Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies
Nov. 14th, 2013 03:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
type_wildAnd so the day finally arrived that we got another Ace Attorney game, and I get to talk about it.
To start with the conclusion: should you play this game? If you liked the previous games, you should. This is more of the same and it's certainly not worse than them.
For any unhappy soul who's lolling about on the internet and doesn't know about Ace Attorney, the short story would be a series of five games for Nintendo handheld platforms. And because this is Japan: Two spin-off games, a Professor Layton crossover, three Takarazuka shows, a film adaptation and probably at least five different manga versions. And a theme park attraction, I'm told.
And if you wonder why it is that a video game about lawyers was parodied in Haruhi Suzumiya, it's because of this:
The genre is "visual novel", which is to say that gameplay consists of reading copious amounts of dialogue interspersed with point-and-click investigation of your environments and solving mysteries. The story will only progress once you have talked to the right people and picked up the right items, and no decision of yours will alter the course or the outcome of it. It's Agatha Christie in video game form - the point of the story is to find out who the killer is.
Our setting is California, some X number of years into the future. Because of the rampant crime, trials are now scheduled to last no more than three days at longest. And because of a number of scandals relating to those who practice law, the public distrusts everyone involved in criminal proceedings. In a downward spiral, many legal professionals are also foregoing the truth for their own benefit. It is, per the arc words of game, "a dark time of the law". Hope rests with the plucky heroes of our tale, the lawyers employed at the Wright Anything Agency.
Phoenix Wright, protagonist of the first three games, is returning to the courtroom after being away for eight years. Phoenix might or might not own the agency (previous games stated that the CEO is his sixteen year old daughter), but what is certain is that Phoenix - once the greenhorn of the courtroom - is now the senior around and he acts the part of wisened experience to his two proteges.
Apollo Justice, hero of game no. 4, still has not found a respectable employment in the year that has passed since, but doesn't seem to mind it much. He is vaguely less of a newbie this time around, and no longer quite so alone in his role as the sane man in the agency. Apollo Justice is fine indeed and far be it from me to deny that I spent a lot of time staring at his not-so-fortunate 3D model.
Athena Cykes is just in from Europe, where as we all know - at least those of us who have played the previous games - most lawyers are licenced by the age of 19 at latest. Athena studied analytical psychology, and is ready to face the courtroom from a different angle than her boss and her senior. She's liable to make outbursts in foreign languages, has a cool gadget, and came here for a reason.
The game follows these three as they defend the innocently accused in a total of five trials. Your job is to direct whichever one of them around to different settings where they will gather information relevant for the case, and then to argue the case in court by interrogating witnesses and finding out how their testimonies contradict the evidence. It's always murder, your client was never the one who did it, and in three of the five cases it is obvious from the beginning who the true culprit is - you just gotta discover how they did it, and why. The answer is always something utterly ridiculous, like the entire game is. Like all the games have been.
The Ace Attorney universe has only marginally more to do with law as practiced in the real world than Super Mario has to do with plumbing.
And like the previous games, the lunacy of Dual Destinies ultimately morphs into drama towards the end of the game. Here lies the first big change from the previous games: the big plot is present already from the beginning. The trials presented do not happen in chronological order, and already the first trial is clearly pointing towards the meltdown that happens towards the end. The big issue is the "the dark times of the law" (about which the game never shuts up), and the dark age gets personal when Apollo starts doubting the truth which his colleagues stand for.
So much for the story. The game itself sees a platform upgrade from DS to 3DS, and six years has passed since the last entry of the series. Despite that, playing Dual Destinies is familiar territory for anyone who's been in touch with the previous games. There's been some innovation in the gameplay, for better or worse - what strikes me is that the game streamlines the investigations far more than previous games did. You'll find yourself automatically going to a new location at times, evidence that has outlived its purpose will be discarded, you can save anywhere and anytime; hell, it's even got a to-do list now. You can no longer investigate every place you go to, that's replaced by a 360 degree investigation of crime scenes. The game tries to make the player spend less time fucking around, but I'm not personally enarmored by that. Mostly because I regularly went back to the offices to show Trucy everything in my pocket.
