Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 5/5/2023)

[Image from igdb.com]

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

Developer: Capcom

Publisher: Capcom

Genre(s): Adventure, Visual Novel

Platforms: GBA

Release Date: October 11, 2001

There’s an old joke about video games that mostly older generations make about the potential of what could be a video game. It’s not a wondrous speculation that stems from genuine interest. Rather, it’s to point out the ridiculous notion of gamifying anything under the sun and producing it as something to stimulate children (or adult gamers, but many of these people believe that video games are solely for children). An example of this that springs to my mind is the one from a season five episode of The Simpsons where chubby poindexter Martin Prince is playing an arcade adaptation of Louis Malle’s 1981 film My Dinner With Andre, and he’s so enamored by it that he vocalizes the “tell me more” option as he triggers it in response to the game’s dialogue. If you don’t get the joke, the entirety of the film is two urbane middle-aged men having a conversation without leaving their restaurant table, which would seem like a boring premise for a video game. I didn’t understand this joke as a kid, but it garners a fair chuckle from me as an adult. Still, the baby boomers on The Simpsons' writing staff thirty years ago pose an interesting question, even if their intention was to make a glib jab at the expense of the medium. Is there anything too mundane to mold into a video game? Shouldn’t they all have at least a modicum of physical activity to hold the player’s attention? Certainly, not all video games feature kooky adventures, platform-hopping, and buckets of blood gushing from the necks of monsters and aliens. In 2001, Nintendo gamified menial labor to great acclaim in Animal Crossing and in that same year, Capcom did the same for the court processions with Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.

What exactly is the appeal behind Ace Attorney? If C-SPAN is any indication, what goes on behind the giant swinging, ivory doors of a courtroom on a daily basis can serve as a makeshift substitute for Nyquil. Not every legal case is as electrifying as something like the OJ Simpson trial. Then again, simply prying into the machinations of a particular vocation might not be exhilarating in real life, but that doesn’t mean that our media hasn't embellished it to the point of sheer entertainment. Television legal dramas like Law and Order and Boston Legal have persisted on the airwaves because the writers have sensationalized a facet of court cases: the mystery behind the crime. Typically, the outcome of most court cases is fairly cut and dry. If they aren’t, the media will have a field day covering it on a national scale to distract us from our uneventful lives, and these usually come around once every five years. In the world of legal fiction, every case that bursts through the courtroom is rife with conspiracy and fraud, and the true culprit lurks in the shadows while the detectives try to unweave the web they’ve made that the innocent defendant is stuck in. Ace Attorney revels in dissecting the thick layers of a legal case seen on these television shows and the dramatic tension that permeates every scene, and the game is consistently engrossing because of it.

The first entry in the Ace Attorney series also introduces the former two words in the
title before the colon. The honorable Mr. Nick “Phoenix” Wright is the main protagonist of the first three Ace Attorney games, and his role as such in the series' debut title has made him the de facto central figure for the franchise, even if Capcom has shelved him in favor of giving other up-and-coming defense lawyers their time in the spotlight. For the time being, the player’s first time vicariously playing a lawyer is also Phoenix’s courtroom debut. Here, he’s a fresh-faced rookie straight out of law school’s birth canal, ready to show the legal world his capabilities. Behind that snazzy ocean-blue suit and his striking hairdo with enough gel coated in it to make it rival a porcupine's quills, he’s a ball of nerves with a dearth of self-confidence due to his lack of experience. Because of his amateurish proclivities, the first Ace Attorney title is somewhat of a coming-of-age story. It’s the origin of how this plucky, dedicated young man became a respected man of the law. Putting the game’s protagonist at the same beginner level as the player in finding those juicy contradictions in the court fosters a perfect growth curve.

