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    Ace Attorney Weekly Poll [9]: What game has your favourite soundtrack?

    September 29, 2020

    Ace Attorney Weekly Poll [9]: What game has your favourite soundtrack?

    Weekly Poll [9]: What game has your favourite soundtrack?

    Posted: 26 Sep 2020 12:32 PM PDT

    Maya fey doodles!

    Posted: 28 Sep 2020 01:08 PM PDT

    I dunno what to write here that wouldn't give away anything about the storyline so please enjoy Post-AJ Phoenix giving Beanix a huggy.

    Posted: 28 Sep 2020 05:12 AM PDT

    I think I need to get a life

    Posted: 28 Sep 2020 11:12 AM PDT

    Friendly reminder that there are only two moments in the entire series where Mia has her chest completely covered

    Posted: 28 Sep 2020 07:29 AM PDT

    Who was this friend Phoenix was talking about in T&T case 1?

    Posted: 28 Sep 2020 05:25 PM PDT

    Was replaying T&T (for the nth time) and still can't figure out who this "friend" of Phoenix which he mentions after the trial for Turnabout Memories.

    Heres the transcript from aceattorney fandom:

    "Well, yeah... I guess I am... But there's a friend that I desperately want to help! And if I hurry, then I should still be able to save him in time!"

    submitted by /u/Licorice_Cole
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    Does The Phantom actually understand that murder is typically seen as wrong?

    Posted: 28 Sep 2020 06:34 PM PDT

    Given The Phantom's "unique psychological profile", it wouldn't surprise me if he's not genuinely evil, he just doesn't comprehend that society would see something like "literally killing someone else" as something to be ashamed about.

    For all we know, an incident where he has to murder someone is just another day at the office to him, and that's why he has no qualms about doing so or any kind of conscience whatsoever, he can't see his actions from a normal perspective. He probably enjoys the "playing dressup" part of his job because it lets him roleplay, and having to literally murder people is just another aspect to it.

    The Phantom is one of the most intriguing characters in all of AA, because he doesn't think like a normal person does and can totally tinker with his emotions at will. Therefore, it would logically follow that his "moral barometer" doesn't match up to one of a regular human being's, either.

    submitted by /u/GnarlyBellyButton87
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    Guys, it is official now

    Posted: 28 Sep 2020 02:29 PM PDT

    How is Ace Attorney the "Homoerotic Capcom franchise" when Megaman X exists?

    Posted: 28 Sep 2020 06:16 PM PDT

    So I recently watched through a playthrough of Megaman X 1-5 and I must ask: How can we as a community obsess so much over Wright/Edgeworth, yet completely sleep on X/Zero? They are in legit romantic robohomosexual love with each other and it's not even an ironic joke.

    submitted by /u/Souperplex
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    Wright x edgeworth this was fun

    Posted: 28 Sep 2020 02:57 PM PDT

    Recreating dumb internet arguments in Ace Attorney, Part 3: "No, not everyone can vomit on command."

    Posted: 28 Sep 2020 03:25 PM PDT

    Where can I download the HD trilogy for free?

    Posted: 29 Sep 2020 01:23 AM PDT

    This game is really interesting I wonder if there is anywhere I can download it for free on android regardless of the file type?

    submitted by /u/destroyerx12772
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    Let's Rewrite - Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies (Part 1) [General Spoilers]

    Posted: 28 Sep 2020 08:17 AM PDT

    Going out of order with games because I'm feeling DD right now. Got something planned for Apollo Justice, so no worries. Same rules I set before still apply. I actually like DD more than most people, even more than SoJ, but it still has a number of issues that run through both titles, so let's try and address them. Dual Destinies needs a lot more adjusting because it introduces the dark age of the law and it has an overarching plot, while JFA had a series of self-contained stories.

    Previous Rewrites:

    Turnabout Countdown:

    Not too much I want to change with this case. It's honestly a lot better than I remember. First, Athena will see this case through until the end. Phoenix can still do a dramatic entrance, but he'll only support Athena from the side. This is her friend she's defending, so c'mon.

    Get rid of Gaspen Payne and stick with my precious child Winston Payne. I never really found Gaspen entertaining and the Payne family never had much complexity to them. They're just continually a silly joke that they're the tutorial guy no matter the setting or the case premise. Making him an asshole doesn't really add much. I'm pretty sure they only made him an asshole because they were trying to think of a way to trigger Athena's PTSD and nothing else, but you don't need to deliberately say or do something to mentally trigger someone and it unfortunately can happen even from the most well-intentioned people.

