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    Ace Attorney My attempt on re-creating a scene in similar artstyle as the anime

    June 15, 2020

    Ace Attorney My attempt on re-creating a scene in similar artstyle as the anime

    My attempt on re-creating a scene in similar artstyle as the anime

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 02:47 PM PDT

    Drew Phoenix cracking a bad dad joke in the middle of dinner

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 08:42 PM PDT

    I've missed your smile

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 08:05 AM PDT

    I revamped my fem!Godot cosplay!

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 04:49 PM PDT

    “How about a cup on me, Kitten?” (Art by me)

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 10:48 PM PDT

    My new favorite award (even if I don't know if it's a reference)

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 06:28 AM PDT

    Ace Attorney in a nutshell

    Posted: 15 Jun 2020 12:29 AM PDT

    Just finished the first game in the og trilogy and von Karma’s case...

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 09:37 PM PDT

    Von Karma is just... my god, where do I start.

    Throughout the entire case, the idea that you're going up against the greatest prosecutor there is starts to terrify you. Everyone reminds you, and you can't escape it. Everyone knows about him. So how are you gonna win?

    My brother and I played the case together, and from the beginning, we took one look at him and said "oh god I hate him." His presence is terrifying, and hearing his objection catches you off guard. This is the first time I really felt constantly bombarded by objections, that I had truly met my match. Both of us knew this was gonna be hard (a lot of saving and loading ensued, and we had to look at a guide twice, I'll admit). But when we won the first case, and von Karma didn't break, it was disheartening. We had to go through another case on the same day.

    Basically, we spent 5 hours on that episode. Hearing that metal detector go off made my heart jump. And when we won... it was the most satisfying thing, ever. Seeing him crumble, yell, and slam his fist in true anger was terrifying. Seeing his whole life flash before him, the horrid white noise accompanied by the yelling, shaking, and look of pain in his face was worth the hours it took to finish that case. I love watching replays of it, but watching it on its own doesn't compare to the buildup to that moment. That's what makes it so perfect.

    "You and your father are my curse" are words that will forever echo in my minds, and von Karma will go down as one of the best and most hated villains in my book.

    submitted by /u/CaptainAnnetta
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    Yep, nothing wrong here

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 11:45 PM PDT

    Miles And Phoenix ( SeiryuuKirin on Zerochan)

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 05:28 PM PDT

    Stylish athena

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 04:31 AM PDT

    Anyone else playing Murder by Numbers? I just found that game and it has a very heavy ace attorney vibe to it. Thought you guys could be interested.

    Posted: 15 Jun 2020 12:07 AM PDT

    Dai Gyakuten Saiban: JC's Retrospective

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 08:16 PM PDT

    So here I am again! With a few days since I finished The Great Ace Attorney, I've spent some time reflecting on all my collected thoughts and opinions on the game, and now I'm ready to get them all down.

    Warning in advance: this is gonna be a long one. I'm breaking this post up into clearly labeled sections marked by bolded text, so if there's a particular subject you want to see, skim downward to look for it.

    THE BRIGHT SIDE

    We'll start with the parts of the game that I have mainly positive remarks toward.

    First Impressions

    Introducing the player to settings, characters, and concepts they'll be seeing throughout a full game is important. You're gonna have a real problem if a scene opens with your first time seeing Character A, as they punch a small child in the mouth, only for the rest of the game to try and make you view them as a friendly, likeable trickster who wouldn't harm anyone.

    On the whole, I think DGS handles first impressions pretty well. The game's opening, establishing the Meiji Restoration era of Japan along with all of the accompanying divide in public opinion among the nation's citizens, gives a clear, straightforward message that this will not by any means be the Ace Attorney setting we're used to seeing. The game doesn't ramble on with a long-winded lesson on this period in history, but enough is said that you shouldn't need to crack open a textbook just to know what anyone's talking about.

    Mere minutes in, we meet our new protagonist, Ryūnosuke Naruhodō, hereafter referred to as "Ryu", like in my other posts on DGS. Like his great-great-grandson, Ryu's a nervous greenhorn about to set foot behind the courtroom's defence bench alongside of his mentor for the first time. Unlike Phoenix Wright, of course, he's also the one on trial, and not yet aware that he'll be defending himself in the case.

    Ryu's a cutie. Eyes darting all around the room, weak, non-committal attempts to slam the defence bench, and stammering uncertainty all over.

    Then, in a stark contrast, there's Kazuma Asougi, Ryu's best friend and mentor. Couldn't be more different. Asougi's all calm confidence and friendly, encouraging smiles. But when the case gets serious, he's got all the steely nerve he needs to back his best friend up and come to his defence whenever required.

