AWKWARD ZOMBIE

I really, really like that you can play as Athena and that you rotate main characters. You really get the sense that the characters form a cohesive unit as a law agency, and trust and support each other through their battles in court.

Also, was it just me, or was the mock mock trial during the investigation day one for case 3 pretty cool? I didn't even play Apollo Justice, and it's pretty obviously supposed to be nostalgia/call back for people who played AJ, but still, it was cool.

God damnit case 3.

I kinda thought Robin was cute, and I noted how the name was kinda androgynous because I know these games like to play with this, but I thought "Surely they won't make the reveal that Robin is actually a girl?"

WHY ARE ALL OF THE CUTE ANIME MEN ACTUALLY GIRLS.

EDIT: CASE 3 ENDING SPOILERS: YES. YES. I FUCKING CALLED MEANS BEING THE KILLER! However, I did not expect the murder to take place on the stage. this was really convoluted but thought out. Goddamn.

EDIT 2 TURNABOUT BOOGALOO: God Case 4 is already giving me feels and I've barely done anything. I like Apollo a lot, so digging into the reason he's been depressed is getting to me. Plus Clay's kinda cute and too anime to live unfortunately, so time to be sad about that.

I swear to god though, if Clay turns out to be a woman, I'm so done. YOU CAN'T HURT ME ANYMORE GAME.

I just beat the game and THE FEELS.

I thought the motive for Case 3 could have been better. I thought it would be something like Means killed Courte over their differing ideology. Courte's belief in justified means leading to the truth was resonating with some students and drawing them away from Means's "results at all cost" belief. Means, thinking that the law was going to remain in its Dark Age, thought Courte's way was destructive to the student body (and possibly making him look bad). He killed her to preserve his belief and keep students on the Dark Age path.

But instead it was bribery over student grades. And the motive doesn't even come up until the very end of the case. It just feels a little less fulfilling.

Well technically, it was exactly the goal they wanted to achieve.

After all, if students try to cheat the system by buying their grades, what are they going to do when they get to their actual job? They're reaching the end (graduating with good grades) by any means necessary. Whether Means was just doing this for the kickbacks or if it was icing on the cake of having his ideology justified, we don't know. However, having this be exposed could threaten his ability to foster such an ideology. After all, even the corrupt courts could easily find him guilty of accepting bribes and force him to step down from his position in the school, or disbar him. If that happened, Courte's ideology would ultimately win out, as her ideology would bring him down.

CASE 5 SPOILERS: God this is making me so sad.

After Athena sees her mom lying there dead, she just...

"It's okay Mom, I'll just take you apart and fix you."

Baby, no! D:

EDIT: MORE SPOILERS.

Uh-oh. I have a sneaking suspicion that Clay was the spy, killed Metis 7 years ago in order to smuggle the Moon Rock into the Hope Capsule, then retrieve it years later when it came back and they were going to go to space.

However, I think Aura discovered all of this and killed him to avenge Metis, and then pinned the crime onto Athena because her hatred that she harbored against her, after finding her in the Museum passed out. She might have also ensured that the moon rock in the Hope Capsule was destroyed.

I'm pretty sure at least the former half of the theory is correct. I could be wrong about the murderer.

EDIT2: Okay maybe not. Goddamnit game, I've been good about guessing this shit up until now for most things, why are you being so frustrating now!

EDIT3: FUCK. My first suspicion at the beginning was Cosmos, but then so much shit was going on I slowly stopped thinking about it, but... now that seems most likely. God fucking damnit game! You're screwing with me now for my savviness!

EDIT 4: NO FUCKING WAY, AUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. FULBRIGHT, WHY?

SUDDENLY IT ALL MAKES SENSE. OH MY FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD. NOW I CAN TRUST THAT CLAY WAS A GOOD GUY BECAUSE HOLY FUCK, FULBRIGHT SUCKERED ME INTO HIS GOOD GUY SCHEME. I THOUGHT HE WAS THE GUMSHOE TO BLACKQUILL'S EDGEWORTH. OH MY GOD.

This is going to be a fantastic blow up.

EDIT 5, I guess: I love the ending, love the whole game, just... LOVE.

Only real issues I had were how dodgy the animated cutscenes were, especially regarding almost anything Phoenix. God that last face in the last cutscene is borderline creepy. Also some took... huge creative liberties. namely the opening of Case 3 where the trio of students are standing over the body. I imagined at one point they'd have all come across it together and suspected eachother, yet kept quiet while Prof. Means tried to frame Juniper. But then, whoops, they never even saw the body, so why the heck did the intro have them standing over it?

However, everything about the game felt like a lot of detail and work was put into it. Hell, Themis Academy could have its own spinoff series (and I'd be perfectly okay with that). And I love them forever for the love they gave to space exploration and masked wrestling. The callbacks were a bit thick, but they tied everything together and made it possible for a lot of the older characters to migrate into the timeskip and be available for future games.

Let's just hope we don't have to wait forever for the next one. If they can put out these games around once a year, they'd easily have a thriving franchise like they're desperate to have. Hell, make a trilogy compilation for the 3DS (maybe even throw in AJ to cover all of the bases), and then rock things out with AA6.

I'm very confident that things could go very well for the AA franchise after such a great jumping off point. Let's just hope Capcom does what needs to be done.