    Even things like smells, tastes, specific words—really anything can do it. You don't need to have someone just being rude to you to pull it off. You could even get a good moment in where Winston stops for a second to ask if Athena is okay rather than prodding more. Winston always struck me as a bit overconfident, but not an evil dickbag.

    We'll change Tonate's motive to help already kick off some of the connections of the dark age of the law. We'll have a setup that there was a mistrial brought on by forged evidence that Detective Arme oversaw and he killed her out of revenge due to her hand in things. This'll help establish how people feel about the dark age of the law. A little exposition dump from Tonate at the end of the case will do.

    I've seen a lot of people ask why previous incidents like Von Karma or Damon Gant didn't cause the DaotL, but Kristoph and the Phantom did, and while I think the idea of the dark age is kind of silly, hamfisted, and unnuanced, I also feel that this response also shows a bit of misunderstanding as to how social backlash works.

    For all the clumsiness in the story, the DaotL is largely a social revolt from a large scandal. Real life social movements like that don't necessarily come about from the first instance of those things happening but earlier cases can be piled on. When you have cases like this where someone is say profiled for their identity, that's not the first instance of it ever happening and movements kind of gradually take off on their own. Pointing at earlier instances of that issue happening doesn't invalidate the feelings people are having in the present nor does it mean people didn't have anger or frustration toward those feelings.

    For example, racial justice activist movements have popped up all the time and more do every few years, but it's not like there weren't instances of those issues prior to those movements.

    It's just more that things have caught more public eye which leads to legal officials being so desperate they create a self-fulfilling prophecy if nobody trusts the other sides to play properly. With isolated incidents, they could at least be seen as that by the public. What DD is trying to illustrate is that the larger systemic issue of masses of people cheating their way through and using illegal or unethical means to secure their verdict is what has caught the public eye. It creates a self-fulfilling prophecy if everyone is cheating because now everyone feels obligated to join in to have a fighting chance in court, and that only makes things worse when it gets caught and publicized.

    The issue though is that this is never actually shown or expressed in any meaningful way beyond several characters acting like idiots or just name dropping "the ends justify the means" or "the dark age of the law" over and over again. I think they realized this and tried to use the courtroom audience to be that voice of the public in Spirit of Justice, which would explain why there are SO. MANY. GODDAMN. COURTROOM PANS! Every time we want to know what the public thinks about something, another one popped up.

    DD is trying to splash in a much more complicated subject and trying to centralize everything into an easily identifiable target that, if defeated will somehow solve everything. This'll tie into later cases, but capturing the Phantom won't magically solve everything.

    Dual Destinies even has an interesting theme it doesn't fully capitalize on. Most cases keep emphasizing how you need to believe in yourself and believe in your client to save the day, but Dual Destinies often flips it around by showing that it works the other way around too. You need to get your client and others to trust in you.

    Shifting Tonate's motive to have him take revenge against a court and people who he feels wronged him or someone he cares about will help tie that point in a bit better and is honestly more interesting than just a greed motive where he sells off the bombs. I think this is actually the motive they gave him in the demo for this game (don't quote me on that) and it's honestly better than just selling bombs.

    Money is pretty much the driving motive of nearly every Dual Destinies culprit except for Marlon Rimes. I know that they never explicitly state the Phantom's motives for being a spy, but while it's true he needed to cover his identity which was the driving force for a lot of his actions in 5-5, there's really nothing except for money that'd drive him to be a spy in the first place, considering he doesn't have the emotional capacity for loyalty for acting on some emotional reason. For that reason, it's reasonable to think he's driven by money too. Don't get me wrong, greed isn't a terrible motive, it just gets overdone when that's four of your killers.

    Countdown doesn't actually need too many changes, but I did want to lay the groundwork that explains most of the later changes.

    Monstrous Turnabout:

    I'm a shameless piece of trash because I unironically love this case. I'd go as far as to say the case would actually be worse if you don't show who the killer at the start because of the misdirection it uses on the player. Still, we'll be addressing a few significant changes.

