My only demand from AA6 is this

[type_wild]

Ace Attorney 6 is happening tomorrow, so let's do the speculating because I found this ancient draft somewhere in an e-mail folder.

AA6, what we know without having gotten spoiled:

I. The gameworld is divided in two: Phoenix goes to the Kingdom of Kuh'rain to help out Maya and bring their court system revolution, while Apollo runs business as usual back in Japanifornia. There's no way these two will NOT end up being part of the same plot eventually.

II. Maya is back

III. EMA IS BACK OMG OMG OMG

IV. It took three games (technically, two games and a drama CD), but it happened alright: Trucy is the suspect Apollo and Athena defends in the second case of the series.



As I've talked about before, the serious frequently known as "Phoenix Wright" is really about everything but our titular hero. All major characters has some degree of ridiculous anime Sad Past going on - except Phoenix, whose gamechanging past experience was being accused of stealing someone's lunch money in third grade. Phoenix, indeed, is the only lawyer or assistant whose immediate family doesn't include at least one murder victim, murderer, complicit in murder or is a murderer themself.

Apollo is kinda unique in this setting, given that his Sad Past is that he's an orphan, but the amount of trauma that gives him is small enough for this fact to be revealed by Phoenix in some flashback where Apollo isn't even present, and once being off-hand and ambiguously mentioned by Apollo himself (he could still have a dad, after all). What haunts Apollo is the narrative irony, because he ISN'T in fact an orphan: the mother who once abandoned him lives, and he has a younger sister. The only people who know this fact is his mother and Phoenix, and for whatever reason, they did not tell him.

More interesting is how Apollo also becomes the first character whose personal agency (rather than Courtoom Shenanigans) wrestles the narrative in a different direction. When Apollo becomes a KNOWING victim of the Sad Life Story club by his best friend's murder, he quits his work with Phoenix in order to pursue a troublesome truth, and ultimately accuses Athena for the crime.

But it's WEIRD. First there is AA4, which introduces Apollo as Phoenix' earnest and somewhat disillutioned protegé, seemingly with a similarly uninteresting backstory until the final case drops the bombshell that GUESS WHAT TRUCY'S MUM IS HIS MUM TOO AND ALSO SHE'S NOT DEAD. Apollo clearly doesn't define himself by his lost family members the way, well, a LOT of the other characters do, and the game clearly doesn't see it as important either except as an explanation for how Apollo's bracelet works. For all the WHOA WHAT, neither Apollo nor Trucy learn about their shared and still living family.

Then along comes AA5, at which point the weirdness just gets STILL weirder, when Apollo is cast to play a central role in the PLOT alongside Athena. You'd think that bringing Apollo to the front like that would necessarily mean bringing up the huge parts of the story that the previous game didn't bring closure to, but that's not what happens. Trucy is as good as absent from the game except for hanging out at the Anything Agency, and her and Apollo's commom mum is only briefly alluded to, and then only by her new life so that no-one who didn't finish AA4 would have no idea that THAT is who she is.

So when AA6 now advertises not only Apollo as the second protagonist along Phoenix, but Trucy in a central role, I'm going to expect that her and Apollo's past is going to come into play somehow, because GODDAMN IF NOT.