Ace Attorney Ace Attorney Really, Really Needs To Stop Trying To "Address" The Law |
- Ace Attorney Really, Really Needs To Stop Trying To "Address" The Law
- After days of finding on how to play ac attorney. Jaiden Animations Striked me with the idea of trying to play on nintendo ds. Im Playing Ace Attorney :D
- Netflix adaptation
- Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Revisit and Critique
- Female investigation assistants ranked by usefulness
- Hawthorne family
| Ace Attorney Really, Really Needs To Stop Trying To "Address" The Law Posted: 15 Nov 2020 01:21 AM PST "The Dark Age of the Law" is probably the most baffling plot thread in all of Ace Attorney. Despite taking up much of AA5's runtime, it is a bizarre non-story that does almost nothing to actually tie into what is going on, has vague origins which clash with the nature of AA's setting, and what it even is can be difficult to decipher. Of course, it's not the first nor last time the series tried doing this. All three games which comprise the "Apollo Trilogy" do that. The Jurist System, the Dark Age of the Law, the DC Act, all these things are built on positioning the heroes as having to reform the legal world. Bring it into the future! These are games about law, after all! Of course, it doesn't work. Why are comprised of reasons I'll go into in a bit, but really, they all come down to a very fundamental problem. Ace Attorney is not actually about law. It is probably the biggest misconception in the entire fanbase that AA were supposed to somehow be directly about the law. This is not true. Shu Takumi, from the literal start, has said on many, many occasions he never purposely set out to make the series as some kind of critique of the court system of any kind. Quote his own blog post: ""A story about a detective seeing through lies" wouldn't be any different from the other games out there. So that's why he decided to have someone whose job is seeing through lies as the protagonist." This remarkedly mundane response demonstrates why Takumi went with the angle of a mystery game built around the courtroom, and it's important to consider when analysing the original trilogy because the games aren't meant to be some discussion about Japan's biased legal system or anything, but merely a series of serialized mystery stories about those involved in the law. What those mystery stories are specifically about are a couple of things, but namely the ideas of truth and justice as concepts people strive for. As the series developed, these ideas of Takumi's grew more nuanced, leading to some of the best writing in the series. Law however, they are not. Law in the context of what society works under and perception of it is not what the games are about, because those sorts of things are things a series like Ace Attorney is simply not equipped to handle or discuss. Let's look over each attempt in the Apollo Trilogy to look at how they try their hand at the law, shall we? First, the Jurist System. It's important to remember that the Jurists were not something Takumi decided upon. It was a pretty big deal in Japan of the time that they were implementing a jury after decades of trial by judge, and if you look through JP media of the time you can find plenty of examples of works addressing the same societal change. It was done, essentially, as an attempt to tie into current events. This probably explains why, in the game itself, the Jurist system is almost comically slapdash. Phoenix talks about a brand new system to revolutionize the courts, there's some fluff text about the current trial being a test run, then suddenly, right when Kristoph thinks he's won, the jury is brought in as a sudden deus ex machina that enables him to be defeated without sufficient evidence. There's a subsequent big speech from The Judge of all characters meant to sound deep, but the problem is that it's received so little thematic weight (the only tease to it being an aside at the end of Turnabout Serenade of much easier it be to convict Daryan if we could depend on the people) that the speech comes out of nowhere. By the end, you're left no quite sure how to think. And, of course, after AA4 the whole thing is never spoken about again. While I will gladly make fun of the Dual Destinies, I can't really fault the devs here either, because what option did they even have? Keep the Jurist System, and suddenly a huge part of the series format falls apart. Suddenly, cases are able to end without full evidence being provided or specific details being confirmed, which is a huge stranglehold on the story. DGS got around this by plot circumstances making actually convincing the jury a struggle (and even then I think many find them one of the least interesting parts of the game), but in the main series, there's simply no reason why the jury wouldn't just solve every problem the heroes are faced with. It breaks the series that