    This case is really interesting because it's not only aware that you'll be thinking two steps ahead of the facts they're showing to you, it actively exploits it. They throw enough clues your way that pretty much everyone pieces together right away that "oh hey, the Alderman has white hair, a muscular build, was at the crime scene near the window and mysteriously disappeared. Obviously he's the Nine-Tails."

    However, Apollo and crew don't actually piece it together outright until much later. Pretty much every single online playthrough I've watched has people baffled they waited so long to reveal something so painfully obvious, so it helps make it seem like the game is being slow, when in reality they've already conditioned you into assuming that so you're misdirected with the twist of how L'belle pulled of his crime and in turn that the Mayor is actually the amazing Nine-tails.

    I've never really seen a game exploit the fact that you'll outspeed its own pacing and use that against you to hide a larger twist. I also don't really feel that you're losing much by revealing a case 2 villain at the start because there are generally only like 2 viable suspects at most anyway and AA games tend to shift to one person at a time, making it easy to narrow down who it is.

    That said, we'll add in a joke answer where you can say that the judge is the masked wrestler due to the white hair found in the mask.

    The biggest draw to this case is that the mystery isn't really "who killed the alderman" but "who is the amazing Nine-tails," a mystery the player doesn't even realize is going on beneath their noses. Revealing L'belle at the start is intended to raise more questions than answers, but it's held back by the case's pacing. This case needs to be able to establish a seemingly obvious solution and then shatter it as quickly as possible to get full use out of revealing L'belle at the start and get the player asking "how the hell did he do it then? Did that opening lie to us?"

    It does actually achieve that, but the two key assumptions being proven wrong (thinking it's L'belle in the Tenma Taro costume and thinking he's used the vent to toss the key away) aren't actually revealed to be wrong until the second trial and investigation respectively. By then you've gotten pretty far into the case. Where it gets interesting is that if you know that L'belle is the killer, everything about the case itself seems to contradict it.

    We'll adjust the pacing to end the first day trial on the reveal that it was Filch in the Tenma Taro costume, something that in the actual case isn't revealed until the second trial day. If you didn't know it was L'belle, then this isn't really a big deal since you'll just either suspect Filch or assume something else is going on but still probably think It's L'belle anyway. But by explicitly showing him at the start the big question of how the hell he was even at the crime scene, let alone the killer now is in mind. You would have to adjust a bit of the locked room mystery of course since L'belle's alibi was built on his claim that he was with Filch, but dismantling those two points ASAP are the most important goals for what makes this case so much fun.

    Next, we'll have two people helping Apollo at the bench—both Trucy and Athena stand by his side on the stand. I know it's usual tradition to only have one bench buddy, but you can have groups of people defending you in real court trials all the time. Even in this very game, turnabout for tomorrow has a decent portion with the final segment where both Athena and Apollo are there on the stand with Phoenix, so there's plenty of material where you can just have three people at a time.

    It's pretty criminal to not have Trucy in this case considering she personally knows the Tenma family and is apparently good friends with Jinxie. Even knowing that, she just disappears from the case despite her friend being left alone without her father in an extremely trying time. Trucy would do anything to cheer up someone close to her and support them in a situation like this. Just let her see this case through until the end, maybe a moment where she sticks up for Jinxie and Athena can see how it's affecting her mood in real time.

    You could get some material where Filch tries to steal from Trucy but ends up messing it up because she just makes the thing he tried to steal disappear and come out of Apollo's pocket or something. You've got all these crazy costumes around, so maybe Trucy geeks out over the material and what they're made of. Maybe Athena is surprised that Trucy isn't the least bit scared of all these terrifying costumes and yokai.

    Next, we'll change L'belle's motive from trying to steal the treasure to wanting to secure a promotion for himself and using the cynicism of the people to his advantage. By eliminating the Alderman and getting Tenma arrested, he would be able to run unopposed and also get the merger in so he can lead an even bigger town for himself. Have him planning to pass a bunch of dumb laws that are obviously just intended to get him to sell his beauty products. But the people in the town don't trust things to change for the better and their apathy is what allow for things to run unopposed. Even on some level everyone kind of suspects the alderman is the Nine-Tails because of the wrestler speaking out the merger.

    Finally, we want to add in a journalist who is cynical but does try their best to promote honest journalism. This'll make for a much easier way to deliver information about how the dark age of the law affects people because she can highlight all the issues people have, share the many corruption stories people bring up, and let the others know how people are reacting in real time. You can make it similar to Roger Retinz where she keeps a phone around and reads off different posts by people or something.

