Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney

In the end, I didn't care for this one as much as its predecessors. And it wasn't because of the new protagonist. No, all the new elements of the game, the new characters, the new Perceive system (most of the time anyway), the new investigation tools, the new soundtrack; those I liked, and more than I had initially suspected I would. Where I think Apollo Justice fails to live up to the bar that the Phoenix Wright series set is in terms of story direction.

The cases, in premise, were very cool. But there were a few things about how they were portrayed that I felt did some disservice. Something that I noticed early in Case 2, and which continued to bother me more and more from there on out, was that there were altogether too many flashbacks. Sometimes I felt like a court scene consisted of about 50% flashback to the investigation period, or even to itself. Remember that time the witness said this? Of course I remember it, it happened two minutes ago.

It was just a minor annoyance until Case 4, where the direction really took a nosedive. All of this game's cases were ambitious, but the fourth one was, I think, too much so. The story was complicated enough that it had to be split into distinct segments - two separate trials, the biggest investigation ever, and then another trial period - and by the end of it the whole affair just felt muddled. And that's setting aside my concern about the time-traveling evidence during the MASON System investigation. Plus, there was a lead in the investigation period that I had way too much trouble following because the in-game hint I kept getting was blatantly wrong. I'm still a bit sour about that.

By and large, though, while I don't feel it has continued to step up to the plate the same way the other three games have, it is a thoroughly entertaining title. Aside from a few occasions where the thing to 'focus' on was difficult to find due to its infrequency of showing itself, and in spite of a perhaps wordy introduction to the technique in Case 1, I found myself really looking forward to chances to Perceive a witness's tics. So, yeah, there's no way I won't be picking up the inevitable sequel.

Progress: Complete