much. Next, of course, is the Dark Age of the Law. Let's ignore the massive, massive continuity issues created by the Dark Age. How everyone treats Phoenix's disbarment and Simon's incarceration as some kind of huge deal despite there having already been events with far, far more prominent and high-profile people and cases which should've had a logically more devastating effect on the legal system both internally and public perception. Let's also ignore for a second that the game genuinely can't seem to decide if it's specifically internal corruption which is the problem or the public faith in the law. Either way, the problem with the "Dark Age" is that it's nothing. The only, and I do mean only thing which is actually influenced by the "Dark Age" is the setting of Turnabout Academy, which's only idea is to have it's horribly one-note villain say "Ends Justifies the Means" no less than 27 times, with zero nuance to the subject whatsoever. Because, evidently, Phoenix never forged evidence to defeat Kristoph, and Edgeworth didn't twice risk an international incident in the name of the truth. Nowhere in the game does anyone, besides Aura (who is misanthropic in general), express distrust in the legal system, no one in the law does anything illegal (besides someone pretending to be a detective), there's no points on the effect it has on the legal system, it's just a black void of plotlessness. The problem being there's just nowhere to go with it. The very, very serious idea of a legal system so rocked with public mistrust to where characters call it a "dark age" is almost too large scale an issue for a series like Ace Attorney to even touch, and instead it has to resort to the bizarre, farcical idea of a single case tangentially related to what caused the Dark Age being resolved somehow being able to "end" the dark age as a whole. It's almost bafflingly how little the story comes together on that front. And, last, we have the DC Act, and all of Khura'in, in a way. Khura'in is an idea with many, many problems, but in the basics, there are actually a few things worth observing. A foreign country run by a tyrannical government which rules through propaganda and a corrupt secret police, where trials are literally rigged in the favour of the prosecution in the name of continuing the oppression of the people. Combine with a secret organization of rebels and, while it has legitimately very little place in Ace Attorney, it could work as its own thing. Unfortunately, then you add in the DC Act, and all that flies out the window. Suddenly the setting of Khura'in is revealed as a ridiculous nonsense land where everything has to be somehow about the courts. The culture, history, important characters, all defined near exclusively by their relation to legal trials, as if that's literally the center of the universe. The DC Act likewise pushes this into absurdity, the story suddenly all becomes about this single, comically corrupt law which makes the entire conflict the story is supposedly about into a black-white farce. By the time you're done fighting the worst villain in the franchises history, there's very little meaning to any of it beyond a way to identify that Ga'ran is evil lady and you have to beat her. So that's that. The three attempts from the series to address law from the perspective some kind of systemic "issue" which needs to be changed. Not a conflict of characters specific views on justice or anything, but an attempt at some kind of "Let's change the world" message, where the characters are the agents who drive the change. You may have noticed none of these...work? Like, at all. Obviously, you can maybe argue these were all just "poor execution", but, batting three for three, I think there's a pretty solid case to be made it just flat out doesn't, and I can say why for a very simple reason. It's inherently a contradiction on the series. Ace Attorney is a series which is about truth, justice, and the meaning behind the most important human connections in our lives. These are the ideas which the series has been reflecting on since Day 1, essentially, and the thing that is vital in that is how...oddly personal they always made their climaxes. Regardless of what happened, it felt like the conclusions of the story were always rooted specifically in what the main characters were feeling, and that's what helped make them powerful. Making them so intrinsically about systems meanwhile I think takes away nearly all the real emotional investment in the proceedings in favour of a rote "beat the bad guy" setting. They also face an inevitable contradiction, because they are based around trying to "uprote" the status quo, but the status quo in question is the series, in a way. It's the unfair justice and the logic debates and the mind battles that make AA's story work, and removing that basically leaves you with no series. It's basically setting yourself up to fail. So yeah, I really don't think these kinds of attempts to be "meaningful" through talking about law reform are a very good idea, or a very healthy one. Obviously, "grand" stories are fine, and lead to fantastic things like Bridge to Turnabout, but these attempts to treat the courtroom battles as literally world-changing are...not good to be blunt, and just kinda run the series into the ground in attempts to one up themselves. Feel free to give any alternate takes here. As always, curious what people think. [link] [comments] | ||
