I really like the Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney series. The characters, the well built stories, the style, the writing… I love it. When I learned Miles Edgeworth was getting his own game, I was hyped.

When I learned that the game would be concentrating more on the investigations, I was worried, but curious anyways. I was unsure if the game would retain the rest of the series’ feel, or if it would become boring because of the new way the game works.

Was I right to be worried, or is this game a gem just like the previous games in the series? Read on and see!

Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Date of Release: February 16th 2010

Platforms: DS

Genre: Visual Novel/Adventure
Players: 1
Rated T for Teen (Murder, blood, sort of violence)

Looks and sounds
The graphical style hasn’t changed at all since the previous games. You still get the nicely detailed HUGE sprites during conversations, the characters are all nicely designed and all have personality and depth, the simplistic animation is something I really love for some reason, and it’s all nice and colorful. The areas are nicely done as well, with as many details as possible and made to be not too hard to find things to investigate. New here is having to navigate through the areas you’re investigating. This time, instead of just using a pointer and examining things, you actually control Edgeworth walking around the scene to investigate different things. The sprites for this are obviously lower quality than the big sprites during conversations, but they’re still quite nicely done, and they are very accurate to the characters’ bigger, more detailed sprites. Overall the game looks great. There’s a bit of recycling for certain of the recurring characters, but that’s to be expected, and there’s tons of new characters too.

Sound-wise, let’s be honest here… all Phoenix Wright games use the same sound effects, and some of the same music. This is no exception. Sound-wise, there’s lots of recycling. There’s still some nice details, like the sound of the text appearing changes when a different character starts talking, and there’s new voices for “Objection” by different characters and such. But other than that a few new music tracks (though some are from the previous games), most of the sound work here is recycled from the previous games in the series.

Story
This game being, basically, a visual novel, the story is the most important element.
This game takes place, I’d say, anytime after Phoenix Wright 3. First, a quick lowdown on each of the 5 cases (no spoilers, don’t worry).

The cases
The first case starts you off after Edgeworth returned from a vacation. He goes in his office just to find a dead body and his files scattered all around, and has to figure out who did it and why. Here we are sort of introduced to a thief named “Yatagarasu”.
The second case is actually a flashback, 2 days before Edgeworth comes back. He’s actually inside the airplane on the way back, and, during a zone of turbulence, he falls unconscious, and, when he wakes up, he finds a dead body in the plane’s elevator (it’s a big plane). During this one, he learns of a smuggling ring partway through.
The third case starts right after he leaves the airport. A friend of his calls him telling his son was kidnapped, and he asks Edgeworth to be in charge of dropping off the ransom money at a police-themed Theme Park, but then he’s knocked unconscious by the kidnappers. Here he meets with Kay, a young girl claiming to be the “real Yatagarasu”, saying that the other one is a phony, and she helps Edgeworth solve the case of the kidnapping in the Theme Park.
The fourth case has Edgeworth  flashbacking again, but to a case 7 years  before (so yeah, a flashback within a flashback), where he remembers that he knew Kay before, and this case he’s working on involve a certain smuggling ring and the “Yatagarasu”. I’ll also mention that this case features a younger Franziska(yay!)… It’s also the only case in the game taking place in the courthouse, though there’s no actual courtroom scenes with the judge and all, just investigation of a murder that took place there. This case is also related to another case 3 more years before, which involved all the same people in some way, and the same location.
Finally, the fifth case takes place at an embassy, which is separated in 2 since it belongs to 2 countries. I won’t say much about this case, but it wraps up everything about the Yatagarasu, the smuggling ring, and the case 10 years prior.

Overall story impressions
Now, the story itself. Each case has to do with a main “story” related to the Yatagarasu and the smuggling ring, and each adds new elements to it. The game manages to not leave too many plot holes,  at least none that are too glaring, and it all resolves nicely in the end. It’s a very engaging story I’d say. And the story progresses along quite nicely too. You rarely learn too much about the story to figure everything out instantly, and the way the clues are dispersed and such, you should figure out everything at around the same pace as Edgeworth. And like all games in the series, there’s twists and turns everywhere, with unexpected victims/culprits/other people involved, and finding rather unusual methods of how the suspects might have done their evil deeds. And the writing is really good too, with some humor thrown in as well.

Characters
The characters are great. Of course there’s Edgeworth, whom  always really liked as a character, but there’s a couple of series favorites too. Larry is back, there’s Oldbag (not that I like her much), Franziska Von Karma is here (yay), Manfred Von Karma, Maggey Byrde, Gumshoe, Ema Skye and a few others are here(no, Phoenix doesn’t appear, though he is mentioned a few times). In addition to them, there’s a ton of new characters, like Lang the badass Interpol agent, a few detectives, Kay who claims to be the real Yatagarasu but who has a relatively troubled past, and a bunch of other people(won’t say too much not to spoil anything). The old characters act exactly as they have in all the other games, and the new ones are all quite unique and have their own little quirks making them all interesting. All the characters have distinct personalities and most of them are quite memorable. A great cast for sure.