    It's not too long before we meet Susato Mikotoba. We know next to nothing about her so far, though. After a very long first case, we meet her properly in Case 2. With Asougi's apparent murder, and Ryu by all appearances the only person who could've committed the crime, Susato's not exactly in a calm or charitable mood. The calm, polite legal student we saw in Case 1 is right out the window in favour of a stern young lady barely holding herself together in the wake of Asougi's murder on the ship taking them to Britain. She's in a "hurl Ryu across the cabin while he's handcuffed" sort of mood here, but we'll learn soon enough that this is hardly her natural state of being. More on her later, though.

    Case 2 also gives us Sherlock Holmes. I'm planning to cover him a couple of sections down, though, so for now...

    Arriving in Britain, we meet Chief Justice Hart Vortex. ... I just assume he's evil. He's gotta be evil, right? Don't answer that. He's got everything -- title, mannerisms, his name -- given that his first act within the story proper is to task Ryu with securing an acquittal for a person like Cosney Megundal, I don't think I can exactly expect a golden-boy Big Good from him, is all.

    And speaking of Megundal, he's Ryu's first proper client in his budding defence attorney career. I made a noise somewhere between a snort and a cackle the first time he appeared on-screen. His design is terrific. Take Cosney's advice -- you wanna make up for lacking height? Wear a hat nearly as tall as you are. Affecting the appearance of a friendly, philanthropic charmer, Megundal strikes up a comfortable rapport with his new attorney straight away, even with only minutes until his trial begins.

    And as the trial begins, we meet Barok Van Zieks, our prosecutor. Looking like he stepped straight out of Castlevania, and sporting the title of Dracula's bestie from that same series, Van Zieks is met with hushed tones and mutterings of his reputation as a fiercely capable prosecutor who, even if he fails to convict a defendant, will see their life ended in short order all the same. Spooky. Take note, though -- people who very noticeably aren't Van Zieks telling you things about Van Zieks is going to become a bit of a pattern.

    The trial eventually gives us our introduction to Gina Lestrade, as well. That name sticks out a bit, given her status as a 17 year-old street ruffian and pickpocket. I'll say here that Gina's first impression is definitely one of the weaker ones. Getting to know her properly as we move along is a big help, though.

    Skipping to much later, in the final case's investigation, we meet the truly exceptional man called Egg Benedict. Please note that I refuse to call him anything else. Egg is a class act of an Ace Attorney character, with flamboyant, dancing movements and a personality to match. All signs say I should consider him a massive annoyance, and yet I don't for a second. He's fantastic, even when he pulls a gun on you.

    Ryu's Resolve

    Now, let's say some more about our hero, Ryu. I already covered his introduction as the nervous newbie and dedicated law student, but where does he go from there? Well, I'm personally going to argue that Ryu goes further than any Ace Attorney protagonist before him ever has in terms of character growth and development contained within just one game. Let's get into it.

    As mentioned, we meet Ryu just before the start of his own murder trial. Accused of a university professor's killing, Ryu is nervous as anything and initially expects to be defended by his best friend and fellow student, Kazuma Asougi. In a startling change for him, however, he instead finds himself tasked with taking up his own defence, with Asougi left to simply back him up however possible.

    To Ryu's credit, he grasps the basics of what he'll have to do without too much difficulty. Unfortunately, he doesn't yet have nearly what it takes to see his own defence through to the end without extensive help and support from Asougi, but we can't fault him for that, right? He's a student thrown into a stressful and unfamiliar situation, who still manages a commendable effort in his own defence all the same. And in the end, he walks away from the trial safely acquitted, even uncovering the identity of the true culprit in the process!

    Following this introduction, we next find Ryu tossed dizzyingly into another mystery entirely, and once again under scrutiny as the prime suspect. Midway through Asougi's trip to Britain, having secretly smuggled Ryu along for the ride, Asougi himself has been killed, all signs pointing to the stunned Ryu as the culprit. Quite understandably, he's in a bad place emotionally for most of this episode's events. His best friend killed, and a scene staged to point to him as the one responsible? That'd do a number on anyone's psyche, and yet even so, Ryu manages to adapt, arguing his innocence and managing to talk his way into the chance to prove it, with some help from those around him slightly less inclined to immediately accuse.

    This is also where he's properly introduced to Susato, Asougi's traveling partner and legal aide, and like Ryu himself, Susato is understandably not taking the sudden murder of her friend well. She has every reason not to trust Ryu, and it's quite understandable that she doesn't. Still, with some frantic effort, Ryu is able to at least tentatively convince her not to continue suspecting him, and they begin an investigation together in a shaky sort of working partnership.