I've re-played the old games the last few months, and for every one of them I had to get out the walkthrough at several points because I've got better things to do with my life. But with Dual Destinies, I hardly ever got stuck. The game holds your hand whatever you do and it feels so much easier than previous games. Whether that is a good thing or not is up for other people to discuss. I suspect that they're trying to court (sorry) an audience unfamiliar with the previous games, both because of the decreased difficulty, and because of the changes in the game's narrative structure.
(This is where I go meta and things go vaguely and unspecified-ly...ish... spoilery)
As previously mentioned, the game starts bellowing about its Big Plot already in the first case. Hell, it started in the trailer.
(here's the trailer to the previous game released, for comparison)
Hell, even before we had a trailer we had those images of Apollo all bandaged up.
So yeeaah, suddenly we've got a PLOT. So did the previous games, but they were never as coherent about them, nor as upfront about them in the promotions of the game. For some weird reason, I remember being SO SURPRISED every time the previous games would turn to some central courtroom character for their dramatic climax in the final case. The previous games were all fairly episodic, and Dual Destinies is episodic too - but it states its intention for a big game-changing showdown already in the prologue. Chronology is sacrificed on this altar - not that it's any sort of big loss. What bothered me was the source of the plot.
So I wrote this huge post about how Phoenix never is the main character until Apollo comese around to POV on him (full of spoilers, obv.), and it strikes me that this carries on in the fifth game. The game carries Phoenix' name, but this is all Apollo and Athena's story. Moreso Athena than Apollo's - and let me just say that I found it a huge improvement that we finally got a game where the main character got to play the most central part in the story! Score one for Athena and all; I've got no complaints about her the things she drags with her into the agency.
The problem is Apollo, and I'm not complaining about Apollo finally getting a story. Apollo's just about my favourite character in the whole damn franchise, so OBVIOUSLY I'm delighted by anything. The problem is that the previous game left an unusual number of plot threads about Apollo dangling, and this game does not pick up a single one of them. Instead, it gives us new ones.
I don't think an audience unfamiliar with the story of Ace Attorney 4 would find it weird that Apollo keeps talking about THIS REALLY CLOSE FRIEND WHO HAS SHARED HIS DREAMS SINCE KINDERGARTEN or something, but for those of us who have played a whole damn game almost exclusively through Apollo's eyes... what the hell happened to Spoiler-kun that year? Why is nothing more said about Apollo's family? I obviously, obviously, obviously see why they'd choose the route they did with the part Apollo's feelings play in the story (how's that for vague), but it still feels like a cop-out. The reason behind Apollo's action feels flat, and when I can't QUITE get myself to believe in it then I can't quite appreciate the whole drama it produces, and the moral feels tokenish and banal.
Speaking of tokenish and banal, so were most of the cameos from previous games. Klavier gets a break for being vaguely useful and for hanging out for the better part of the investigation, but Pearl gets like three minutes of total screentime, and Trucy is ditched almost entirely until she's the only one around who can go investigate with Phoenix. That's right, boys and girls, we finally got to see Trucy being Daddy's assistant and it was absolutely precious for the little while it lasted. And Edgeworth... I guess would be a point that makes a lot more sense if you're familiar with the original trilogy, because for new players he must be coming from out of absolutely no-where. Edgeworth and Phoenix having a Big Showdown in court was another place where the game was uncharmingly unsubtle in its characterisation. Meh.
In conclusion: I though the game was worth playing and then some, but I also think there were some writing flubs along the way that I could've done without.
Other things to note:
1. The voice acting
I like it just fine but let's just say, there are two series from where I know Sam Riegel (Phoenix). I don't think I'll ever forgive them for not dragging in Yuri Lowenthal to do Apollo. Did they not realise how many jokes they have deprived us of? Proof 1, Proof 2. Of course, they got Yuri Lowenthal to do a certain somebody else but come ON the only time he and Phoenix exchanged words was in a flashback in an unvoiced DS game. Completely unrelated to that, I don't get why it is that Edgeworth's voice suddenly falls two octaves when he's doing his objection.
2. The cutscenes
They look good but it was not a good idea to take a comedy game and give it cutscenes full of duh-rah-ma. A number of them cross the line into unwilling parody. If your audience is laughing during a moment of profound friendship, you went wrong somewhere.