| Posted: 15 Nov 2020 02:27 AM PST
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| Posted: 15 Nov 2020 01:49 AM PST
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| Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Revisit and Critique Posted: 15 Nov 2020 12:34 AM PST Hey, everyone - another long discussion post coming down the line. I'm sure plenty of you have become aware that I'm definitely not as big a fan of Ace Attorney Investigations 2 as most of the people in this community who have played it. It's my least-favourite Ace Attorney game, behind even the first Investigations, and I've criticized it plenty of times here, but didn't ever feel like I could really dive into a full, long-form post on the matter until I went through it again. Problem was, it took me years to summon the motivation to actually finish the game for the first time, because the biggest of the problems that I have with it were such a huge drag on the experience that for quite a long while, I couldn't tolerate playing it for more than half an hour at a time, and even those sessions were usually months apart. I knew there was no way I could possibly play it again for myself. Anyway - thanks to this excellent Let's Play of the game by YouTube user SkiniMini, I went back through the whole game recently and got a much better feel for it. (You might be interested to know this fun fact as well - SkiniMini's actual name is Dani Chambers, and she's a professional voice actress. That'd be cool on its own, because it means that she provides some exceptional readings for quite a number of the game's characters, but she was cast in the English dub for a certain anime not too long ago. That'd be the Ace Attorney anime, in which she voiced Dahlia Hawthorne and Sister Iris.) So, I'm comfortable with putting my thoughts on this much-loved game down for real now, though I should open with the warning that I still don't particularly like the game, and I will be criticizing it a lot in both this post and another that I'm working on. So, let's get going. STORY I'll begin by temping what will be a very critical post by saying that this game's story is excellent, on average. Weak points certainly exist, but there's more than enough good to push past them. This is far from being the only Ace Attorney game to try and majorly tie its cases and characters together into one huge storyline, but no other game thus far has done it better. We have five cases that all tie into one another in some way or another, and we get to learn details about the trial that led to the DL-6 Incident while going through them. Unfortunately, I think this excellent story's presentation is terrible, and that was largely what killed my interest in playing the game the first time around. So, to get into why: THE PACING This is, without a doubt, the biggest problem I have with Investigations 2. This game is astoundingly slow. I'm genuinely impressed by much it consistently manages to drag the progression of the story out, with character after character just endlessly rambling in circles and wasting time like it's what they were born to do. It isn't just the characters talking too damn much, though. I already dislike the gameplay style of the Investigations games compared to the main series, and this game highlights the reasons for that more strongly than its predecessor did. I know that it's common for people not to like the investigation segments in the main series. There are plenty of cases there that I dislike for having long, boring investigations, or annoyingly obscure progress requirements. I don't consider the way the spinoff subseries handles the split between courtroom-styled gameplay and investigation to be an improvement, though. While it's certainly nice to explore individual scenes in such great detail compared to the main series, you also get stuck staring at the same backdrops and settings for hours and hours on end despite shifting back and forth between Investigation and Rebuttal segments over and over throughout. Then, there's the game's addiction to delivering story through long-winded exposition. I speak with complete honesty when I say that I'm amazed by how often this game falls back on characters just vomiting information at you for anywhere up to twenty minutes at a time, given how long the rest of the game drags on for. Over and over again, the story just comes to a