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).
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).
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