3. Blackquill
Blackquill I found to be on the boring side compared to the previous prosecutors (even with the spoilers included), but he's still better than Godot. Of course, I think Godot is somewhat of a Stu and I will never understand how the fandom got their collective panties soiled for him, so that's not really saying much anyway.
4. Fullbright
They've got to bring him back because I loved him SO MUCH. Sure, I'm still bitter about their ditching Ema, but then we got him instead and he is... he is better than Gumshoe, because they didn't run out of jokes about him.
5. Juniper
Oooohmygod I pray they won't bring Juniper back for another game, Jesus but I couldn't deal with her fashion sense. I liked her perfectly fine as the student council president, but when she showed up for the next trial in that hat and those pine cones my response was "oh god not HER again" and I swear I almost said it out loud in the compay of others. (speaking of: I wonder if Klavier knows who Apollo's mum is) Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure she WILL be back if they ever make another game, because the girl is a bigger Maggey than even Maggey ever was, except Maggey was adorable and funny and Juniper's just annoying. (and if they insist on bringing her back, then I'll insist on them at least bringing in Robin and Hugh along with her, because they totally made her worth it)
6. German score:
- I love that I read the line "Los geht's" with the English-language setting on
- I love that I got to see Apollo being annoyed with Athena and Klavier geeking it out in German
- I love that Athena's reaction upon being introduced to Klavier is essentially "WILL YOU SIGN MY BRA"
- I love that Athena's German vocabulary is vaguely more diverse and gigantically more useful than Klavier's
- ...but Klavier did not speak with a German accent. Sadface. Thinking about it, is it ever said whether the Gavin bros are German or American? I think they might have meant Kristoph to have an accent but it's kind of hard to tell from one word when you're, err, me.
7. To return to the topic of running jokes, I was less than impressed by the way they took parts of Apollo's characterisation that was mentioned literally just once in the previous game, and suddenly made it this gigantic part of his character. The Chords of Steel were funny, sure, but this game won't fucking shut up about them. But I very much like that Sakura-chan's invincible spell made its way into this.
To start with the conclusion: should you play this game? If you liked the previous games, you should. This is more of the same and it's certainly not worse than them.
For any unhappy soul who's lolling about on the internet and doesn't know about Ace Attorney, the short story would be a series of five games for Nintendo handheld platforms. And because this is Japan: Two spin-off games, a Professor Layton crossover, three Takarazuka shows, a film adaptation and probably at least five different manga versions. And a theme park attraction, I'm told.
And if you wonder why it is that a video game about lawyers was parodied in Haruhi Suzumiya, it's because of this:
The genre is "visual novel", which is to say that gameplay consists of reading copious amounts of dialogue interspersed with point-and-click investigation of your environments and solving mysteries. The story will only progress once you have talked to the right people and picked up the right items, and no decision of yours will alter the course or the outcome of it. It's Agatha Christie in video game form - the point of the story is to find out who the killer is.
Our setting is California, some X number of years into the future. Because of the rampant crime, trials are now scheduled to last no more than three days at longest. And because of a number of scandals relating to those who practice law, the public distrusts everyone involved in criminal proceedings. In a downward spiral, many legal professionals are also foregoing the truth for their own benefit. It is, per the arc words of game, "a dark time of the law". Hope rests with the plucky heroes of our tale, the lawyers employed at the Wright Anything Agency.
Phoenix Wright, protagonist of the first three games, is returning to the courtroom after being away for eight years. Phoenix might or might not own the agency (previous games stated that the CEO is his sixteen year old daughter), but what is certain is that Phoenix - once the greenhorn of the courtroom - is now the senior around and he acts the part of wisened experience to his two proteges.
Apollo Justice, hero of game no. 4, still has not found a respectable employment in the year that has passed since, but doesn't seem to mind it much. He is vaguely less of a newbie this time around, and no longer quite so alone in his role as the sane man in the agency. Apollo Justice is fine indeed and far be it from me to deny that I spent a lot of time staring at his not-so-fortunate 3D model.