    Onboard the ship, they of course also meet the Great Detective himself, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. As the investigator who discovered Ryu unconscious at the crime scene, Holmes is naturally the reason that Ryu has become the prime suspect. With Susato styling herself a huge fan of Holmes, this quickly becomes a bit of an awkward situation for them. I'll save what I have to say on Holmes himself for the next section, though.

    Of course, with help from his small pool of tentative allies, Ryu is ultimately able to prove his own innocence, and even solve another mystery onboard the ship, but now he's in a different sort of quandary. With Asougi dead, there's no longer a legal student headed for Britain, meaning the exchange will have to be canceled without one. Who better to fill that position, however, than Ryu himself? Determined to see his best friend's goals accomplished even if he has to take them on himself, and to honour Asougi's memory, Ryu chooses to take on the arduous task of studying all he will need to in order to take Asougi's place in the student exchange.

    What follows upon Ryu's arrival in Britain sets him up for quite the character arc, indeed. He finds himself almost immediately tasked by Chief Justice Hart Vortex with securing an acquittal for local celebrity Cosney Megundal in a murder case he knows nothing about. Incredibly, however, Ryu is able to draw the seemingly hopeless trial out long enough for the prosecution's case to crack apart, with Megundal acquitted. This is not, however, the cheerful moment of victory we've come to expect from the end of most Ace Attorney trials. If it was possible, Megundal has become even more suspicious than ever before as the truth of the case has drawn closer to the light, but with his acquittal, it seems things can go no further. The matter only becomes even more complicated in the following episode's early events, as Megundal is discovered to have been killed.

    But enough detailed summary of the game's events. If we're in this thread, we've probably played it already, right?

    From this point, Ryu takes on new cases and mysteries, facing the same sharp-tongued prosecutor twice over again. He establishes a proper working partnership with Susato, and even meets up with Sherlock Holmes again, personally befriending the Great Detective, no less. The darkness Ryu unwittingly entangled himself in during Megundal's trial, however, is what really keeps his story rolling along. In Case 5, we finally see that story unraveled in full, Ryu's regrets over his part in the events becoming a catalyst for his drive to uncover the truth, no matter what enemies his actions might earn him.

    Across all of these events, Ryu transforms completely as a person, finding his confidence and proving himself to those who might doubt or mistrust him. There's a particularly good reflection of his growth seen in his conversations with his final client in the game, Gina Lestrade. Gina is the kind of person who has been hurt many times before, and who sees no point in trying to place her trust in others, given the risks she sees involved. And yet, through his sheer will to honour a promise he made to Asougi, Ryu continues to trust in Gina's innocence through thick and thin, eventually breaking past the defence mechanism that is her distrustful nature and making a true friend in Ms. Lestrade.

    More than once in the game, Ryu questions why others have chosen to trust and believe in him. He faces no shortage of scrutiny and general suspicion from those around him during his travels, only a small percentage of it justifiable, and yet there are those select few who choose on their own to put aside petty suspicions and believe in him all the same. These questions and the answers they're given show us a depth of character in Ryu that other Ace Attorney protagonists would need multiple entire games' worth of time to develop, and at the end of Dai Gyakuten Saiban, we're still only halfway through the adventures on which we'll be following him. I have to say, I'm damn excited for more.

    A Bit from Holmes

    The Great Detective of Baker Street is a character of many varied depictions. To see him join the ranks of the Ace Attorney cast, becoming an actual historical figure within the series -- it's kinda surreal to look at, in my opinion.

    I'll admit as well that Holmes had a bit of a shaky start in this game, for me. Case 2 isn't exactly a high point of the game overall, starting with a long, long bout of exposition and slow-paced, limited investigation. When Holmes makes his entrance proper, showcasing bizarre and often outright nonsensical conclusions about the case while coming across as a bit of an insensitive jerk at times, the player can easily be left quite confused by this seeming departure from the standard for depictions of Holmes. I won't, however, be one of those to say that this feels like an unfaithful interpretation of the character. Shu Takumi shows a clear appreciation for Sherlock Holmes in his own take on the detective, and a willingness to experiment for the story's benefit. A Holmes who is far quirkier, and prone to misjudging what he observes in his sharp, analytical view of the world around him is a perfect fit for Ace Attorney's universe. I still question, however, if Holmes as seen here is really meant to be making genuine mistakes in his judgments of scenes, or simply inviting Ryu into a theatrical game of deducing the truth through his own methods. An error-prone genius, or a true master of deduction making his own fun by trolling those around him? Tough to say.

    By the late game, Holmes really has found his footing within this cast. He's a hilarious goof, and a supportive friend to Ryu and Susato, while proving himself a genuinely brilliant detective even with the above talk of his frequently off-base deductions still holding true.