full stop because your last hour of crime scene investigation hasn't actually progressed the story in any way, just adding a pile of evidence to your Organizer instead, and so a character rolls in to ramble story exposition at you for anywhere from five to thirty minutes and get things moving again. Exposition is important, and every Ace Attorney game needs to use it sometimes. I'm confident in saying, however, that no other game in this series has such a consistent habit of falling back on it simply because its actual gameplay failed to deliver that information in reasonable time. This pacing issue also pairs off in most unfortunate fashion with another problem, that being... SO, SO MANY CHARACTERS This game's cast is gigantic, and while that's common for Ace Attorney, I have to call into question the reasoning for quite a few of this game's character appearances in particular to exist. Now, something it's important to keep in mind - this game came out in 2011, and was in part intended as a 10th anniversary celebration for the series. Consequently, a whole damn lot of characters from past games (especially the very first one) make appearances. Now, what's the problem? Well, most of these characters get substantial screentime, despite the game also introducing more than enough characters to carry its entire story without the added help. This results in cast bloat to an extreme rarely seen even in this series, with scenes constantly stuck with either giving every one of the many characters present a voice in the long-winded dialogue breaks, or characters just standing around in silence for up to an hour at a time, simply because they are eventually going to end up being important to the conversation again in an hour or so, meaning they can't just leave. So, short form, this game has too fucking many characters. Case 1 gives us a very obvious Expy of longtime recurring character Lotta Hart, but then the game also adds Lotta herself in Case 4, and she sticks around for the remainder of the story. We get repeated appearances by Regina Berry, of all people. Frank Sahwit is a prominent witness in Case 2. Will Powers and Penny Nichols show up in supporting roles in the final case. Ema shows up and still contributes almost nothing beyond occasional forensics minigames - did the writers just have some sort of quota for original-trilogy characters required to appear, particularly those from AA1? Anyway - having so damn many characters around at practically all times, between the returning characters from past games and the already-large new cast specific to Investigations, the game's script ends up dragged out even more severely by its need to give everyone a voice. And speaking of the script... SCRIPT AND LOCALIZATION PROBLEMS This game's script is terminally boring. The exhaustive quantity of dialogue isn't just slow - it's dull. Plenty of important characters have distinct "voices", but even they tend to drop those voices entirely at times simply because they have way too many lines, and the result is crowded scenes in which nearly everyone sounds basically the same. This was helped considerably by the Let's Play I used to revisit the game, because it at least meant that most characters more literally sounded distinct, but their actual text was unfortunately still prone to becoming a long-winded, homogenous mess the longer scenes went on for. Now, when I wrote up a huge text post for Dai Gyakuten Saiban a while ago, I had to repeatedly mention that I couldn't really hope to tell how much of this problem was actually an inherent issue in the game's script, and how much was simply a fault of the fan translation. The same applies here - I greatly respect the work that the fan translation team did to make this game playable in English. It was an incredible undertaking on their part. I can't, however, pretend that I consider their work to be remotely up-to-par with the official localizations. There are a few key problems:
GAMEPLAY I already talked about how the Investigations subseries reshuffles courtroom-styled gameplay and investigation phases in a way that I don't think works very well. The main series clearly splits them apart in full, letting you alternate between them, and I think that works a lot better, even if there are several cases throughout the series with bad investigation phases. I'm gonna complain about Logic Chess here, instead. I think it's terrible. Nearly every Logic Chess segment in the game consists of beating around the bush while a character rambles about not wanting to tell you things, waiting for them to inevitably say something important anyway, and then doubling back to an earlier dialogue option to go "but wait you said this" so you can watch them panic and then ramble a bunch of exposition. The mechanic is boring, tedious, and almost never does anything other than dress up the game's familiar long-winded exposition in a stressful