarah Michelle Gellar-  but it's also the last big conflict between Buffy the girl and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Once she sees Willow's distress at what happens in the AV room, Buffy the girl never acts up throughout the rest of the show. From now on, it's Buffy the Vampire Slayer who truly is the main character of the show, and the girl in her only comes out in moments when she doesn't need to be the Slayer any more. It's a tremendously powerful portrayal of both the end of Buffy's childhood and the start of her adulthood. Metaphorically, one could say that the Master did kill Buffy - but just the part of her that wasn't willing to accept the responsibility of her duty as a Slayer.

Buffy is obviously central to this episode, but that doesn't mean the rest of the cast is static. Giles has a beautiful arc where he quietly accepts that Buffy is more than just his Slayer - she's someone he loves and is willing to die to protect. It's not a showy arc, and it's played in the background to Buffy's evolution through the episode, as Giles' realization is completely motivated by her actions, but it's touching nonetheless. This is some of the tenderness that I felt was missing from the character through most of the season. Xander, similarly, accepts Buffy as a friend, and gives up on any pretentions that she'll have romantic interest in him, realizing just how much their friendship truly means to him. I mean, that does happen in this episode, but it's cut short by the fact that he'll be back to being creepy and annoying over his crush on her in the next season. For now, though, I'm surprised at how final Xander accepting Buffy as dear a friend, nothing more and nothing less, felt in Prophecy Girl, an effective and very clear finalization of his arc throughout the season.

Willow's arc through the episode is by far the quietest and such hardest to see, but it's there. For the first half, we're shown her as frail and lacking confidence, but as truly kind-hearted, to the point where she kind of lets her feelings be trampled over. When Xander is rejected by Buffy and invites Willow to the prom as his backup, however, her frailty disappears, she rejects him, respecting herself enough to not allow herself to be used this way. From here, she gains confidence, and manages to keep up - and even get along - with Cordelia until the two find the remains of the massacre in the AV room. At this point, Willow's self-control and newly gained is dashed, and the state of utter dread and despair that Buffy finds her in is what motivates Buffy to sacrifice herself in order to try to stop the Master.  But Willow comes back to help and fight alongside the others, finally reafirmed in her own worth as she proves invaluable in the ensuing battle. Prophecy Girl is the origin story of the quiet self-confidence that will lead Willow to evolve from here all the way to the end of the show, and that makes her my favorite character in the show.

Even removing all this context, however, Prophecy Girl is a solid piece of writing, a compelling story with a supremely engaging third act and a satisfying climax. Prophecy Girl is funny and moving in the way that only Buffy is. This is the first true triumph for the series, a phenomenal piece of work. It's got so many fantastic little moments, too - how cute Willow is at the start as she listens to Xander prepare his confession to Buffy and she pretends it's to her, the fantastic way Giles is disheveled and nervous throughout the episode, the fantastic moment when Joyce gives Buffy the dress, the Master's ham, Xander saying he's going to lie down and listen to country music and then actually doing it, the amazing imagery of Buffy in the leather jacket and white dress with a crossbow...

Here's ranking and rating: The ranking is of all episodes of Buffy and Angel I've watched so far, with 1 being the best one, and the rating is out of ten in context of the quality of the show: I'm essentially trying to decide what 10% of quality of that particular show the episode belongs in. Because both shows are so good, this means negative ratings are not neccesarily a diss on the episode -  I just think it's one of the show's weaker ones.

This goes at the top of the list, no contest.

Ranked List

Rating: 9/10
Among the best of Buffy, but this show is so fantastic that even this level of quality is not near the top. I expect this to come in at around number 20 by the end of the show's run. 

New Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony Review - Simply Brilliant

It's impossible to properly discuss New Danganronpa V3 without massively spoiling it. Even that right there consitutes a minor spoiler, but it's one I can't not have. As such, I'll divide this review into two sections: A general overview of why the game is good, and deeper discussion of its intricacies. I'll do my best to keep the first section spoiler-free, but I implore you, if you have even the slighest interest in this game, go play it, even before reading the first section, as even there I'll have to spoil some bare minimum things. Even if you don't, even if you haven't played the first two Danganronpa games, go do it. This might be the finest series in all of gaming, and I can't recommend them enough. Now, without further ado:

Section 1 - General Overview

New Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony is, as the title would suggest, the third installment in the Danganronpa series. As with the previous two, it follows a group of sixteen students who are trapped together - this time in a school again, back to series origins after Danganronpa 2's tropical island setting - and forced to participate in a killing game. If you kill someone, you're allowed to leave. The catch is, if you're caught, you're killed too. If you're not caught, everyone else gets killed instead. The player controls one of the students, who is forced to investigate the murders and become a prominent figure in the so-called Class Trials - group discussions where everyone puts their head together to try and figure out who the murderer is. Like previously, the students are all the best at some particular (and usually pretty obscure and specific) field, being called the "Ultimate" at that field. Talents in this game range from Ultimate Pianist, through Ultimate Entomologist to Ultimate Robot.

The gameplay loop is largely unchanged from the previous two games. The game is divided into chapters, with each chapter having three distinct parts - "Daily Life", where the story unfolds in typical visual novel style and the group learns more about the mysteries of the school, then "Deadly Life", where the player must roam the school investigating the murder and collecting clues, and finally the Class Trial itself, which resemble the trial sequences from the Ace Attorney games with an added element of action as you must point out contradictions in other people's reasoning, all while dealing with the changing mood in the room and navigating the situation accordingly.

Both Daily Life and Deadly Life contain walking about sections, where you navigate the school in first person. Much like the previous two games, they're both pretty scripted. Whilst there's often additional dialogue to be found if you roam about a little, there's only ever one place to move the story forward, and it's pretty obvious where. Following the formula for the hybrid detective/lawyer game that Ace Attorney proved works bizarrely well, there's no possibility of missing clues during the investigation sections either, which drains some of the charm away.

Still, the real trick here - as Ace Attorney proved - is that the writing has to be strong enough to make you forget this. The murders need to be set up in such a way that you constantly feel like you're discovering something significant as you're investigating, but there still need to be enough bizarre small clues that seem insignifcant but make no sense at the moment to make the big moments of realization in the trials work well. Danganronpa V3 mostly suceeds at this, though a couple cases (3 and 5 for me) become a little too obvious a little too fast, and it takes the characters a while to catch up.

The meat of the game as a game comes in the Class Trials though, and these are also pretty much unchanged from the previous two games. Most of your time will be step in what the game calls Nonstop Debate, where the characters talk at each other, presenting what they think happened in the murder. You've got a few pieces of evidence out of the ones you collected to choose from, and you must match them with highlighted statements in order to either contradict them or agree with them. This section is basically a much easier version of the cross-investigation sections of Ace Attorney - it works basically the same way, but you're only allowed to present a small portion of your evidence, and only at a few of the statements. The catch is people talk fast, and you have to respond quickly at the right statement (Otherwise you must wait for the whole conversation to loop again) as opposed to having unlimited time in Ace Attorney. It's overall considerably easier than Ace Attorney, but it makes the Trials feel much more fast paced and fluid, and puts more emphasis on the unfolding story.

This is backed up by a suite of minigames, which represent different occurences in the Trial. Someone takes particular offense at your line of reasoning? You enter a small minigame where you have to cut down their arguments with the correct piece of evidence like it's a sword duel. Hysteria overtakes the room? You have to listen to several people talk at once, and figure out who to focus on to find the statement you must contradict in order to calm everyone down. The room is split in half over a particularly contentious point of the murder? There's a minigame where you have to figure out how to best organize your side of the room to convince the others by matching the key words of their arguments to those of the opposition. Someone's out of arguments and they're just trying to shout you down? You play a rhythm game where you shoot down all their yelling. You have to think particularly hard about something? You either play a game where you're mining for the answer in your mind, one where you're creating a key word from scrambled letters, or one where you're driving a taxi through Vegas and picking up hookers with the right answers floating over their heads. That last one may be a bit weird.