This is precisely what the player will be doing from the start of Ace Attorney. It was a wise move from the developers not to have rookie lawyer Phoenix Wright slumming it in divorce court for his first trial and working his way up the ranks. The first case of the series starts Phoenix Wright on his legal career with a murder trial defending his idiotic, unfortunately-named childhood friend Larry Butz (I’m sure the correct pronunciation is Byootz) from the accusation that he bludgeoned his girlfriend with a clock modeled like a statue. The first case sets a precedent for the rest of the game as every case is a spicy murder mystery, something to hold the player’s attention as firmly as a legal drama show (sans any rape cases because the game isn’t allowed to be too graphic). However, the first murder case dials down its spice level to acclimate the player to the court process. The real murderer, the accuser Mr. Sahwit, is seen committing the crime before the court case to give the player a clearer perspective on how to engage the trial. Not to mention, Sahwit would look guilty of something even if you saw him walking around the block minding his own business, sweating profusely enough to melt the glue holding the toupee on his head. Mia, Phoenix’s sensei in the defense department, is also holding Phoenix’s hand throughout the entire trial to direct the player on the right path. The first case is essentially a glorified tutorial, easing the player into the game’s mechanics with a case easier to probe than a cow abducted from a crop circle.

What exactly is the key to success in proving the innocence of the accused? Evidence, and lots of it. The first case will provide all of the relevant pieces of interest pertaining to the case for your perusal. After that, Ace Attorney introduces the other half of its gameplay that has as much precedence as the court hearings: procuring the evidence. Every time a murder occurs, Phoenix Wright will spend the day walking on the town trying to find potential clues to gain an advantage in the next trial. Considering this job is usually the responsibility of a detective, is this legal scavenger hunt ethical for an attorney? There’s nothing explicitly stated in the rulebook that he can’t take it upon himself to scrounge up evidence, so being thorough is what gives Mr. Wright the edge over his opponent in court. Every day begins at his office, and the natural course of action afterward is to visit his current client down at the Detention Center for some questioning. Depending on the information given by the culprit in holding, Phoenix will head to the crime scene, and the player will use the “examine” option in the menu to summon a magnifying glass. Anytime the player skims over a relevant clue at the scene, the magnifying glass will turn gold to signify that the particular object might be important. If it is, Phoenix will store the object in his inventory and whip it out during the next trial if the opportunity strikes. Even when Phoenix has seemingly cleared out every possible trace of suspicion to use at his disposal, his job isn’t done after his meticulous effort. Evidence also has to be obtained by talking to suspects, supposed witnesses, and fellow legal peers through conversing with them. Sometimes, presenting evidence to them is the only method of making these various NPCs cooperate, so it’s important to pay attention to the sequence of events. However, as the day progresses, the evidence-gathering process gets a bit cumbersome. By the end of the day, Phoenix is probably a haggard mess, sprinting back and forth between ten to twenty different locations and speaking to a cast of NPCs to stringently progress through the day. To make the player seem like they are straining themselves by walking all over creation, the list of notable locations is not organized very conspicuously in the “move” menu. The correct destination will at times be buried in layers of another as each room gets its own designation. While adhering to a direct course of progression between all these jumbled areas can get hectic, I ultimately believe this is the best course of action because it ensures that the player will receive every last inch of evidence for the trial. The game will be fair to any unobservant mistakes the player might make by impeding the next step until everything before it is accounted for. This way, the player can be comfortable knowing that they’ll be fully prepared for anything the next day.