bow. It's stressful, of course, because there's a completely pointless time limit. The Investigations games are already the most forgiving of mistakes of any game in the series. It's incredibly rare for any mistake to knock off more than 10% of your full health bar, when the average in the main series is double that. Additionally, these two games almost constantly include bits of fluff dialogue right before you're prompted to answer something (and especially if you do mess up and have to try again), outlining exactly what you have to do. People complain about Dual Destinies making answers too obvious by having assistant characters spell out the exact answer for you, but it started here. Now, why does this make Logic Chess worse? Because Logic Chess has a completely pointless time limit. Every segment requires you to pick from multiple-choice answer prompts while a clock ticks down, and any mistake will instantly axe a generous chunk of that time limit before kicking you back a prompt or two. This results in a massive amount of wasted time any time you make any small mistake, but if you run out of time entirely, the utter pointlessness of the time limit is outlined for you by the game only "punishing" your screwup by knocking off 10% of your health anyway. The real punishment, of course, is the fact that running out of time boots you even further back in the dialogue, forcing you to reread the exact same pages' worth of text again and again. Now, sure - plenty of Logic Chess segments are easy, because again, Edgeworth tends to explain exactly what you need to do right at the start, but the late-game makes the correct answers much less simple to guess, especially in Blaise Debeste's segment, which is the most annoyingly padded cat-and-mouse session in the entire game. And to tie in with the "repeated phrases" problem, I think Edgeworth has a grand total of two lines used any time you make a mistake in Logic Chess, so chances are pretty good that you'll be seeing them a ridiculous number of times. DEFENCE PROSECUTOR I think the writers ran into a problem when they decided to make Edgeworth the main character of this subseries. Guy's a prosecutor, but the typical structure of an Ace Attorney game all but necessitates an uphill battle to prove someone's innocence in a crime, and so Edgeworth spends a very generous chunk of every single case in the subseries defending people in arguments against someone who wants to override his investigative authority. You defend Gumshoe and then Maggey in I-1. Edgeworth himself and then Rhoda in I-2. Meekins and Lauren in I-3. Gumshoe for basically all of I-4 (which is the most ridiculous example, because Edgeworth was still in his dishonest-bastard phase during that case, and yet he still devotes hours of time to fiercely defending this random idiot detective he just met five minutes ago). Kay and Larry in I-5. At least the sequel takes some steps to justify this with the PIC's intervention forcing Edgeworth to take on an alternate role as a defence attorney's assistant, but that really just highlights how much of a problem this obviously was for the team. EDGEWORTH WORSHIP This is the thing I've complained the most about in this subseries. For nearly the entirety of both Investigations games, Edgeworth is treated like a perfect, golden god of logic who is never by any fault of his own wrong about anything. Characters constantly punctuate his dialogue with vapid praises for him, and his character flaws from the original trilogy are ignored almost completely. This entire subseries feels like it was written by an Edgeworth fanboy and for Edgeworth fanboys. He's a perfect, shining hero who never loses his composure for more than three seconds at a time, and never has to exhibit any emotion beyond cool-headed smugness or mild irritation. This bleeds over into an added effect of damaging other characters. An utterly ridiculous number of characters exist solely to praise Edgeworth constantly, or end up in that position by the endgame. Ray has a great character arc, but it ends in Case 3, and for the remainder of the story, he's just there to stall a background conflict and later join Edgeworth's cheerleading squad for the endgame. Kay's character arc ended in the previous game, and so she's effectively irrelevant for nearly this entire story, and present solely to provide the gameplay functions of Little Thief. She only gets to be relevant at all in Case 4, when she's hit over the head and turned into a different character entirely for most of that case. Otherwise, she's just a Little Thief dispensary and another Edgeworth cheerleader. As mentioned earlier, Ema appears in the game almost exclusively to provide forensics activities. Her only other role is to replace Kay as the peppy sidekick girl for a good chunk of Case 4, because the game will apparently melt down if there isn't a teenage girl in that role for more than