I also love the music in this game all of the reprises and leitmotifs. The Reminiscence music especially was fantastic:

I absolutely loved this game, too. For a while I was suspicious of how well using 3D models would look. Not only do they look fantastic, but they still have great character animations for every character. They made the graphics leap without sacrificing what made their previous art style good, and I applaud them for that.

My only concern was the relative easiness of the game during most of the cases. I understand the reduction of penalty size, telling you when you've found everything at an investigation scene, that kind of thing. Those were problems with the previous games that were more annoyance factors than anything.

But I'm talking about when Phoenix/whoever constantly tells you what evidence to use. Not the hint system, just in dialogue. In previous games, Phoenix would think about whether he had evidence to prove something, and he would suddenly think, "Oh! What about that?" And then you had to figure out what "that" was. Now Phoenix flashes back to the exact moment when you get the evidence, or Apollo/Athena describes it like "If only we had evidence that (does exactly the thing that the evidence's description says)."

I feel like that's why most of the cases had crazy switcheroos where they discover that the entire premise is upside down, like who was actually in the locked room in case 2, and where the murder actually took place in case 3. Because it was pretty easy to figure out how to prove whatever your theory was to the court. The real puzzle then becomes what you actually need to prove, as most people go in with the default "prove the defendent innocent given the circumstances" mode, not "prove that what we assume are the circumstances are false." I like that direction being applied to cases, but I'm not sure I like making the puzzles easier in order to make room for that direction.

Overall the game was still really strong. My favorite part is still the Phoenix/Apollo/Athena tagteaming, and the ability to use all of their "powers" in tandem to suss out the truth. If they kept this dynamic up, this could be a really cool direction to go in. I hope they do go about making games more frequently, so we get a chance to see this continue.

So beautiful.
I also think it was a bit too easy. Even if you get penaltied to death you can restart right there with full "health" again. What's the point of the penalty system then to begin with? But you can save at any point anyway so you could just save and try through everything.
But yeah apart from that, wonderful. Favorite case is #2 because NINETALES VALE FOREVER
followed by the tandem of 4 and 5, then 3 and 1.

The DLC case is up to download since yesterday. It's pretty great!

I've yet to play this but I like the sound of anything involving killer whales.

...and pirates.


I guess I have to beat the game before I can download this content?

Just the first case.

DnD, if you haven't already beaten it, I would play the DLC case before the final case. The final case is major epic and coming off that into the silly (yet still very good) DLC case is a little jarring.

On that note, there was this line from the DLC case that got me (major spoilers):

Athena: "Wow, Detective Fulbright! You're just so amazing!"

Me: ....mmmmmmmm.

I intended to play the DLC case as soon as I beat the first case - but I got drawn into the second and now I've drifted well into the third. On your suggestion I'll probably go for the DLC case once I've cleared the third.

I've warmed up to the characters more now - the demo gave me the wrong impression of a lot of the characters because I figure Athena actually has more depth than I originally thought and Phoenix isn't as perpetually inept as he came across in the demo.

I like that we have rotation between our three lawyers - to see each of them leading a case keeps the stories fresh, I guess. I like that Apollo hasn't been swept aside and forgotten following Phoenix's return.

Whoever said there were a lot of typos in this game wasn't kidding - I estimate that there's a noticeable grammatical error every twenty dialogue boxes - which is really, really poor for a game so heavy on dialogue - and IIRC I don't think previous Ace Attorney games had such a high grammatical flaw ratio.

Something else that bothers me is why Simon Blackquill speaks with British inflexions/slang - I really don't get why a samurai-themed character would talk that way. I put it down to the American thing of having bad guys talk with British accents - but it still really doesn't add up to me.

I think it has to do with the game apparently being localized (for text at least) in Europe.

I've seen some s's instead of z's for words (like realise instead of realize) and other stuff like that.

but yeah, Britishisms + "-dono" is just kinda... odd.

Also, his stories about his fellow inmates are weird. I expect them to be kinda like Lemony Snicket asides, but they never turn out... satisfying. Just weird.

I guess his prison anecdotes are mostly there to prop up his character's theme of being a jailbird - just in case you forget and mistake him for a cosplayer or something mid-session.

I don't mind them - they're actually pretty silly/funny if you take them as tongue-in-cheek humour.

On the British inflexions/accent; I guess I've come to see him as a British guy who was waaay into the Japanese samurai thing and adopted it as his 'style' or whatever (I guess that would make him a weaboo?).

more like a teaboo

I'm dying.

While there are more typoes than I would like, they do seem to stop appearing in the later cases, with practically none appearing in the final case (that I can remember, anyway). I don't know if they localized them in reverse? Or just proofread the final case more closely? In any case, it gets better, so try not to let it bother you too much.

Finally beat the DLC case, and the "let's turn our thinking upside down thing" ended up being something that caught me completely off guard. THERE WERE TWO ORCAS. Looking back, there was some set up for it, but not nearly as much as the other cases that had switcheroo scenarios.

Unfortunately, I was able to peg the culprit earlier than usual due to someone spoiling for me that all the killers in this game are male. The culprit's "breakdown," though, was very surprising. Overall, the DLC case was great; totally worth ~$7.