    She'll be a regular throughout the game. You can introduce her here by having her be the one who took the photo of the flying Tenma Taro and have her a little more involved in this case's second day trial to make up for the sped up pacing. Packing in a little more day 2 will still give us a little more time before getting to L'belle.

    Honestly, the Nine-Tails twist exploiting everyone playing off the early assumptions as just an obvious twist is already great and one of the things I love most about this case. It'd also give Mayor Tenma a little more to work with than that stupid "possession" gimmick since they already revealed Filch to be Tenma Taro. Instead, just give him more "dad ready to fight the world for his precious daughter" moments. Damian casually trying to break out of jail multiple times or calling himself rude for not having anything for you is plenty endearing as is.

    submitted by /u/BSWolf777
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    My complicated feelings on Ace Attorney

    Posted: 28 Sep 2020 04:09 AM PDT

    Ace Attorney was one of the first works of media I can say really became part of my life.

    I first learnt about the series via browsing StrategyWiki guides, and was fascinated by the sheer attention to detail it had compared to the "western" depiction of video games I was raised under, which was just entertainment. I played all three parts of the original trilogy via their WiiWare releases (remember those), and have since gone on to have played basically every game in the series since. AA was, I guess, a series which was critical to my development.

    Which is why, playing the tenth game in the franchise, that I'm now forever left with...mixed feelings, I guess you could say. Both towards the series, and my desire to even engage with it.

    To start with, I'm going to be making some....pretty harsh comments about AA as games, particularly the later ones. I make this clear in large part not just so to avoid hate, but also because I want to make it clear all of it is my own perspective, and not meant to be asserting what people on this subreddit think is wrong in some way. This is, at the end of the day, my argument and feelings. Nothing more, nothing less.

    So, with that preface out of the way, let's start talking about AA.

    The development of Ace Attorney as a series is pretty well-documented, but it's still worth considering the history of Japanese adventure games for the context it gives. VNs, or more precisely ADV (adventure) games have a long history. The Portopia Serial Murder Case was one of the earliest games on the Famicom, released in 1985, and was basically the first Japanese game ever to have a detailed story. The influence of it lead to the Famicom having a long legacy of simple menu based adventure games, basically none of which crossed over to the west. Over the course of the next decade, the genre developed alongside RPGs (fun fact, Portopia was made by Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii) into basically JP gaming's premiere form of complex interactive narrative, so thus there was a pretty heavy precedent when Shuu Takumi began working on the series for the ideas of interactive, text based adventures, even if they'd largely migrated to the PC by 2001.

    The original trilogy were, compared to some ADV's from before it (YU-NO was released in 1996, for example) are...rudimentary, which is understandable give that they were made for the GBA. Approximations for game script length tend to vary a lot, but the original trilogy were generally somewhere in the range of 100-200k or so, pretty small especially when you consider that fair amounts of the script would be basically filler dialogue the player is unlikely to even see. Unlike the sweeping scope ADV's were reaching, they were designed by Shuu Takumi to be "easy", he once said he intended for his mother to be able to easily understand them without difficulty.

    This simplicity shows looking at how Ace Attorney is laden out. Unlike most ADV's, AA's story and characters are not what you'd call very complicated. Most characters are given very set positions in the narrative without very detailed backstories or motivations. The story flow is very straightforward, each case is laden out with you learning the basic scenario, setting and supposed culprit, and being tasked with figuring the truth. Usually, the emotional revelations outside of the final cases tend to be quite straightforward and not especially shocking, some might surprise you a bit if you weren't paying the greatest amount of attention, but generally they tonally are pretty neutral as far as twists are concerned.

    What AA lacks in complex design though it has in personality. Takumi's characters are very animated, literally and figuratively. They are each built off a central gimmick of sorts, and developed out from there into what forms more of a person. While I couldn't write much in the way of analysis on many of them or how they thematically or emotionally fit into the narrative, they have really striking designs and personalities, with the case slowly revealing additional factoids about them that can change who they are in interesting ways. They're a fundamental element of how cases are designed as contained stories.

