Playing A Game Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth PC

Fifteen years on, Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth might still be my least-favorite Ace Attorney game. But! the Collection's high-def remake improves the game, enough that it's satisfying to play through despite some deep flaws.

Edgeworth's side-view investigation scenes work better on a big screen: where hunting for clues on an NDS touchscreen was a fiddly squint-and-poke exercise, now there's plenty of room to walk around and much more detailed art to grab your eye.

Likewise, high-resolution character portraits and backgrounds let this game lean farther than it once did into the Ace Attorney franchise's flair for drama.

As always, Ace Attorney shines when its absurd characters are front and center -- but Edgeworth's cases just don't exploit that as much as Phoenix's and Apollo's. Although investigation scenes do include Cross Examination-like dialog combat, and Edgeworth's opponents react bombastically when their contradictions are pointed out, the game almost never uses these in sequence to continue building tension. Instead, most witnesses or suspects tend to feel picked-up and then thrown-away before their character has had a chance to develop.

Edgeworth himself experiences very little character growth, only showing slight development in the final chapter by begrudgingly acknowledging the "turnabout" logic championed by his blue-suited friend. (Who goes weirdly unnamed, despite other cameo guest appearances.)

Not that a deep-dive into Edgeworth's story would be easy to follow, anyway, as this game's chronology is sincerely confusing: its 2nd and 3rd chapters take place before the 1st, then after a 4th-chapter flashback to years earlier, chapter 5 picks back up where chapter 1 left off. I don't think the order of narrative events needed to be this disjointed; I think the game was just poorly paced.

And so long as I'm being negative, same as I lamented in 2010, the "Logic" mechanic of connecting clues to reach a conclusion is neat when it works but often feels like bullshit. Many of the game's expected connections are a leap too far, or alternatively so obvious that I couldn't believe Edgeworth needed help to reach the conclusion.

So yeah, this is definitely a weaker Ace Attorney game, between mechanical awkwardness and rough story pacing and lack of memorable characterization. But like I said at the top, remaking its character art and its investigation scenes in high definition succeeds in elevating Ace Attorney Investigations to feel more at-home among its courtroom peers.

Rating: Good