    The Bastard Megundal

    Ryu's first client in the Great British Empire, Cosney Megundal. The man's eccentric look and openly generous, philanthropic nature mask more than I ever would've guessed upon first meeting him. With Chief Justice Vortex requesting an acquittal for Megundal, the player has every reason to perceive him as an upstanding, charitable fellow caught in a bad situation. Megundal certainly seems to present himself as such, as well.

    During his trial, Megundal proves himself a sharp-witted sort, his positive reputation with much of London's population allowing him to easily earn the favour of not only the jury, but also the gallery observing the trial. This is not, however, enough to secure him his freedom easily. The case against him seems very clear-cut, and it takes quite a strong fighting effort from Ryu's side to prevent his conviction.

    It's near the trial's end that Cosney's mask slips.

    Up to this point, his behaviour toward his attorney has been jovial and even-tempered, placing his confidence in the foreigner representing him. There comes a certain moment, however, when it appears all but certain that Megundal has tampered with the case's evidence to create a way out for himself, and with Ryu hardly the type to brush this under the rug, his response to the development angers his client. Megundal snaps at him, his previous friendly expressions and words of trust thrown out the window entirely in favour of a short-tempered outburst quite jarringly accompanied by the use of a racial slur against Ryu. Of course, despite this, Megundal's play has worked, and he is acquitted, outright laughing in the face of his accusers and gleefully returning to a now much more obviously false veneer of friendliness.

    And then someone sets him on fire.

    Megundal's highly suspicious acquittal and even more suspicious death set the tone for all of what follows, with Ryu caught in the middle of what will eventually become a much greater mystery, and rapidly earning himself the disdain of the case's prosecutor, Barok Van Zieks.

    It's not until well into Case 5 that all of this is brought back to the fore. Another case begins to uncover the actual truth of Megundal's actions, and in spite of the man himself only appearing alive in Case 3, he proves to be the true villain of this entire game's main story, with his self-serving machinations worked into the background of the finale in expert fashion.

    When I finished Case 3 and wrote my commentary post on it, I was a bit surprised to see such praise for it among those of you who responded to that post. I certainly liked the case just fine, and thought Megundal had proven to be a surprisng and interesting part of the story. I didn't quite get, though, why the case or his character would be quite so well-liked until later on. I maintain here that on its own, when it occurs, Case 3 is a fine trial session with interesting events and buildup for the later section of the story to address it, but not a particularly amazing episode. By the endgame, however, with far more depth drawn up from its events, it does retroactively become a much more memorable and engaging story, and I'll praise it for that any time.

    Earning the Striking Moments

    Ace Attorney, by its very nature, has a long history of stories with shocking, dramatic, and course-changing moments in its storytelling that, when done right, can take a relaxed player going through the motions of solving a case and forcibly pull them right out of that calm, catching them off-guard and taking back their full attention in an instant. There's no better feeling in this series than remembering what seemed like a trivial detail or strange, unexplained and easily forgotten moment, and suddenly realizing its full significance. In my opinion, on average, Shu Takumi is the more skilled director for this series when it comes to this particular area.

    I've said before that one of my criticisms for Takeshi Yamazaki's entries in the series is of what I view as too great a fixation on such "moments". Shocking, dramatic bursts of storytelling that totally shake the player's view of things are important for a series like this, but I've said more than once that Yamazaki's games tend to fixate so strongly on the specific goal of trying to create specific moments that they often seem to forget another key component, in the critical buildup to these instances. That's not to say that his games never succeed in this area, of course. A certain moment in Dual Destinies, with a certain mention of an "emergency ladder" comes to mind, for instance. On average, though, I feel that Takumi is much better at gradually building up a story that makes its way up to and really earns these startling and memorable moments. One of my most-covered topics of discussion in my time on this subreddit has always been the civil trial segment in case 6-5, which I positively hate, viewing it as a complete and disastrous failure of storytelling, much of which I blame on the seeming desire to just specifically create a scenario in which Apollo can face off against Phoenix in court, no matter how flimsy the justification might be.

    This isn't a problem I find DGS to suffer from, at all. The final events leading up to Megundal's acquittal are an excellent example of pulling this off right. The complete removal of the usual satisfaction the player would expect from securing a Not Guilty verdict makes for an unforgettable final few minutes for that entire case. Another of my personal favourite moments in this game comes late in Case 5, when the player is suddenly given reason to remember a certain incident from somewhere over an hour of gameplay earlier, with Inspector Gregson seemingly lose his temper and shake down the witness beside him. I remember perfectly the split-second of realization that accompanied that moment, suddenly understanding exactly what the true reason for Gregson's actions there had to be.