    The creativity and ingenuity on display in many AA cases is likewise something of a signature element of the franchise, and for good reason. Nearly every case in AA excels at tilting player expectation in some way, presenting scenarios which can radically alter as the dots connect together to form an entirely different and often times far more complicated conclusion, with the murder frequently changing in terms of true time, place and means. Interestingly, Takumi also avoided an objective "truth" finder, and quite often many deductions purposed are entirely shot down and disposed of, forcing the player to re-evaluate the case entirely from a new angle. Even if the truth isn't that shocking, the way it's reached can be genuinely surprising.

    This comes to the head in the final cases of the three games, each of which turn the formula the player has adjusted to and barrels the player headfirst into the situation meant to act counter to their understanding. So suddenly they're trying to save the rival they thought they were supposed to hate, find a miracle in an impossible solution, or be placed in an epic conclusion with virtually every notable character across the trilogy having input. These cases are fundamentally the emotional high points of Ace Attorney as a trilogy, each of them forcing the player to think and feel in a way that puts them in a very different spot to where they started.

    Had AA ended at just the original three games, it would've existed as something people remembered for their connection to it. Maybe it might not be "great" fiction, but it was really special, in its own way.

    Of course...instead they made Apollo Justice.

    Apollo Justice is an...interesting depiction of what happens when a creator hits a dead end. By the end of the third game, basically every real angle of Phoenix's character had been approached, and basically the entire story as it existed was resolved. With that fact in mind...what exactly was there? In order to address this, the original plan was for it to be essentially a pesudo-reboot without connections to the original trilogy, but in the end Phoenix was included, and the game has...issues.

    Look, I know the game has defenders, but I'm not going to mince words. Apollo Justice is a bad game, and one which fundamentally fails to actually work as a story.

    Apollo Justice is a game which fails in a lot of ways. It has a genuinely excellent and really interesting opening section that subverts players expectations in a way that opens up a ton of bold new mysteries...and then frustratingly squanders all of it, throwing Apollo into loosely connected plot threads that fail to connect together or create anything really emotionally compelling. Despite continually introducing new characters, none of them are able to build a believable relationship with each other, most glaring being main protagonist Apollo himself, who the game time and time again fails to do anything with as it seems uncertain on what to even do with what it has.

    More glaring, however, is that the game appears to have been half-written, with numerous plot threads being either included in the most slapdash methods possible, or flat out being ignored, leading to glaring plot holes such as the actual main events of the first case going completely unmentioned in the flashback to it near the end of the game, rendering the entire motivations of Zak utterly incoherent. By the end, any narrative built around Apollo is utterly hijacked as literally all of the plot is covered in a series of muddled flashbacks, and he's then left to watch as the game anticlimactically concludes on him accomplishing nothing.

    And, unfortunately, this speaks to a great issue lying in Ace Attorney's structure throughout the games, and one which is something which actively hinders anything the main series attempts to pull off.

    The original trilogy does not, as I've seen some people argue, really have ongoing "plot". There is setup for later cases present in all three, but for the most part, every case is a singular, self-contained entity with its own story, characters and emotional breakthroughs. This holds even towards the final cases, which are generally only hinted at, rather than being the result The structure is, quite fittingly, comparable to that of Sherlock Holmes, loosely connected mysteries which aren't needed to really be understood outside of the context of themselves.

    I think this kind of format is important to understand, because it is something games made after the original trilogy crucially do not follow. Apollo Justice includes information related to the final case in all three prior, much of it also related to the case at hand (Valant's role in Turnabout Serenade, for example). Dual Destinies and Spirit of Justice likewise attempt to make each case related in some way to the narrative progression, though the former less so. This is important because, and I'm going to say something controversial.

    You cannot tell a satisfying long-form emotional narrative based in AA's standard structure.

    The problems with such a format is that such a setup is counter-intuitive at best to telling a storyline that stretches out over the entire game. When every game is essentially broken into isolated narratives, each having to involve their own settings and characters whom likely won't be seen again, natural storytelling is essentially betrayed as the games cannot decide what they're supposed to even be. A4, 5, 6 and the first Investigations have a pretty consistent pattern in this regard, as they jump between focus after focus without an idea of what any of it is supposed to be.

    One of the best examples of what I'm talking about is Turnabout Revolution, Spirit of Justice's final case. The case stars Apollo heavily and focuses on a background relationship of his, concluding on a point of relevance to him. This would, logically, seem to assert Apollo as the protagonist of the game...only he's only the player character in the second case, and has not appeared at all for the past 8-10 hours of the game. This means the entire climax of the game is robbed of basically any role as the conclusion to an emotional journey in the slightest, rather it amounts to just watching essentially the story run on autoplay as you're wondering how exactly you got here. Apollo barely even speaks to Rayfa, one of the main characters, yet somehow the story is supposed to still be about him come its closing moments.