These minigames have differing levels of effectiveness, but you'll rarely be playing any of them more than twice in the same trial, so even the worst ones (like the rhythm game) are pretty painless, whilst the best ones (like the newly introduced Debate Scrum, the one where the room is split in half) are really fun. In general, they help keep variety up in Trials, and do a good job of making you feel like you're using a big skillset in order to overcome more obstacles than just having to figure out who the murderer is. It really does lend a dynamic feel to the trial, and help give the other characters in the room personality as they feel their involvement in the trail is as important as yours. In a way, it's more of a lawyer game than Ace Attorney, as pure hard logic won't get you to the end of the trial - you've also got to be able to manage the people in the room with you. Like the two previous games, class trials are a joy to play, with the mysteries being cleverly written and full of twists, and fairly hard to guess before you get at least partially into the corresponding trial.

Also back is Free Time - the small choice you do have during Daily Life, where you're allowed to choose who to spend time with when the plot's not advancing, which has been slightly improved but is still as flawed as ever. The problems with it in previous games were twofold. First off, there were barely any instances of it, which cut players from seeing many of the various stories told by hanging out with a character several times. Also, certain characters wouldn't give you scenes for hanging out with them until a certain point in the story, but would let you try, which not only would waste a valuable Free Time chance with no warning, but would also be spoilerific, as not being able to hang out with a character yet was a sure indication that they were neither the victim nor the killer of that trial. The first of these two is alleviated - you now get five Free Times per chapter, up from the three from the previous games, which means you can exactly complete one characters' little story in a chapter by only spending time with them, without being interrupted by a massively long Trial and all the story that comes with that. The second is super not, and I managed to massively spoil one of the Trials for myself that way, as well as wasting several Free Time slots. I don't understand why that feature is still there, it seems like putting in added work just to make the game worse. Surely it'd be easier to just allow all Free Time to happen at once, unless there's a plot reason for it not to (like a character isn't talking to you, for instance). Still, Free Time is a welcome addition to the game, letting you learn a bit more about the characters you like the most, and helping mix in a bit of interacitivity to the largely uniteractive Daily Life sections, where all you do otherwise is walk to the next plot-relevant location.

Now for the part that those spoilers will force me to drastically cut down: The story is good. Once again, the sixteen students have wildly different personalities, full of cartoonish quirks, and there's plenty of goofing around to be done with them. Everyone gets a fully fleshed out and unique personality and look, even the people who die early on, which in addition to making the world feel more vibrant prevents one from metatextually figuring out who stays around for long. Danganronpa carries on its trademark combination of wacky humor with genuinely gruesome, disturbing and touching scenes, which only makes the mood feel that much more bizarre and unique. Once more, the game largely consists of a drip-feed of information about the larger plot which the characters slowly figure out whilst dealing with interpersonal drama and the constant string of murders, which are often tragically motivated.

This isn't the stuff that makes Danganronpa V3 truly precious (that I need to give myself the freedom of spoilers to discuss), but it is an integral part of making it a great experience. Everything works here. The gameplay, whilst simplistic, works fantastically in conjuction with the plot. Mysteries that you want to solve abound, both in the short scale in the form of the murders, and in the long scale in the form of what exactly is going on and why this death game is happening. Characters evolve and grow, jokes become crucial and sometimes legitimately disturbing plot points. Danganronpa V3, even without the stuff that truly makes it tick is an incredibly good game, with pretty fine-tuned gameplay and a hell of a fun story. I'd be recommending it even without the stuff that I'm going to explore in...

Section 2 - Spoilers

Last chance to leave! I mean it! Full on spoilers! You're robbing yourself of a great experience by reading this! If you want to play the game, go do it now. You should, by the way.