    There is, however, something negative I have to say here, as well. In Case 2, while it reflects the original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney well, Asougi's death comes very suddenly, and you may observe that my only comments toward it up to this point have been about the way Ryu and Susato each respond to it. This is because I find the event itself rather poorly executed. The entire early portion of Case 2 feels like its weakest area, with the player simply being dumped right into the aftermath of Asougi's murder and only being given any background on it in the midst of a barrage of exposition that goes on for a mind-numbing length of time. We don't even see a body. Now (DGS2 spoilers under this marker!), I know from the marketing phase for DGS2 that Asougi will turn out not to be dead at all, but with no indication of that in this game, that doesn't really do much to diminish the problem here.

    Story Free of Formula

    Something else for which I've often criticized the more recent Ace Attorney games is their overreliance on the story formula established by Trials & Tribulations. On this particular front, DGS is quite a welcome change. The first case seems typical, if much longer than normal, being a single trial. Then, we have a second case with no trial at all, followed by a case much like the first, being a long trial alone. From there, Cases 4 and 5 are both composed of a single lengthy investigation, and a single lengthy trial each. This represents a willingness not to adhere to formula for its own sake, and for any criticisms of the story that I do have, I think it helps the flow a whole lot. The only real problem arises when you have sections like Case 2's first two thirds, or the investigation in Case 4, which I feel drag on much too long while moving much too slowly.

    Additionally, DGS abandons past formula with its clients and culprits. Ryu himself is the suspect in the first two episodes. In the first, he proves a witness in the case to be the true culprit in typical Ace Attorney fashion. In the second, the "murder" turns out to be a tragic accident caused by a terrified and innocent girl's unfortunate misunderstanding. This is followed by Ryu defending someone he's able to have declared Not Guilty, but who proves to have in fact been the culprit all along. In Case 4, we again see the accused proven innocent, and the entire events of the case an unfortunate (and riddled with a downright ludicrous count of coincidences, at that) accident. Case 5 again features a more standard culprit, but with the crime the case revolves around as an unplanned mistake in their greater plot tying them to Case 3's events, and genuinely tragic motivations for what they've done.

    There's also the distinct lack of what had, over time, become quite a predictable habit of this series in introducing a prosecutor or rival character who firmly opposes the protagonist, but who turns out by the end of their debut game to be a more sympathetic sort of person than initially thought, and who goes through a redemption arc to close out their part in the story. I'll say a lot more on this later, though.

    Top-Shelf Animation

    As the second Ace Attorney game developed native to the 3DS by Capcom's own in-house devs, DGS looks fantastic. Dual Destinies suffered in noticeable areas from a somewhat clumsy attempt to translate the long-standing artstyle of the games to 3D, bringing us from detailed, expressive, and hand-drawn sprites to 3D models attempting to imitate that style, with only partial success. Characters created fresh for the 3D style tended to look much better than those who had to have their 2D looks recreated in a totally new style. Poor, doughy-looking Apollo.

    DGS, on the other hand, reinvents the artstyle wonderfully, taking full advantage of the hardware leap to play with dynamic camera movements, incredibly expressive models and animations, and highly-detailed 3D representations for evidence to be examined, merging all of these advancements into a visual style that impresses me even more than the next game to be released, Spirit of Justice, which had its own collection of improvements over the look of Dual Destinies.

    In particular, the massive increase in detail for character animations is used to give the game a brilliant style of highly physical comedy shared across a huge portion of its cast.

    Brief Musical Interlude

    The game's soundtrack is fantastic. I don't have much else I can say. Character themes, courtroom tracks -- just about everything is great, and the soundtrack sets a mood totally distinct from any other game in the series.

    ROUGH EDGES AND DULL BLADES

    So, that's the end of the mainly positive portion of this post. From here one, we're going to be digging much more into my criticisms. There's something important I need to establish first, though. With Dai Gyakuten Saiban only being playable in English via fan translation, I need to address that there will be a recurring footnote attached to many of these upcoming criticisms.

    "I don't know how much of this is actually a fault inherent in the game itself, and how much is just a weakness of the fan translation."

    That's a sentence I found myself frequently returning to while thinking out this whole massive post. So, because it will be coming up fairly often, whenever I would normally write out some equivalent to that sentence, I will instead be saving space by swapping in the phrase "Peach Farm". Any time you see "Peach Farm", it means the above italicized sentence. And so, with that...