    And Spirit of Justice is worth highlighting because it's entire structure is like this. The game makes an enormous deal about bring back Maya, only for her to be almost completely absent from the story after the one case where she plays the role of defendant. An entire case is oddly sandwiched in-between plot critical events which sees Athena and Blackquill working to solve a murder at a rakugo house, an entire scenario which has literally nothing to do with the rest of the story (Athena is otherwise barely in the game) and was apparently only included so the player could have a "breather" (as if the rest half of Turnabout Revolution didn't already do that?). The game repeatedly tries to allege an important relationship between Apollo and Nahyuta, only the two have maybe two hours of actual interaction before the climax. The list goes on.

    I use Spirit of Justice, but really nearly every game struggles from this kind of narrative oddities from the structural tools it employs. There are dozens of examples, from Iris giving her backstory in DGS 1 in her just her third real scene, to the "dark age of the law" being introduced in Dual Destinies, treated as a major factor of the story, yet accomplishing nothing as the actual narrative of the game is something only tangentially related to it. All of them have these weirdly inconsistent "half-narratives" which fail to create a compelling whole, and often squander what they have in the process. Even if the individual scenarios are strong, and they still very much can and often are, if the game they are part of is seriously claiming to be a coherent story, and actively failing at accomplishing that, then essentially that leads to any grand narrative being a waste of time.

    And this leads to AA having this continual problem of not being able to leave a lasting emotional impact with me in spite of all it tries to pull off. No matter how many culprits are exposed, how many shocking revelations are given and how many personal "victories" are made, I'm always left...weirdly unsatisfied with the conclusion. Rarely does the victory feel earned, because the experience is virtually always the same. Dual Destines runs off a twist of a main character who you've known nearly the entire game being the villain, but there's no weight to that revelation, because the character is just treated afterwards as another culprit, the emotional shock is basically null and void.

    I could go on about a bunch of other things. I could point out how the continual use of Phoenix does nothing but handicap the game with a character who the story can do nothing with. I could talk how utterly aimless and safe many twists are. The use of characters from the original trilogy as a cheap means to garner fan attention. I could talk about the games visibly low budget, how useless the "turn the case around" moments are, and a host of other things, but that's relative complaints, and I don't think they really add to how I feel.

    I think, somewhere along the line, something clicked with me about why I consume fiction. I didn't care about lore, I didn't care about the truth, I didn't didn't care about some kind of dynamic confrontation with the villain. I just cared about...the journey, in a way, the emotional narrative which I was given, and how that story left an impact in me.

    Ace Attorney, I found, just lacked any of that for me. It became to my eyes as just disposable, the worst kind of fate I see in any kind of media.

    Which is why it surprised me quite a bit when, this year, I finally played and finished Investigations 2.

    Investigations 2 is widely considered the best game in the franchise by many fans, and that's an opinion I would agree with, which is quite ironic given the first game is more or less the most forgettable game in the entire series, an almost entirely plotless adventure where Edgeworth stumbles through scenario after scenario with paper-thin characters before concluding on an overlong yet strangely uninteresting final confrontation.

    The follow-up, however, is notable for how it does practically everything right. From the start, the advantage of losing the investigation-trial divide allows the game to consistently develop its narrative in a more focused, direct manner, being able to conduct both revelations and emotional interactions easily and without formality. Its main cast in all introduced within the first three hours and remain a consistent presence from there on out, no one just abruptly vanishes for a case or two. Nearly every character is given a full narrative of some kind, even ones who would in other games just have had roles amounting to "gives information". The game even successfully manages to earn a lot of emotional moments in places, with the beautifully bittersweet conclusion of Case 3 having me in tears.

    Most pivotally, the final case completely throws away every expectation the player may've had regarding Ace Attorney and abandons the format of the normal series entirely, so much so that the murder itself is barely even touched upon. Rather, the game becomes an increasingly shocking series of revelations and encounters piling up on themselves, each building off clues and themes the game had spent time legitimately discussing. Rather than feeling disposable, the conclusion of Investigations 2 is an emotional journey felt both by the player and Edgeworth, and it leaves a deep impact as a result.