Ultimately, scrounging up evidence is a necessary evil in supporting the superior half that Ace Attorney is the trial portion. Like court proceedings in real life, the judge will introduce both Phoenix and the prosecuting lawyer on the opposing side and briefly summarize the stakes of the case. Once a witness or another person of significant relativity to the case is called to the stand, it’s the player’s time to prove how much they’ve been paying attention. Phoenix’s job as the defendant is to snipe out any contradictions in the witness's statement, dividing every sentence of their testimony with their own individual claim of the incident. Once the player finds a contradiction in one of the sentences, Phoenix will refute the witness's claim with hard facts from the evidence. Of course, these contradictions are never obvious. After the first case where the real culprit’s lies are so easy to trace that even Lionel Hutz could suss out, correlating a person’s testimony to a piece of evidence becomes quite tricky. Ace Attorney can even feel like playing Minesweeper during the later cases when multiple pieces of evidence pile up to fill two entire pages with up to five statements. Maybe I’ve drawn this comparison because a fifth of the meter in the top right corner of the screen explodes if Phoenix makes an incorrect correlation, with the judge disapprovingly shaking his head wondering how Phoenix passed the bar. If the entire meter explodes after five wrong accusations, the judge will pass a guilty sentence on Phoenix’s client and the player will get a “game over.” This thin margin of error is why everyone should press the witness on everything they say, even if it irritates the judge and the prosecutor. It’s better than having a faulty accusation literally blow up in your face. Oftentimes, the witness's testimony is so vague that pressing them on their minced words is the only way in forcing them to reveal their full account, and then their revised statement will be ripe for slamming with a contradiction. Because correlating someone’s lies and wishy-washy half-truths is never obvious and could fit a number of pieces of evidence as proof to the contrary, the player must make a concerted effort to pay close attention to every detail. As nerve-wracking as carefully peering over the evidence and how it coincides with a certain statement can be, making the connection successfully feels so gratifying. Phoenix pointing his finger and yelping one of his trademark “objections!” is a cathartic reward for being scrupulous. The tense process of matching evidence with a contradictory statement and watching everyone around Phoenix drop their jaws in utter shock as the revelations unravel more of the truth makes every step of the proceeding truly gripping. The game’s presentation also aids in achieving this effect, with an animated comic-book liveliness that makes every reaction pop.

Phoenix will also have to consider his choices in the courtroom carefully because his guardian angel on his right shoulder during the first trial literally becomes an angel after the first case. Mia’s position as Phoenix’s mentor gives the player the impression that she’ll be a central secondary character in the series. However, the developers interestingly pull a bait-and-switch tactic on the player by making Mia’s murder the subject of the second case. Mia’s poor, helpless little sister Maya is fingered as a suspect, so Phoenix is forced to leave the guiding light his superior used to provide to defend the life of an innocent girl who has obviously been set up to take the fall. Not only is the suspect far from being the real perpetrator for obvious reasons, but the game also allows the player to get a brief glimpse at the real perpetrator again while he’s in the act. Mia’s tragic absence has ousted Phoenix’s guiding light, yet he has not lost his sense of sight. The player will still know that the real culprit and his pink, bimbo witness transplant accomplice are scheming their way out of being delivered to justice for their heinous crime. The second case will make the player emotionally invested in bringing these two to justice because of how personal the case seems to Phoenix and because they’ve despicably put a girl’s life at stake. That, and the gaudy con-man behind the crime, Redd White, is the textbook definition of a douchebag, murdering women in cold blood withstanding. The player can’t wait to convince the judge to throw the book at this guy for his crimes against humanity and lack of general tastefulness, and the case swerves so far off the rails that it nearly careens off the track. When this case eventually seems hopelessly swayed in White’s favor due to his exercising his oppressive social status, the resolution to winning this case must be derived via supernatural means. The explanation for Maya’s purple hippy garb she wears is that it's uniform for her familial clan of spiritual mediums that conjure up the dead. When using her powers, the deceased Mia can return to the realm of the living by taking the space of Maya’s physical form, which is Mia in the revealing purple gown. Because Mia is present at the very end, she gives Phoenix a vital last piece of evidence that incriminates White, a buzzer-beater if there ever was one. I find the resolution of the second case to be a bit contrived. If the game is going to resort to using otherworldly elements in a game mostly confined to reality, they should’ve saved something like that for the climatic scope of the final case.