    A Witless Script

    There's a problem I have with both Ace Attorney Investigations 2 and DGS, and I don't think it's a coincidence that they're the two games in the series to currently have completed English fan translations as the only effective way I can play them. In both games, I find that the script is unusually boring for this series, with dry, plain dialogue and characters who just don't "sound" distinct at all. There's something called "character voice" that Ace Attorney's official localizations are very good at managing, but that I find these two fan translations to struggle with, which regrettably drags down the experience of playing them considerably.

    Peach Farm, but when I read the extensive dialogue of these two games in particular, I find that much of the cast seems to speak in the same flat, homogenized manner, and while Investigations 2 at least takes considerable steps to match the typical localization style of the official Capcom releases, DGS does not, which is something I find to majorly hurt the overall experience of playing the game. It just makes long stretches of dialogue seem stale and forgettable, which has the negative effect of making much of the game feel much more drawn-out than necessary or likely intended.

    This ties into the problem of localizaton. I completely respect that Scarlet Study wanted to provide a more faithful translation of this game's script compared to Capcom's official localizations. Unfortunately, that came with what I view as some very distinct flaws. Japanese and English are extremely different languages. What makes a hilarious bit of wordplay in Japanese will, in all probability, sound like dry nonsense in English, and this badly lessens the usual wit present in an Ace Attorney script. Consider names, as well. Most character names in this game serve their purpose just fine without being changed, but then you hit a name like "Cosney Megundal". That's meant to sound believably like it could be an English name to a Japanese audience, but to an English audience, it just sounds like a jumble of syllables, because despite being assigned to one of the English characters, it's based on Japanese wordplay. (Added question: how do you lot like to pronounce "Megundal"? I go with "Meh-guhn-DALL", with the "dal" getting the emphasis, and rhyming with "pal".)

    I'll admit, though, that this whole problem is lessened very noticeably in Case 5. Suddenly, we're seeing characters who do have clearly distinct speech patterns, and for the first time since Gina's appearance in Case 3, characters with easily identifiable accents giving unique flavour to their dialogue. Even Ryu's dialogue seems much more lively and witty in Case 5 compared with the rest of the game prior.

    Something Something Susato

    I talked already about Susato's apprehensive behaviour toward Ryu at the start of Case 2. As mentioned there, in the wake of Asougi's murder, she has every reason and justification not to trust Ryu. It's completely understandable that she doesn't at the start.

    Unfortunately, that is one of the only two story points in the game when I feel Susato exhibits very much actual character at all. Once Ryu does earn her trust, and they uncover the truth about what happened on the ship together, Susato sort of drops off in terms of interesting character traits.

    We skip ahead to Case 3, when she and Ryu have arrived in Britain. Susato is all wide-eyed amazement when it comes to taking in the sights of London, but where this would normally be the time for a character in her position to really come out of her shell and start expressing her personality, bouncing off of Ryu's take on things, Susato sort of just... doesn't.

    "The [blank] of the Great British Empire certainly is impressive, isn't it, Susato?"

    "Yes, it is! I read about [blank]. I think that they [blank]! Did you know that, Naruhodou?"

    Thinking back through my memory of the game, I feel like that summarizes an unreasonably large percentage of the dialogue Ryu and Susato share when examining just about anything during investigation phases or evidence examinations.

    She's just boring. I don't need or expect every character who takes on the assistant role to act like Maya 6.0, and in fact it's actually been a long-running annoyance of mine to see Ace Attorney so frequently build assistant characters around the familiar basics of Maya's personality, but if you're going to break from that pattern and make an assistant character who doesn't fit the Maya archetype, you still need to give them a personality. For most of her screentime, the only character traits Susato has that stick out to me at all are "polite" and "reads frequently". Peach Farm. If she's going to be the secondary star, she badly needs so much more than that. I want to ask something, too -- before playing the game, I was under the impression that Susato had a recurring tendency to bring up the topic of desserts, and sweet foods in general. I can't say that I remember very much mention of that in the game at all. Did I somehow just perfectly miss all the exact right bits of flavour text, or is it really not there?

    Of course, I just said "for most of her screentime", which brings us to the rest of it. In Case 5, set quite a while after the previous case's end, Susato is suddenly found to be acting totally different, like there's something majorly bothering her. We don't know what it is, and she's doing her best to be secretive. Almost immediately after this, she receives a summons from Chief Justice Vortex, and from there, she's set to return home to Japan due to her father's ill health. This means that from the end of Case 5's investigation until the ending sequence, she's out of the game.

    She doesn't just drop out entirely, though. She's shown to be working on something behind the scenes, which turns out to be... something hard to explain. By some entirely unspecified means, she somehow knows that Ryu will need a certain very strange piece of evidence to ensure victory in the impending trial. Now, I don't have a ton to say about the cat-flap maker, myself, but I understand that it's something that bothers a lot of people? I dunno -- I feel like the whole final section of Case 5 where it's important could've been cut from the episode entirely at no real loss, so while I agree that it's incredibly stupid, and feels like some bizarre attempt to help Susato feel critical to the final trial when she's absent from it entirely, it doesn't really seem to impact me personally all that much.

