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.