The mainstream has plenty of fun stuff to play with, and Ace Attorney caters to a specific audience, and that's cool. They are, in short, exactly the sort of game I want to play, though I recognize and acknowledge that by very definition this means that they're not necessarily something with particularly "mainstream" appeal.īut I'm fine with that. My own curiosity about what "a lawyer game" could possibly look like was the reason I bought a DS in the first place, in fact.Īlthough technologically quite primitive - they were originally Game Boy Advance games, after all - the Ace Attorney games have always felt fresh and interesting to me, perhaps because they represent something we don't often see outside of the PC market: a blend of unashamedly wordy (and well-written, if not quite so well-proofread) visual novel storytelling and honest-to-goodness "use this thing on the other thing" adventure game happy funtimes. Twelve years, eh? It honestly doesn't feel like that long, though that said, Phoenix Wright and friends have been a comfortably familiar part of my life for some time now. What do you think? I've got an absolute boatload to say about the look and feel of the whole affair but I want to know first: what was it like walking back into the court room for you? I understand that this indeed the first case but did it have to be so obvious?įor me, the first case felt emblematic of the rest of the experience: gorgeous, grin-inducing but a little blatant with its answers. Having said that, I also saw the outcome from about a mile away. There's a certain kind of poetic symmetry to having the younger brother of Phoenix Wright's first opponent serve as Dual Destinies's first prosecutor. It's a nod to the fans, an acknowledgment of how it all first went down. And the new prosecutor? Gaspen Payne? The "Rookie Humiliator"? The badgerer of attractive women? Brilliant. Ted Tonate is simultaneously competent, smarmy and repulsive. The jury - god, I love puns - is still out on the rest of the case. Okay, to be fair, that's kinda quirky but she's boring. Miss Juniper Woods' only quirks appear to be an aversion to city air and a tendency to knit furiously when discussing her crush. She's sickly, shy and attractive in an infuriatingly wholesome way. The game opened with an unsuspected bombing and what may easily be the blandest defendant yet. Dual Destinies features both old friends and new. Luckily, the writing is and always has been stellar. Ace Attorney guys don't believe in showing or telling they advocate showing through grandiose amounts of linear storytelling.
Big, honkin' truckloads of exposition and hilarious dialogue. (Did I get that right, Pete? I don't want to mislead the voyeuristic purveyor of our letters.) In the latter, you coyly snoop around in an attempt to find evidence you probably should not have no access to. In the former, you do what defense lawyers try to do best: defend your client against overwhelming odds and poke holes in testimonies from some extravagantly silly witnesses. Much like its predecessor, Dual Destinies is split into two categories: the courtroom puglisms and the this-could-probably-get-you-arrested-in-the-real-world investigations. Like a turducken except infinitely more clever and arguably less tasty. Hi!, if you're only here because you went 'Yay! Letter series!' and have no idea what this is all about, the Ace Attorney saga is, by and large, best described as a lawyer simulator jammed into a Japanese comedy show (You know? The one where they rocket unsuspecting people out of lavatories with the help of rocket propelled potties?) jammed into a visual novel. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies is very much reminiscent of the titular lawyer: the hyper smart class clown mostly grown up. Which leads me to analogy I've been building all paragraph: A little calmer, a little quieter and a little more informed with the gravitas of age, maybe, but certainly still the same guy. Luckily, though, Wright's a clarion beacon in the inexorable advance of the molasses of age. Did you know that it's been about twelve years since Phoenix Wright first stormed onto the court room and into our hearts? We're getting old, man.
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