The original Danganronpa was, all in all, a fairly straightforward little story: A death game happened for mysterious reasons, you got information about why along the way, and at the very end it all clicked together in a satisfying way. On the way there it played with your expectations a little bit (especially in the victim of the first case, who was set up to be a major character), but it was largely exactly the type of thing you'd expect from a death game story. Then Super Danganronpa 2 came along, which was set up to be the same thing, except it played off your expectations from the first game, mysteriously mirroring certain parts of it to an uncanny extent, but pulling off curveballs at the last moment. The reveal at the end was all the more satisfying for it, because not only did it explain the mysterious events happening in Super Danganronpa 2, but it also worked on the level of a metatextual commentary on the first game. Super Danganronpa 2 had followed just enough of the plot beats from the first game to make you feel like you knew what was going on, only to pull the rug out from under you consistently.

New Danganronpa V3 does a similar thing, with the direct one-to-one comparisons to the first game gone, and a whole new level of meta insanity pushed on top. In the very first case it blows your expectations coming in from the first two games straight out of the water: The Ultimate ???, a talent that always represented a major character up until this point, is the very first to be killed, and your bloody player character is the one who did it. The entire game is built around subverting your expectations this way: Characters trick you into thinking they're going to be important only to suddenly die, all whilst seemingly side gag-characters survive till late in the game. Murders seem incredibly simple and with obvious solutions, only to have been much more complex.

The entire game is just a constant, unending subversion of your expectations in every single regard. Seemingly important clues to the nature of the story turn out to mean nothing, whilst off-handed comments made an hour into the game unravel the plot over thirty hours later.

But, most of all , Danganronpa V3 is beautiful because of its ending, a metatextual clusterfuck where the characters appear to become aware that they're fictional only for you to realize that they're not fictional in our universe, they're fictional within a fictional universe in which the events of the first two Danganronpa games may or may not also be fictional. As such, all the mysteries of the school that have been carefully and precisely built up over the last thirty hours are thrown out of the window. There's no solution, the mastermind was sowing the clues as they went along in order to create an intriguing story. Really, none of the clues were actually real. It's all fiction. The last couple hours of the game are spent investigating why people enjoy Danganronpa the way we do. Is it out of some sadistic wish to see innocent characters die? Is it out of a desire to watch people overcome overwhelming odds? Maybe a combination of the two? What's true is that it's a massive mindfuck, and a joy to read through as more and more insane levels of meta get added on top of each other, creating a joyful and fascinating little tangle. There's a lot here, from the aforementioned self-reflection to an ode to the power of fiction and even a notice that the series is, at the very least, going to take an extended break.

There's also the cockblock aspect. The characters get actively angry at the audience and refuse to give them a satisfying ending, just choosing to allow themselves to be killed to spite us. Between this and the mysteries of the school not being satisfied, the entire ending is designed to feel unfullfilling, and it does its job fantastically. Fortunately, the metatextual mindfuck of the entire thing does make it incredibly satisfying, but not in the way the large majority of the game made you expect it to be. Once again, a fantastic reversal of expectations.

Danganronpa V3 is many things. It's a fantastic death game story. It's a commentary on its own series, and on the risk of a series running its course without ending. It's a meditation on the difference between art and artist. It's a critcism of people's taste in art, and an ode to the power of that exact same art to make the world a better place. Most of all, it's an absolutely phenomenal game that works near perfectly from beginning to end: Great murder mysteries to solve, a phenomenal plotline, and the best character work in the entire Danganronpa series, along with possibly the greatest ending in all of gaming. Fucking play this thing. Please.

10/10, among the greatest games of all time.

A Tour of Sunnydale - Out Of Mind, Out Of Sight

Eerie flute music is a Sunnydale staple, so it'd be a crime not to listen to some as we take A Tour of Sunnydale.