ten minutes. During the final confrontation with the Mastermind, the earlier portion has no fewer than seven characters accompanying Edgeworth and basically speaking up only to say "you can do it, Mr. Edgeworth!", and yet the scene still feels the need to add more later on. I'll get into this more in my next AAI2 post, which will be a cast review. DEBESTE OF THE WORST I've been thinking a lot about Sebastian and Blaise since finishing my rewatch. This is another thing I'll be spending way more time on in my cast review, but I'll say a bit here, too. I've called Blaise a terrible character more than once before, and I stand by that claim. He is, in my consistent opinion, a jumbled amalgamation of random traits from Manfred von Karma and Damon Gant, but less interesting and more annoying than either, completely flat, lacking anything resembling a motivation for being such a monstrous pile of shit, and his only remotely interesting character trait is his abusive relationship with his son. And speaking of, there's Sebastian. I will admit that I think his character arc in Case 5 (and the very end of Case 4 just before that) is quite good. So, what's my problem with him? He's pointless. He's not the game's real rival. That's Courtney, who's standing right next to him for most of his screentime. Sebastian is, to begin with, present for way too much of the game considering that his main purpose for most of it is just to be a comically inept obstacle for Edgeworth to easily bypass. Beyond that, though, he just doesn't do anything for nearly three whole cases. He's just dialogue padding, and a huge amount of it, because Courtney provides the actual "rival" role from behind him, and his character arc doesn't even begin until well into Case 4, when his bastard father has stepped into the story. Sebastian serves no real purpose for the majority of his screentime, and yet he's present as a recurring, annoying obstruction for nearly the entirety of Cases 2 and 3, and it takes a very good chunk of Case 4 for the game to even allow him to begin developing. Now, that's a problem that basically every Ace Attorney game released after AA4 has had, but it definitely hits Sebastian in particular pretty hard. It doesn't help, of course, that the most impactful part of Sebastian's arc is also the game's biggest display of Edgeworth fanboyism, when Edgey suddenly transforms into a therapist capable of coaching Sebastian out of years' worth of emotional abuse like it's nothing. ... And I think that'll cover my list of major points to say on this game that aren't too specifically tied to individual characters. All of that will come in a week or so, when I have the time to write my full cast review. I might end up thinking of things I wanted to mention after posting this, so I'll be happy to respond to any questions or remarks anyone reading this has. [link] [comments] | ||
| Female investigation assistants ranked by usefulness Posted: 15 Nov 2020 02:47 AM PST Note: providing witness testimony doesn't count. 7: Athena. Has a knack for reading (hearing?) people and solving puzzles. Gets Fulbright's cooperation every time. (The Mood Matrix doesn't count because she only uses it in court - otherwise, her ranking would be much higher.) 6: Trucy. Motivates and encourages the nervous newbie Apollo. Klavier adores her, which gets them into the crime scene in 4-2. The first to spot Lamiroir hiding in the guitar case, which may have saved her life. 5: Rayfa. Reads Khura'inese and translates documents. Provides valuable exposition about the setting. Commands attention and respect by virtue of her station, which Phoenix can take advantage of. 4: Pearl. Able to channel spirits, being a major point in 2-4. Charges the Magatama twice and teaches Phoenix how to use it. Provides the forensicking in 5-DLC. 3: Maya. Directly obtains crucial evidence a few times, often accidentally. Also able to channel spirits, allowing Mia and Dhurke to be partners through her. Gives Phoenix the Magatama. 2: Ema. Grants meaning to many of the most important pieces of evidence in RftA through her testing. Continues to play the Forensics ex Machina in practically all her other appearances. 1: Kay. Half the cases in AAI and AAI2 would be unsolvable without Little Thief. In fact, without her, most of the events of those games wouldn't have happened at all because Edgeworth would still be tied up in a room in Gatewater Land. I have not played DGS, but I would be interested to know how you would place the assistant/s in as spoiler free a manner as possible. [link] [comments] | ||
| Posted: 15 Nov 2020 02:27 AM PST I don't remember really well about 3-5, so could someone explain what Dahlia, a Fey clan member, has to do with the Hawthornes? Does that also mean that Pearl and Iris are Hawthornes? What about Valerie, is she a Fey clan member too? [link] [comments] |
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