    I just hope Susato can offer me a better showing in the sequel. I already know certain details about her role in Case 1, and at least that gets me hopeful.

    Overcrowded Court

    To put this next part simply, there is too damn much going on during the trial segments in Britain. Ryu, his co-council, Van Zieks, the Judge, six jurors, and anywhere up to four witnesses at once make for a horribly cluttered courtroom setting that never manages to find a comfortable balance in who gets screentime, how much, and when.

    Most of the game's jurors are obnoxious, one-note gags or ridiculously over-convenient choices just oh-so-perfectly suited to the exact case on trial, which repeatedly feels like an immsersion-killing contrivance. The jurors are, at all times, either talking way too much and making scenes drag on forever, or totally silent for anywhere up to an hour at a time, making them feel totally pointless instead. The only times their verdicts matter are when they unanimously vote Guilty, prompting a Closing Argument, or at the very end of each trial, when their votes are just flavour added to the Judge saying "Not Guilty".

    London also seems to have a remarkably small population overall, as numerous jurors are reused, or recycled witnesses from previous cases.

    I do like the Closing Argument itself, but it consistently feels like the only thing the game has that justifies the presence of the jurors at all, and even it falls victim to the problem of those juror choices so often being ridiculously over-convenient.

    There's one character in particular who proves to be a major victim of this. To elaborate...

    The Offscreen Prosecutor

    I don't particularly like Barok Van Zieks. He left very little of an impression on me, with his most memorable trait by far being his utterly relentless displays of open racism toward Ryu.

    Now, something critical here -- please don't take this view to mean that I consider him a lesser character. I respect that Van Zieks shows off a fairly solid section of a character arc throughout this game's events, and his reasons for acting so abrasive and bigoted toward Ryu and the Japanese in general appear to make sense, based on hints we're given throughout the game. Being openly racist doesn't make Van Zieks a bad character. It does, however, make it a hell of a lot harder for me to like or care about him, and it badly inhibits my interest in actually reading his dialogue.

    There's a certain threshold at which I say "OK, I get it". Van Zieks feeling the need to chime in every ten minutes during trials with racist rhetoric and slurs crosses that threshold in no time at all, and then spends the rest of the game dancing back and forth over it.

    "I get it, he's going to be a racist asshole no matter what is happening, can we move on with the fun mystery solving, please"

    This is one part of a larger problem I have with Van Zieks overall. He doesn't have a lot of screentime to begin with, as far as Ace Attorney rivals go. He's just one single character in the game's horribly overcrowded courtroom, and a very generous chunk of the dialogue he does get is spent on either interchangeable, exhausting racist remarks, or his one single joke/catchphrase, smashing alcohol containers and then saying some permutation of "how impudent of me to [blank]". Peach Farm, but like Susato, his dialogue is just bland beyond my ability to care about, and far too high a percentage of it falls into the two above categories.

    Now, there's something Van Zieks shares with another prosecutor I don't care for: like Nahyuta Sahdmadhi in Spirit of Justice, most of what we learn about Van Zieks as a person doesn't come from him. Instead, we're just fed exposition from other characters. To Barok's credit, he differs from Nahyuta in that his behaviour actually matches that exposition. Characters say that he's a fiercely capable, dedicated prosecutor with a distinct bias against the Japanese, and that's exactly what he proves to be. With Nahyuta, it was Ema telling us what a lovely, kind person he is, only for every word out of his mouth once he shows up to be childish insults and sanctimonious vitriol.

    His character arc makes sense. Prior to the game's events, he spent years away from the courtroom. When he finally returns to it, his aim is to put away the corrupt bastard that is Cosney Megundal, only for Ryu to step in defending Megundal and throw the case into complete disarray, eventually earning a Not Guilty and nearly letting Megundal escape unscathed before a certain someone kills him off. This leads to a continuous increase in the racist aggression Van Zieks demonstrates against Ryu for most of what remains of the game, but the biggest problem remains that this arc plays out almost entirely offscreen, and we see almost none of it. The only time that Van Zieks actually appears to change his view of Ryu at all is at the very end of Case 5, when Ryu finally proves himself to the prosecutor by shouting that he doesn't care if all of Britain turns against him, so long as he's able to uncover the truth of the case. This finally seems to break through the shell of prejudice that Van Zieks has obscured himself behind throughout the whole story up to this point, but it all just feels like it comes much too late in the story to me, and that it doesn't get nearly enough focus to work. The majority of its effects are seen in only one single two-minute scene he shares with Ryu in the immediate aftermath of the trial's end.

