Something about Ace Attorney
I love Ace Attorney. But to be honest, I don’t like where the main series is heading.
Case in point: Spirit of Justice. We’ve got three main characters (Phoenix, Apollo, Athena) all crammed in together in one game that attempts to juggle their storylines (in Athena’s case, it’s nonexistent here, in Apollo’s case, the backstory feels shoehorned) and eventually fails at what it set out to do ( (example being Athena’s case in Spirit of Justice which was not only completely irrelevant to the main plot but also very short)).
The way I see it Capcom should either split the games between the characters (dual versions like in Pokémon, maybe with loosely related plots), or cut out some of the already matured characters (like Phoenix and Maya). For Phoenix, his story ended with Trials and Tribulations, but they just had to turn him into a hobo for Apollo Justice (which ironically focused more on Phoenix rather than Apollo, not that the hobo gig sold much in Japan).
Gameplay-wise, I feel like Ace Attorney is stuck in its past. I mean, sure, each main character’s got their own ‘special ability’ (Maya’s Phoenix’s Magatama, Apollo’s Bracelet, Athena’s Mood Matrix), and Spirit of Justice had the Divination Séance thing going on, but I still think that they’re a bit hesitant from changing up the core gameplay like cross-examinations and investigations and stuff.
For the investigation part, The Great Ace Attorney introduced the Joint Reasoning feature, where you nitpick Sherlock Holmes’ (mostly irrational) conclusions and try to find out what really happened. I really liked this feature, and I feel like it added more content to the otherwise tedious point-and-click parts of the investigation segments, but also gave us an insight into how this version of Sherlock Holmes’ comes to his conclusions, therefore building upon an already astounding character through gameplay.
For the trials, we’ve already seen things changed up in PL vs AA’s witch trials, where you can cross-examine multiple witnesses at the same time. You have to keep an eye on the other witnesses and wait for their reactions to the testimony you’re currently reading. This makes the cross-examination session flow much more smoothly, and is a good way to introduce plot twists.
The Great Ace Attorney’s jury system? Easily one of the best additions to the court segments so far, in my opinion. You’ve got a judge and six jurors, the latter of which you need to convince to get your not-guilty verdict. If all jurors vote guilty, you have a chance to overturn their verdicts by conducting a ‘jury examination’, where instead of examining the witnesses, you’re examining the jurors themselves, trying to find contradictions among their statements, and help them realize the faults in their collective reasoning. If most of the jurors change their vote, you win and the trial continues as usual.
I feel like the jury system is an extension of the witch trials (it probably is, since DGS began development straight after PL vs AA), but with more stakes: the final verdict of the court depends on this examination. The jurors are switched up between cases (although some of them come back), but you get a feel for their personalities through this neat new feature.
I can understand why the developers might hesitate to bring these changes to the main series, since both PL vs AA and DGS1&2 sold poorly. It’s a shame since both of these games brought new ideas to the table, only for poor sales driving them back into the tried-and-true formula of the main series.
Any game in the series is better than no game at all, and the recent leaks are making me hopeful that DGS isn’t completely dead, and that AA7 is on the way. I just hope they try and spice things up for the new game, and maybe build off of the ideas the spinoffs introduced.
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