    Would I call I Investigations 2 some kind of masterpiece? Not really, I can safely name plenty of ADV's which are vastly more emotionally riveting, shocking and powerful, but what I can say is that, for just that, it was the one time I can safely say I've been able to leave Ace Attorney with my head high, not a pertinent shrug and an "eh, that was all right I guess".

    And it's because of all of that that...I don't really think I have any interest in an AA7 or whatever.

    Honestly, while Ace Attorney was a huge part of my formative years, the more I look at it, the more I question if I really can love it all that much, honestly. I'm left wondering what my feelings even are.

    If the world is given AA7, what'd that amount to? Another medium length ADV with a poorly conceived narrative beats, which leaves me feelings like I earned nothing? A story which changes nothing about me, and is just meant to be played, enjoyed, and forgotten about?

    I can't really accept playing something I'd consider disposable, honestly. Not just because I find it unappealing...but because I don't want to see Ace Attorney as such a thing.

    Call it emotional attachment, but a part of me still really, genuinely wishes to consider the franchise something that stays in my heart. Ace Attorney was my first exposure to a lot of things, and it carries that special feeling to me. That feeling...still exists, even now, and I don't want to throw it away.

    Reconciling those feelings with disillusionment is, I think, a hard prospect to make, but it's a worthwhile one, I'll always be grateful to this series, even if I personally feel it doesn't really bring me joy in remembrance.

    Consider a thank you letter, perhaps.

    submitted by /u/RainSpectreX
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    How would you guys feel about a reboot of sorts?

    Posted: 28 Sep 2020 09:22 AM PDT

    TL:DR The series has become a bit too convoluted, is stuck with the same formula, and a reboot could fix these issues by taking the series back to its roots.

    I personally think that AA should be rebooted. The for this is because the series seems to be stuck in a specific formula and can't really break from it at this point. I know that the spin-offs changed things up, but the main series has done very little to shake things up. Though that isn't to say I don't like the AA formula, I like all the games in the series, but this leads me to my next point.

    I think the writers really messed up when it comes to Apollo Justice. While I really loved AJ:AA, I would be lying if I said I was satisfied with how the story concluded. There were many threads that were left open and I felt like I didn't get to spend enough time with Apollo and Trucy to fully grow attached to them. This is where I hoped DD would help. I wanted DD to continue the threads that AJ laid out and further grow Apollo and Trucy as characters, but I was very disappointed with what I got instead. What I got was a game that had zero interest in doing anything AJ set up, but instead wanted to introduce a new protagonist, while reintroducing Phoenix as a central protagonist. This creates a ton of issues, by having three playable characters, you don't get a whole lot of time with any of them. Now none of the characters are given a satisfying conclusion because we aren't given enough time to care. They try so hard to shoehorn in all these characters, but all that ends up accomplishing is making the stories feel less focused and far more disjointed. I honestly feel that Phoenix should've never been brought back as a playable character and I think that they should've waited to introduce Athena. Now we are able to put all of our focus on Apollo and Trucy, which I think would work wonders on making Apollo more likable and Trucy more memorable.

    Now for my final point; wouldn't it be exciting to see AA with a brand new look and feel. Again, I love this series, despite all of my issues with it, but I would love to see how the series could be reinvented. They've pigeonholed themselves to a formula created by the limitation of the GBA, and those limitations carry a ton of charm, but now I think it's a good time to see what an AA game would be like if it was made for modern hardware. Imagine what it could look, sound, and feel like. I'm not saying to completely change everything that made the original trilogy so amazing, I'm saying we should see what stories they could tell if they restarted and didn't have to follow the structure the previous games. It doesn't have to follow the exact same characters and attempt to make a story that doesn't contradict anything already established. I'm saying to take the series back to it's roots where it was just a game about a lawyer trying to solve a murder and not the convoluted mess it has become.

    I truly love this series and all I really want is to see it evolve. The series has tons of potential and maybe a reboot could help realize that potential, but what do you guys think? I know this is probably a controversial take, so please be civil and now these are just my opinions. Also what would guys like to see in a reboot and what would you want it to be like?

    submitted by /u/benjiboitothemax
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    I've been doing some covers on Ace Attorney tracks for about a year and wanted to show you guys to get some feedback.

    Posted: 28 Sep 2020 05:24 AM PDT
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