Today, we're taking on Season 1 Episode 11 of Buffy, titled Out of Mind, Out of Sight. The second of the two Buffy scripts written by Ashley Gable & Thomas A. Swyden, Out of Mind, Out of Sight is directed by one-time Buffy director Reza Badiyi, and is ranked 97th on The Phi Phenomenon. The closest episode that's ranked above that we've seen so far is The Puppet Show at 94, and below is Never Kill A Boy On The First Date at 122. This is a marked improvement for Gable and Swyden, whose previous script, I Robot, You Jane, is the second lowest rated Buffy episode of all time, at number 143.

For once, I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with the way things pan out on the big Phi Phenomenon list. Out of Mind, Out of Sight is at the lower end of season 1, but decidedly above the crap episodes of the season. It's probably not going to be the lowest ranked episode that I like in the season, but it's close enough to be somewhat of a dividing line. Instead, this is (ironically enough) a forgettable but solid little episode of television.

I think the big problem with Out of Mind is precisely that. It's not got either any good or bad enough moments to be very entertaining. When watching these episodes I've been taking notes, just little thoughts that cross my mind as I go through. Some of them are realizations about what works or doesn't work in the episode at a larger scale, but most of them are just moments that do or do not work. These help me construct my review, as I'll usually stare at these notes for a couple minutes before starting to write, and look for patterns in them. An episode like The Pack had a lot of moments where I was amused, so that was a funny episode. The Puppet Show had notes on all sorts of things, most of them positive, and I had a lot of notes regarding clever manipulation of my expectation in the plot. Hell, even Never Kill A Boy had a bunch of notes about how nothing worked. All in all, it takes usually a side to a side and a half of paper per episode. Out of Mind took me a quarter of a side.

This doesn't mean that Out of Mind isn't good. It's competent in almost every respect. I stayed engaged the entire way through, and the few notes that I took are all positive. This is the episode that finally makes Cordelia make sense. We finally get to see her as more than the rich mean girl, and realize that she's also going through some stuff. Her bitchy facade is just that, and she's actually smart enough to understand how vapid she is and how unsubstantial her friendships are, but keeps being this way because of a crushing fear of loneliness. It's neat stuff, and it justifies Cordelia's presence in the show. Out of Mind is also kind of unique in how it just subtly puts out this feeling that Buffy is also lonely and kind of depressed, and doesn't neccesarily touch it, just getting it across through the cinematography and acting. It's also cool how the circumstances the characters find themselves in feel more deadly than ever before - particularly Willow, Xander and Giles in the boiler room being gassed.


There's legitimately great stuff in Out of Mind, Out of Sight, but there's just not enough of it. It has a strong central premise, and a fairly well constructed plot, a few decent character beats and that's really about it. In a way, Out of Mind, Out of Sight is a perfect representation of Season 1 as a whole. It's appropriate, with a few shining moments, but largely fairly disposable. When it does shine it's through unexpected character depth and a level of darkness that's surprising for network TV in the 90s.


Here's ranking and rating: The ranking is of all episodes of Buffy and Angel I've watched so far, with 1 being the best one, and the rating is out of ten in context of the quality of the show: I'm essentially trying to decide what 10% of quality of that particular show the episode belongs in. Because both shows are so good, this means negative ratings are not neccesarily a diss on the episode -  I just think it's one of the show's weaker ones.

I start at last week's episode, Nightmares as a comparison. I think this is definitely better, since I wasn't bored for most of the run. Unlike Nightmares, I don't think Out of Mind, Out of Sight is flawed. I look at Angel, and I'm a bit stuck. On the one hand, Angel is more memorable and is legitimately pretty good. On the other, Out of Mind doesn't have the crutch of being pivotal, and it is very similar in quality. It's forgettable, sure, but it's also pretty competent. I think they have a similar amount of high points, but Out of Mind's are higher. As such, I think Out of Mind just edges it out.

Ranked List

Rating: 4/10 this whole block of episodes is roughly at the 4/10 rank, so that's what Out of Mind gets.