While the second case unceremoniously removes Mia as a central figure in the Ace Attorney series, it also introduces a slew of characters that will retain their status as series mainstays. Once Maya’s prosecution case is finished, Phoenix Wright takes her into his custody as his assistant, “adopting” her in lieu of no longer having a legal guardian. Maya will continue to offer her own insight while Phoenix looks for clues and deciphers those shoddy statements during the trials. I can’t definitively say that her presence is as useful as her sister’s, but following around Phoenix during the evidence-gathering process is made less tedious with their conversations. They have a brother-sister dynamic with one another if her pension of referring to Phoenix by his Christian name “Nick” wasn’t indicative of that. She makes him look like an old man by comparison. Also during the evidence process, district detective Dick Gumshoe will always be on the case to inspect the crime scene for the police department. This man is the reason why Phoenix cannot sit back and let the local authorities scrounge up the essential clues to fill the holes in people’s faulty statements. Gumshoe is passionate and well-meaning, yet I have the feeling that this big lug didn’t graduate among the top percentile in his class. His salary is constantly being deducted due to his constant carelessness and it’s a wonder how he isn’t trying to bum a dollar off of Phoenix at every encounter. Actually, the transactions between Gumshoe and Phoenix are in the favor of the latter as Gumshoe’s position allows him to access vital pieces of information like the victim’s autopsy reports. Of course, Gumshoe can’t be TOO helpful with this information due to his unrequited hard-on with the opposing prosecutor with the most consecutive appearances: Miles Edgeworth. Considering their contrasting attorney positions, their suit colors, and their general disposition, Edgeworth is Phoenix’s rival through and through. While Phoenix is optimistic, honest, and light-hearted, Edgeworth is cynical, intense, and willing to descend to any desperate lengths in order to twist the verdict in his favor. Penetrating through his cheap logical fabrications during the trials is especially satisfying just to see that smug grin of his disappear.

However, Edgeworth is not the game’s main antagonist, and that revelation becomes apparent near the end of the game. Unfortunately, another case is wedged between the meat of the game’s prevalent arc revolving around Edgeworth’s relationship with Phoenix. The game’s third case involves two actors who play the main hero and villain characters respectively on a popular children’s TV show, and the hero actor has slain his villainous television nemesis by impaling him with his prop katana. It’s like if Christian Bale murdered Heath Ledger on set. Many say that this is by far the weakest case of the game because it doesn’t congeal with the other cases in terms of any overarching themes or character relationships, and the first case gets a pass for having to serve as the game’s tutorial. While Edgeworth is the prosecutor in this case as always, the content of the case has nothing to do with his relationship with Phoenix. However, I’d argue that this case is a pivotal point in the game’s difficulty arc because it’s the first instance where the player doesn’t get a peek at who the true culprit is before the first trial. Even Phoenix is heavily doubting his client’s innocence with all of the circumventing evidence seemingly stacked against him. Because of that, the third case is still relevant, plus the studio crew is an entertaining bunch.