    I also take issue with the game's efforts to convince me that Van Zieks is the sort to prioritize finding the truth over simply having a defendant declared Guilty and putting the case behind him. Obviously he can't just turn against his witnesses and argue in favour of Ryu's side the moment cracks appear in his case, because we wouldn't have a challenging or interesting game if he did, but even when he does show signs of wanting to see where Ryu's theories are leading, it feels like it comes out of nowhere, and then vanishes again just as quickly. Near the end of Case 5, there comes a point when he seems to also believe that Gina isn't guilty after all, but as soon as that moment passes, he immediately reverts to his efforts to shut down Ryu's arguments seemingly just because.

    Pacing in Decline

    This part is something hardly unique to DGS. It's affected the whole Ace Attorney series for a long time, and it's not always necessarily a bad thing.

    If you compare the amount of text in any more recent game in the series with the amount that, say, the first game had, you'll instantly notice that the further you get into the series, the longer the scripts become. The difference becomes huge eventually.

    DGS Case 1 doesn't need to be anywhere near as long as it is. In the way of actual gameplay, it's probably pretty comparable to 4-1. It goes on for a much longer amount of time, however, because the script is drawn way, way out. Characters will just talk on and on and on, slowing things down to a crawl. This causes it to sometimes feel like it takes forever to get anywhere, and (Peach Farm) it hurts especially badly when the dialogue is simultaneously so often incredibly boring. Like I said, this doesn't always have to be bad. Brevity like that of the very first game isn't essential, but when you have a dry, drawn-out script and a game that shifts so much focus onto physical comedy with eccentric character animations all over the cast, everything is at risk of feeling like a miserable slog, and dialogue just starts to blend together.

    (I've written too much. I'm about to bump up against Reddit's 40,000 character limit, so the very last part of this post will be in a stickied comment below.)

    submitted by /u/JC-DisregardMe
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    Phoenix Wright - Testimony 2001 (UndreamedPanic Remix)

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 11:39 PM PDT

    One thing I would like to address about the certain “plot device characters” in 3-5

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 09:34 PM PDT

    So I constantly see the idea about Iris and Misty Fey being plot devices and it's certainly a fact they were used as plot devices; however would establishing them with more personality or backstory really improve the overall story. Both are meant to be more mysterious figures to drive the narrative, so establishing them with more fleshed out personality from the brief moments we get to talk to both of them would remove that feeling of finding out and the idea of tragedy surrounding the whole story; a large group of people negatively affected by the manipulative devil known as Dahlia Hawthorn. Iris, despite lacking in personality, is shown that her compassion for her sister is what continues to reserve her conscious. Meanwhile Misty has been a mysterious figure throughout the entire trilogy and the limited knowledge of her makes it even more heartbreaking to learn she went out to protect Maya in this overall and arguably stupid and selfish plan conjured up by Godot's wounded heart and flawed being. That's what made 3-5 great because of the intersecting plot lines all around the idea of deception and manipulation causing others to be wounded and unable to recover under the mask of the mysterious circumstances. Could they be fleshed our some more? Maybe, but at the same time they are meant to be deprived of some. So I personally don't mind it as they add to the mystery and themes of Trials and Tribulations.

    Also no bringing back Iris in the future would only hurt her character similar to my problem with those who want to bring Godot back

    submitted by /u/SlyqNick
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    Why does everyone hate Larry?

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 06:20 PM PDT

    What is your opinion about the Layton crossover?

    Posted: 15 Jun 2020 12:23 AM PDT

    I'm in the middle of the story so far (I think) and I love it. I can only speak for the german version, but the quality is stunning, same goes for the music. The trials and puzzles are great, too. What do you think?

    submitted by /u/Dryb0ne
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    Which Relatively Unpopular Character do you Actually Like?

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 07:14 PM PDT

    Spider-Man drawing because new game (also Miles)

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 03:14 AM PDT

    Ace Attorney Trilogy Review from a Late-Blooming Fan

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 10:49 AM PDT

    How much space do the DD and SOJ ports take up.

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 04:36 PM PDT

    Do they need some more downloads after downloading or are they playable after installing.

    Android btw.

    submitted by /u/I_atemykidsandwife
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    Info on the order of games

    Posted: 14 Jun 2020 11:27 AM PDT

    So I've been playing through Ace attorney blind, and I'm on Justice for All now. I've bought Miles Edgeworth Investigations, and it sounds really intriguing. I was wondering if playing the game early would spoil anything for me? Thanks!

    submitted by /u/ChromaticSins
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