16bit Chronicles: Capcom A to Z- Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney

Title: Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney (NA)

Platform: Nintendo DS

Release Date: April 12, 2007

It's been a minute since we updated this project due to the length of this game, but I am finally read to talk about Apollo Justice. This was a really good entrant in the Phoenix Wright series! I was pretty apprehensive due to the new protagonist and was afraid the game was going to lose some of its charm but...yeah its really just another Phoenix Wright game through and through. The protagonist even looks like Phoenix.

Background

As the fourth main title in the Ace Attorney series, Apollo Justice takes place 7 years after the initial trilogy of games, and there have been some changes in the lives of our characters. You start playing, not as Phoenix Wright, but instead as a plucky young defense attorney named Apollo Justice. He is the protégé of a friend of Phoenix's, Kristoph Gavin, and his first case is actually defending Phoenix Wright on the count of murder. Apollo has all the typical quirks you would expect from a protagonist in this series: he is an underdog do-gooder who gets by with some shrill yelling and an unerring sense of justice (his catch phrase even being "It's Time for Justice!").

Phoenix is one of the few returning characters (the Judge is the only other prominent one), and he has fallen on some hard times. He has been disbarred due to falsifying evidence, and is now a piano player at a local borscht restaurant who moonlights as a poker card shark. He also is much more calm, collected, and confident in this entry; he seems to always be one step ahead of Phoenix and serves as a kind but aloof mentor figure.

Phoenix has also adopted a teenage daughter named Trucy, who is a magician who helps bring in money with her "Wright Anything" talent agency and magic shows. Trucy serves as your "Maya" (basically your sidekick) for this game.

With all of these changes, the player is thrown into the deep end. The lack of familiar faces can be a little disconcerting at first, as Phoenix, who drifts in and out of the story, is your only real familiar face. In fact, the overall mystery for this game is figuring out how Phoenix got into the state that he is in, and the mystery behind Trucy and her parents.

Apparently the creator of the series, Shu Takumi, took a backseat during this game, writing the scenario but serving more as an advisor/supervisor for the project. He did this because he felt that he told the story he wanted to tell in the original trilogy, and wanted to see what an almost new story would be like in different hands.

Gameplay

The game, per the series, is a visual novel that plays out in two separate gameplay settings. There are the courtroom scenes, which play out very similarly to the original trilogy in that you are listening to witness testimony, pressing them for information, and then presenting evidence to poke holes in their testimony. If you remember, the whole series takes place in a warped version of the Japanese legal system, where you are guilty until proven innocent, and you are given only three days at most to prove this point. At any time, if you lose the confidence of the Judge, he can declare your defendant as guilty. Thus, much of the gameplay is continually introducing doubt to the testimony of witnesses until you can definitely prove your defendant had nothing to do with the crime.

The added wrinkle that they added to this game was the use of "tells" in that your witnesses will give away when they are lying by a certain behavior. For example, in the first full case, one of the witnesses is a self-proclaimed scholar (and panty-thief because of course), who will turn the pages in his book when he is unsure of his testimony. You have to pinpoint this behavior with your "Gramarye," a mystical ability which lets you spot such tells, and then call the witness at the appropriate time. Per usual, in these games, these ideas are usually gated to only be used at certain times, and even if you can tell when a person is lying, you have to wait until the prompted moment to use the ability.

The other half of the gameplay are the "investigation" moments, in which you go to the crime scene and related areas and look for clues, question witnesses/bystanders, and other such investigatory activities. If you have played the other Ace Attorney games, these are usually known as the parts of the game that drag, as really you are just moving from place to place, clicking on everything on the screen, asking everyone everything you can think of, and really just hoping that you are hitting flags that push the game forward. Apollo Justice sadly, does not improve this much; you might work your way through an entire area, but not realize that the one clue you picked up opened up a new question for a witness in another area. It's a drag. They added a new "foot print" and "fingerprint" analysis tools that utilize the touch screen of the DS, and these are also really finnicky. For example, in one of the missions you have to get a toe print off a pair of sandals, but the game won't let you inspect and take the prints until you look at the sandals from the exact right angle that the game wants you to look at them. I played this on an emulator which did not have the best sensitivity and controls, and this was maddening to get right. Apparently in the actual DS copy, it is still annoying as there are a ton of message boards asking for help on how to use fingerprinting/footprinting correctly. So, bottom line, the investigations are a drag; for a game that sings in the courtroom scenes, they really want to keep you from playing them.

The characters and writing are still top-knotch, but I can honestly say that if they cut out like 1/3 of the dialogue, this game would be a lot more palatable. I understand that this is a visual novel, but the amount of text that doesn't drive the plot forward or provide meaningful character development is staggering. The game is really in love with its translation, and they want to you read every joke and giggle every time Apollo rubs the back of his neck in chagrin. This game is only four cases long, but they really drag those four cases out.

Still, the mysteries are good, if a little overly complex. There are double crosses, secret identities, withheld information, and the rest of the courtroom and mystery cliches. The last case, in particular, is really neat, as they change to an "experimental" legal system of using a jury instead of just the judge for the case. It does a great job, as well, of tying in the murder of the individual case to the overarching mystery. It is probably the best final case since the first game with the Mannfred Von Karma/Miles Edgeworth murder mystery.