Athena Cykes is just in from Europe, where as we all know - at least those of us who have played the previous games - most lawyers are licenced by the age of 19 at latest. Athena studied analytical psychology, and is ready to face the courtroom from a different angle than her boss and her senior. She's liable to make outbursts in foreign languages, has a cool gadget, and came here for a reason.
The game follows these three as they defend the innocently accused in a total of five trials. Your job is to direct whichever one of them around to different settings where they will gather information relevant for the case, and then to argue the case in court by interrogating witnesses and finding out how their testimonies contradict the evidence. It's always murder, your client was never the one who did it, and in three of the five cases it is obvious from the beginning who the true culprit is - you just gotta discover how they did it, and why. The answer is always something utterly ridiculous, like the entire game is. Like all the games have been.
The Ace Attorney universe has only marginally more to do with law as practiced in the real world than Super Mario has to do with plumbing.
And like the previous games, the lunacy of Dual Destinies ultimately morphs into drama towards the end of the game. Here lies the first big change from the previous games: the big plot is present already from the beginning. The trials presented do not happen in chronological order, and already the first trial is clearly pointing towards the meltdown that happens towards the end. The big issue is the "the dark times of the law" (about which the game never shuts up), and the dark age gets personal when Apollo starts doubting the truth which his colleagues stand for.
So much for the story. The game itself sees a platform upgrade from DS to 3DS, and six years has passed since the last entry of the series. Despite that, playing Dual Destinies is familiar territory for anyone who's been in touch with the previous games. There's been some innovation in the gameplay, for better or worse - what strikes me is that the game streamlines the investigations far more than previous games did. You'll find yourself automatically going to a new location at times, evidence that has outlived its purpose will be discarded, you can save anywhere and anytime; hell, it's even got a to-do list now. You can no longer investigate every place you go to, that's replaced by a 360 degree investigation of crime scenes. The game tries to make the player spend less time fucking around, but I'm not personally enarmored by that. Mostly because I regularly went back to the offices to show Trucy everything in my pocket.
I've re-played the old games the last few months, and for every one of them I had to get out the walkthrough at several points because I've got better things to do with my life. But with Dual Destinies, I hardly ever got stuck. The game holds your hand whatever you do and it feels so much easier than previous games. Whether that is a good thing or not is up for other people to discuss. I suspect that they're trying to court (sorry) an audience unfamiliar with the previous games, both because of the decreased difficulty, and because of the changes in the game's narrative structure.
(This is where I go meta and things go vaguely and unspecified-ly...ish... spoilery)
As previously mentioned, the game starts bellowing about its Big Plot already in the first case. Hell, it started in the trailer.
(here's the trailer to the previous game released, for comparison)
Hell, even before we had a trailer we had those images of Apollo all bandaged up.
So yeeaah, suddenly we've got a PLOT. So did the previous games, but they were never as coherent about them, nor as upfront about them in the promotions of the game. For some weird reason, I remember being SO SURPRISED every time the previous games would turn to some central courtroom character for their dramatic climax in the final case. The previous games were all fairly episodic, and Dual Destinies is episodic too - but it states its intention for a big game-changing showdown already in the prologue. Chronology is sacrificed on this altar - not that it's any sort of big loss. What bothered me was the source of the plot.
So I wrote this huge post about how Phoenix never is the main character until Apollo comese around to POV on him (full of spoilers, obv.), and it strikes me that this carries on in the fifth game. The game carries Phoenix' name, but this is all Apollo and Athena's story. Moreso Athena than Apollo's - and let me just say that I found it a huge improvement that we finally got a game where the main character got to play the most central part in the story! Score one for Athena and all; I've got no complaints about her the things she drags with her into the agency.
The problem is Apollo, and I'm not complaining about Apollo finally getting a story. Apollo's just about my favourite character in the whole damn franchise, so OBVIOUSLY I'm delighted by anything. The problem is that the previous game left an unusual number of plot threads about Apollo dangling, and this game does not pick up a single one of them. Instead, it gives us new ones.
