We need to talk.  I just finished Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, the newly released fourth game of the vaunted Ace Attorney series, and I don’t know what to say.  Your first Ace Attorney game, Phoenix Wright, was a fantastic, novel game with a great plot.  Justice for All, the second in the series, was a bit worse, with most of the cases being merely decent.  However, the game’s final case was amazing, easily one of the top three cases ever.  That case kept the game from being a letdown, with JFA overall being worse than the first but not by much.  Finally came Trials and Tribulations, a triumph on par with the first in the series.  With the Ace Attorney series sporting such a fantastic track record, I was more excited about Apollo Justice than any of the Ace Attorney games before.  After all, this was to be a brand new chapter in the franchise, right?  The Phoenix Wright plot arc was complete, you had a killer concept, and this was your first AA game not made on the GBA.  It looked like all the elements were there with nothing to hold you back from making the greatest Ace Attorney game ever.  So how did Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney end up such a disappointment?

 I think much of the reason this pains me so is because your general story concept for this game was so great.  The player is Apollo Justice, rookie attorney and fan of the great lawyer god Phoenix Wright – except that seven years ago Phoenix was stripped of his attorney’s badge, now forced to play the piano at a Russian restaurant to pay the bills.  What happened to our favorite character?  What event could have happened to turn the man we came to know and love into bitter exile?  Also, since when did he have a daughter?  How could any fan of the Ace Attorney series not salivate when imagining the possibilities inherent in such a premise?  Yet somehow you guys turned what could have been the greatest Ace Attorney plot ever into an anticlimactic letdown.  When I said “anticlimactic,” I meant that literally.  Your climactic case, where there is a great surprising unexpected twist and an extremely satisfying end, is at the beginning of the game!  Everything afterwards feels flat compared to the excitement that defending Phoenix Wright against a murder charge.

 Keep reading, Capcom.  There's plenty more after the jump.

 Another big mistake: Apollo Justice is somewhat lacking in courtroom revelations.  The most enjoyable part of the Ace Attorney series has always been when I have an epiphany in court and reveal some twist to the case that turns everything upside down.  I always get a rush as I connect dots I didn’t, or couldn’t, see until just that moment, and I turn the case on its head.  However, in this game you guys go ahead and tell me some very important revelations that I should have been allowed to realize on my own.  You even gave away the identity and the methods of the main bad guy in the final “climactic” case, and make the challenge simply proving it in court!  That’s only a fraction of the fun I would have had if you had let me figure it out on my own.

However, the biggest crime of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is the writing.  I’m not talking about the plot; I’m talking about the characters and dialogue.  The problem isn’t that AJ doesn’t feel like an Ace Attorney game, in fact it’s quite the opposite.  The writing of Apollo Justice is a complete rip-off of the previous three games.  It’s as if they wrote the game with one set of characters and just changed the names when they were done: Apollo Justice is a carbon copy of Phoenix Wright, with the same personality and everything, and Trucy Wright replaces Maya Fey as the “naïve girl who follows you around and makes stupid comments.”  It’s the exact same formula.

Now I’m sure you’re asking, “Why is that such a bad thing?  That formula has worked for us for all three previous games!”  The issue is that by making Apollo Justice nothing more than young Phoenix Wright’s personality with a different face, you’re missing the point of having a new character at all.  There’s no real uniqueness to either of the main characters.  If I’m forced to play the game through their eyes, I’d like them to at least be more than the old characters with different names.  And as for that “naïve girl” thing, that needs to stop.  Seriously, all conversations go like this:

Phoenix/Apollo: Question or comment.

Maya/Trucy: Naïve statement!  Crazy theory or off-topic rant!

Phoenix/Apollo: Sarcasm/exacerbation/aggravation.

Enough is enough, guys.  It was starting to get old by the third game; at this point it just doesn’t make me smile the way it used to.  Find Apollo and Trucy their own special identities, and fast.  “Same shit, different game” is not a good philosophy for game design.

It’s not really that I have that much against the idea of “spirits” or “magic,” it’s the fact that you guys have been using these things as a crutch for your games.  For instance, this new “Perceive” mode, which Apollo just “happens” to have the power for: you get a close-up view of the witness and you move the camera around until you find the witness’ nervous tic, which will only show up during part of a single sentence of the testimony.  When he/she is doing that tic, you know that part of that certain sentence is a lie, and you call them on it.  It’s an interesting idea… except that it ends up being used as a lazy substitute for good writing.  It wasn’t hard to notice that whenever there was a situation where it would be tricky to get the trial headed in the direction you guys wanted it to go, you just had me play “one of these things is not like the other” and presto, the Apollo has just made a perilous leap in logic justified by the witness swallowing.  It’s not any different with the Psych Locks either; whenever you had wanted people to know where to go during investigations, you put up a Psych Lock, which then acts as a giant neon sign saying “Plot continues through here.”

I need to make this clear: as much as I am disappointed by the direction this game headed, Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is still an above-average game.  That’s right; even with all of the ranting and scolding found above, I smiled quite a few times when playing this game.  Part of it would be the graphical improvements.  The use of videos to explain certain things in the game really made it easier to understand some situations.  I also appreciated the improved character art, though you guys really need to put more frames of animation in there next time.  Also, can’t we have at least just a little bit of animation in the areas we’re investigating in?  You’re not working with the GBA anymore; you need to use more of the power you have available.  Even with those qualifiers, the visuals are improved enough to be deemed “good enough.”  Another good thing is the soundtrack.  I still think that the first game had the best tracks, but the new soundtrack in Apollo Justice is the closest you’ve come to equaling that achievement.

The best improvement is the new uses you’ve found for the touchscreen.  Finding fingerprints, making footprint molds, and other activities were all quite enjoyable.  My particular favorite was using a soundboard, especially the way you worked it into the actual trial.  It was a great idea.  The only problem with this stuff is that I don’t think there’s enough of it.  It left me wanting more, much more.

Sincerely,

Ian “Taxman” Small 

Final Score: C+

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Eight_HundredDollars said:

If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?

March 04, 2008