If this game’s substance stems from the growing dynamic between Phoenix and his foppish, blouse-wearing rival in red, then the fourth and final* case of this game certainly completes their symbiotic arc. What better way to make the two get along with one another than by putting Edgeworth in the hot seat with a murder charge and having to resort to swallowing his pride and hiring his career foil to defend his life? Like with the previous case, the game deems the player experienced enough to withhold information from them at the start, almost as if the game wants the player to fail and put the smarmy Edgeworth behind bars out of spite. However, Phoenix seems to be the only lawyer with an ounce of integrity in this district and the last case should’ve been a lesson that all of Phoenix’s clients could be innocent, even if they are smarmy fucks who usually scowl and smirk at Phoenix’s expense. Since Edgeworth is situated in the defendant's seat for now, who will Phoenix be swatting interjections back and forth at like a tennis match? Manfred von Karma will take the stand as the prosecutor, and he’s never lost a case in his forty-year career, so no pressure. The intimidating, draconian man who dresses as gallantly as Count Dracula from Castlevania liberally uses objections at the snap of his fingers, and the judge doesn’t even bat an eye. Is this due to his impressive, unparalleled tenure in the court system, or is he abusing the fact that the judge seems to be terrified of him? Either or, the man will constantly interrupt the witness and Phoenix as a tactical strategy to obscure information. Once Phoenix manages to get a word in, it’s revealed that the real culprit of the murder on a fateful foggy night out on the lake is tied to a fifteen-year conspiracy briefly mentioned in the second case called the “D-16 Incident.” Not only did this case involve the Fey family, but the circumstances of the case haunt Edgeworth because his father was supposedly murdered by the man who framed him in this present-day case. Edgeworth seems to believe that he was the one who murdered his father by accident and tries to confess his vague suspicion in court. However, after prodding into the nitty gritty of the evidence, it turns out that von Karma vindictively murdered Edgeworth’s father on that day after he put a blemish on von Karma’s spotless record. Once this juicy nugget of truth comes to light, the mighty von Karma falls from the heavens of his glory, and good riddance. Through this whole charade, Phoenix and Edgeworth reveal a mutual respect for each other and Edgeworth has a moment of clarity about his role as a prosecutor. His sense of honor and optimism was crushed in the D-16 incident and envies that Wright is what he originally strived to be. It’s beautiful, really. Also, a parrot takes the stand to testify against his owner. It’s certainly a highlight.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is quite a pleasant surprise for the video game medium. It turns out that a game with the premise of court case trials, presented in the visual novel format nonetheless, makes for an entertaining video game. In saying that, the extent of how entertaining Ace Attorney is can only be believed if you experience it. The game is brimming with style stemming from its presentation, and it's also substantial thanks to its impeccable character writing, the progression of each case, and the nail-biting process of picking a piece of evidence to match a statement during the trials. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is a unique entry in gaming that kept me consistently on the edge of my seat, waiting to reveal every revelation every step of the way like any court drama on television. I’d object to most high-octane war shooters with constant action in favor of this game any day.

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*” Turnabout Goodbyes” is the last case of the base game released in the 2001 Japan-exclusive version released in 2001, at least. Us Westerners are far more familiar with the DS remaster/port released in 2005. While the Western world would’ve been satisfied with simply shipping the game overseas, Capcom ostensibly needed to add some additional content for the native Japanese players, a dessert after several hearty helpings of the same court cases on an advanced console. The treat that capped off the first Ace Attorney game is “Rise from the Ashes,” the epic fifth case at the end of the game. While the case is entirely removed from the overarching “D-16” case from the base game, “Rise from the Ashes” is still a doozy. After the fourth case, Maya leaves on a train to hone her skills as a spirit medium after experiencing symptoms of imposter syndrome. In Maya’s absence, another quirky teenage girl named Ema requests that Phoenix defend her much older sister after she’s accused of the severe offense of murdering a detective (not Gumshoe). It doesn’t help her case that her sister is readily fessing up to her crime without impunity. The older sister, Lana, is also the leading prosecutor in the district, adding another layer of uncanniness to the Maya and Mia parallel. Phoenix has got his work cut out here as the final case is easily the most difficult. Evidence stacks up to filling three whole pages by the end, heavily increasing the likelihood of mismatching evidence in court. Because this extra court case is on an advanced piece of hardware, it adds new mechanics into the mix, which mostly involves putting a broken vase back together and pointing out a contradiction with video evidence. The duration of the fifth case is also as long as the entire base game, so let that factor into your decision to extend your playtime. Despite all of the excruciating elements of the case, I still recommend diving into it after the first set of credits ends the base game. Being patient with the hours of content on display here unveils an enthralling case that eventually overlaps with another old conspiracy that strikes at the heart of the police department. If you thought that von Karma was the final boss of imposing legal figures, he’s got no sway compared to the irredeemable scumbag at the core of this case. He’s such a seemingly impenetrable force that Phoenix and Edgeworth end up double-teaming him with an onslaught of objections to take him down. Whether or not “Rise from the Ashes” is compensation for those Japanese players buying the game again or a pre-DLC addendum for amateur Westerners, this goliath of an Ace Attorney chapter still comes highly recommended, even if it is almost totally removed from the base game.