I don't think an audience unfamiliar with the story of Ace Attorney 4 would find it weird that Apollo keeps talking about THIS REALLY CLOSE FRIEND WHO HAS SHARED HIS DREAMS SINCE KINDERGARTEN or something, but for those of us who have played a whole damn game almost exclusively through Apollo's eyes... what the hell happened to Spoiler-kun that year? Why is nothing more said about Apollo's family? I obviously, obviously, obviously see why they'd choose the route they did with the part Apollo's feelings play in the story (how's that for vague), but it still feels like a cop-out. The reason behind Apollo's action feels flat, and when I can't QUITE get myself to believe in it then I can't quite appreciate the whole drama it produces, and the moral feels tokenish and banal.
Speaking of tokenish and banal, so were most of the cameos from previous games. Klavier gets a break for being vaguely useful and for hanging out for the better part of the investigation, but Pearl gets like three minutes of total screentime, and Trucy is ditched almost entirely until she's the only one around who can go investigate with Phoenix. That's right, boys and girls, we finally got to see Trucy being Daddy's assistant and it was absolutely precious for the little while it lasted. And Edgeworth... I guess would be a point that makes a lot more sense if you're familiar with the original trilogy, because for new players he must be coming from out of absolutely no-where. Edgeworth and Phoenix having a Big Showdown in court was another place where the game was uncharmingly unsubtle in its characterisation. Meh.
In conclusion: I though the game was worth playing and then some, but I also think there were some writing flubs along the way that I could've done without.
Other things to note:
1. The voice acting
I like it just fine but let's just say, there are two series from where I know Sam Riegel (Phoenix). I don't think I'll ever forgive them for not dragging in Yuri Lowenthal to do Apollo. Did they not realise how many jokes they have deprived us of? Proof 1, Proof 2. Of course, they got Yuri Lowenthal to do a certain somebody else but come ON the only time he and Phoenix exchanged words was in a flashback in an unvoiced DS game. Completely unrelated to that, I don't get why it is that Edgeworth's voice suddenly falls two octaves when he's doing his objection.
2. The cutscenes
They look good but it was not a good idea to take a comedy game and give it cutscenes full of duh-rah-ma. A number of them cross the line into unwilling parody. If your audience is laughing during a moment of profound friendship, you went wrong somewhere.
3. Blackquill
Blackquill I found to be on the boring side compared to the previous prosecutors (even with the spoilers included), but he's still better than Godot. Of course, I think Godot is somewhat of a Stu and I will never understand how the fandom got their collective panties soiled for him, so that's not really saying much anyway.
4. Fullbright
They've got to bring him back because I loved him SO MUCH. Sure, I'm still bitter about their ditching Ema, but then we got him instead and he is... he is better than Gumshoe, because they didn't run out of jokes about him.
5. Juniper
Oooohmygod I pray they won't bring Juniper back for another game, Jesus but I couldn't deal with her fashion sense. I liked her perfectly fine as the student council president, but when she showed up for the next trial in that hat and those pine cones my response was "oh god not HER again" and I swear I almost said it out loud in the compay of others. (speaking of: I wonder if Klavier knows who Apollo's mum is) Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure she WILL be back if they ever make another game, because the girl is a bigger Maggey than even Maggey ever was, except Maggey was adorable and funny and Juniper's just annoying. (and if they insist on bringing her back, then I'll insist on them at least bringing in Robin and Hugh along with her, because they totally made her worth it)
6. German score:
- I love that I read the line "Los geht's" with the English-language setting on
- I love that I got to see Apollo being annoyed with Athena and Klavier geeking it out in German
- I love that Athena's reaction upon being introduced to Klavier is essentially "WILL YOU SIGN MY BRA"
- I love that Athena's German vocabulary is vaguely more diverse and gigantically more useful than Klavier's
- ...but Klavier did not speak with a German accent. Sadface. Thinking about it, is it ever said whether the Gavin bros are German or American? I think they might have meant Kristoph to have an accent but it's kind of hard to tell from one word when you're, err, me.
7. To return to the topic of running jokes, I was less than impressed by the way they took parts of Apollo's characterisation that was mentioned literally just once in the previous game, and suddenly made it this gigantic part of his character. The Chords of Steel were funny, sure, but this game won't fucking shut up about them. But I very much like that Sakura-chan's invincible spell made its way into this.
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