Turnabout Time Traveller, and which trilogy it fits best in
-by someone who remembers the second trilogy/Apollo trilogy a whole lot better than the first.
(Spoilers below for all main series games aa1-aa6, especially 6-DLC)
(Not for the Investigations games or the Great Ace Attorney games, though. I have not finished those.)
(This is mostly copypasted from my train-of-thought ramblings on Discord, and also I did not fact-check ANYTHING, this just. Occurred To Me. And now I am inflicting it on you)
So. I've been thinking about 6–DLC and how it tries really hard to look like a case cut out of the original trilogy? But it's not. Not only because of the obvious, but because I can pinpoint certain aspects of the case that are things Ace Attorney never really did in the Phoenix trilogy? If I remember correctly? But did do in the Apollo trilogy.
In chronological order:
First off, the time travel. Sure, the supernatural is and always has been a thing in AA. But things that look like but aren't supernatural phenomena? Not so much. There's like one occurrence in 2-2 where you think a channeling's happened but it hasn't, but channelings in general are still a thing that exist. (And I guess there's Larry insisting that Iris can fly in 3-5. No one actually believes him though.) But in 5-2 we spend half the case wondering if yokai exist! They do not.
So yeah, the same sort of thing happens with the time travel aspect of 6-DLC. Not as strong a case, though, because I don't have multiple examples.
Second off, Sorin's anterograde amnesia. I don't think it's called that in-game, but that is very obviously what the 'memory disorder' Sorin has is.
In 6-5 we had one character with some kind of trauma response (Armie) and another one with namedropped prosopagnosia. 6-4 brought us plurality. Might as well bring up Robin from 5-3 as well because that feels like the same thing? You will note that it is never her physical sex that is important – I maintain we don't know what that is – what is important is her mental gender and the influence it has on her emotional state. And then there's Athena herself in 5-5, of course, who also has some kind of trauma response and has blocked the UR-1 incident from her memory.
What I'm saying is that the second trilogy deals with mental stuff a lot more than the first. I'm not sure I can think of a single canon example of mental stuff in the first. Oh, wait, Phoenix got incredibly fictionalized very temporarily amnesia once. This was not really important to anything.
Like I'll admit that Godot not being able to see red on a white background is important but also that's more of a physical thing. It's at least implied to be because of his mask, and that in and of itself is something he needs to wear because of the poisoning. Physical health issue.
(Also Edgeworth says at the end of 1-4 that he's been getting nightmares over DL-6 ever since it happened. I suppose that is something. I don't think it was relevant to the case though, not like the before listed examples.)
So Sorin's anterograde amnesia fits in a lot better with the later games.
(Weird part is, despite this case occurring well after all the above mentioned examples, I was still reluctant to guess that Sorin had anterograde amnesia when I played? Like I thought of it, but it seemed a bit out there. Because nothing like that happened in the first trilogy. But We Ain't There Anymore!)
Third off, and this one feels kind of weird, but I'm genuinely not sure I can think of a single case in the Phoenix trilogy where you had multiple suspects none of whom did the murder and you were trying to make sure that none of them got found guilty?
This happens in 5-3, 5-DLC, 5-5, kinda 4-1, kinda 6-5... And 6-DLC, of course. The only similar example I can think of from the Phoenix trilogy is 2-4 where one of your two suspects very much did do the murder but also has a hostage so you do have to try and not get him convicted yet.
Like I think of this as a classic Phoenix thing to do, but then it's. Not. Not in the first trilogy, anyway, unless I've forgotten something really big.
But yeah it's. It tries really hard to be nostalgia bait by bringing back all the classic characters. You are Phoenix, your assistant is Maya, your opponent is Edgeworth, and you even have Larry as a witness. But as stated above there's a lot of things that it does that only appeared in the later games? You just... don't see it at first.
so yeah. just... noticed that, I guess.