Minor problems
Overall, I really like the story here, but I do have a few problems with it. First is the climax in the fifth case. The Phoenix Wright series always has incredibly intense climaxes. Here, it’s not much different, but it lacks that certain… “WTF IS GOING ON THERE’S SO MUCH SHIT HAPPENING” feel the other games have, and not many really cool twists at the end. Here… I don’t know, maybe it’s just because we already knew everything before the end…
And my other problem is that the twists, throughout the game, while some (or even most) really surprised me, are not too hard to figure out. Make no mistake though, the story here is really nice and fun to see through.

Gameplay
The gameplay here doesn’t play as big a role as the story, but it’s still quite important. But be sure of one thing: You will read, a lot. IF you don’t like reading a lot in games, don’t even bother with this one.

This game plays similarly to the other Phoenix Wright games, but it has a few quirks. The game concentrates fully on the investigation process of the cases, rather than the court scenes. Heck, there’s no actual courtroom scenes like in the others.
And the controls are incredibly simple. Everything can be controlled on the touch screen, and everything has a button assigned to it so the touch screen is really just optional. And if you really feel like it you can press Y and say “Objection”(or other things) when you feel like it.

Investigating
Investigating is rather simple. As mentioned before, you move Edgeworth in the area you are currently investigating examining everything you can, and talking to everyone you can. This will give you pieces of evidence, and clues that you can link by Logic (more on that later), and sometimes add things you can talk about to NPCs. Certain areas you examine, like certain furniture or dead bodies, will bring you to a more detailed close-up picture of them, and you will move a cursor around, examining everything on the image, and this will also advance the investigation. Sometimes, examining certain things will give you access to the Deduce function. This is when you’ll have to point out a certain element of the image, and point out what piece of evidence you have contradicts said element on the image. Then you have the Logic function. As you find clues, those will pile up in your Logic screen. Going there, you can take 2 clues (or “thoughts”, I guess), and link them together. If the 2 thoughts are linked together, you get it right and get an explanation from Edgeworth about it. Note that, when you get any of those wrong, you lose some of your life bar. When you finish an investigation segment, AKA you find everything there is to find and link all your Logic together, your life bar heals and you get to continue the story.

Cross-examinations
This usually brings you to a Cross Examination segment. Those basically “replace” the courtroom scenes. Here, just like in other Phoenix Wright games, a witness or suspect will give you testimony or arguments against what Edgeworth thinks, or theories as to what is going on. And like in every other Phoenix Wright game, you can press each statement in the testimony, and you can present evidence. Pressing a statement will make the witness or suspect go in more details as to what he’s saying. Sometimes it will give you more information, or clues for contradictions, or it might even add more statements to the person’s testimony. If you find a contradiction in a person’s testimony, you have to object to it, presenting a piece of evidence that proves the person’s statement wrong. Presenting evidence at the wrong statement, or presenting the wrong statement, reduces your life bar. Sometimes you have to raise an objection while pressing, though the game will ask you if you want to object while you’re pressing or not. Usually it’s a good idea to do it. Sometimes during conversations in-between cross-examinations you’ll also have to present evidence, and again getting it wrong will reduce your life bar.

That’s really all there is to say about this game’s gameplay. It’s really quite simple. And, if you look at it, it’s incredibly linear, since you always have to find all the clues in each investigation, and you have to present the right evidence at the right statements to progress through the story. And there’s not much bad effects for getting something wrong. Sure, the life bar goes down, but you can save the game anytime and reload whenever you get something wrong, so that really removes most of the game’s “difficulty”.

Overall
Like all the other Phoenix Wright games, I really like this one.

It has a good story, the characters are great, the style is cool, the new gameplay elements are pretty nice, and the overall feel is really fun and deep, just like previous Phoenix Wright games. For fans of the series, there’s not much that they might find to complain about. Sure, I find the twists were quite easy to predict at times, but it’s never too easy to figure things out by yourself. Sometimes a few things come completely out of the left field, which is awesome and keeps you intrigued in the story. Overall, this is a great addition to the series.

Kind of just a note/question here… One thing that kinda bothers me is the fact that the game insists that a person shooting a gun with their non-dominant hand is a contradiction (and this “contradiction” is used multiple times in the game)… Is it really THAT much harder to shoot a gun with your left hand if you’re right-handed? I wouldn’t think so, but I never actually shot a gun so maybe I’m completely wrong. If anyone could clarify this that’d be great.

Pros and Cons
Pros
- Looks great
- Plays well
- Really good story that keeps you hooked until the end

Cons
- Hard to find cons on this one… I guess the “less-intense-than-usual” climax is a con
- I guess the massive amounts of recycling MIGHT be considered a con…. But I don’t think so in the case of a Phoenix Wright game (every game in the series does that)
- The game has low replay value… but it’s like a book, and no one complains that books have low re-read values… like books (and other Phoenix Wright games), this will be a game you might come back to in a few years to re-experience it

The Save Factor!
The game has a relatively low starting price of $30. Because of the low replay value, I’d say $25 would be the Save Factor on this one. AND I’d say the full price is well worth it for fans of the series.

jobocan ds, Games, Handheld, Review