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dkirschner's Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (PC)

[August 22, 2025 03:46:42 PM]

I'm most of the way through the third case and retiring this one. I played most of it (about 10 hours) while walking on the treadmill over the past 4 months or so. I do walk on the treadmill more often than that! The first thing that struck me about Ace Attorney is that it totally inspired Paradise Killer, which I really liked. I had never played anything quite like Paradise Killer, and now its pedigree is obvious. It even uses some of the same sound effects, like the chime noise when something is suspicious.

I liked the first two cases; they were a good introduction to the game and its characters. The detective work does get tedious, moving the magnifying glass around the screens to hear Phoenix's comments and to try and find clues. This gets worse as there are more places to explore. By the third case, which involves moving around a movie studio, the detective work was getting boring.

The trials were more fun, but even those were getting boring by the third case. I think the trials suffer from the problem of being too scripted. You listen to witness testimony, cross-examine the witness (wherein you hear the testimony again and yell "objection!" [always amusing] when you want to press the witness), successfully press the witness, listen to their revised testimony, cross-examine the revised testimony, and so on. If you mess up on any of these parts or want to hear something again, you have to click through all the dialogue from that part again. The third case is more complicated than the first two, so I have been listening to testimony over and over trying to figure out when and how witnesses are lying. If you accuse them too often by presenting incorrect evidence, you lose and have to start over, which is annoying. So, you can't just guess over and over, even though the game's logic is such that you'll have to guess sometimes.

Sometimes, you know when and how the witness is lying, but it's unclear what dialogue option is the correct one. For example, I have been cross-examining a child in the third case. He witnessed fight that ended in a murder, but didn't actually see the murder. He didn't see the murder because he was fiddling with his camera, which I had figured out. When you press him on this, there are three options. You can claim that he didn't see the murder because he couldn't see it, because he was looking at something else, or you can present evidence. Well, if he was looking through his camera, you could imagine that he couldn't see the murder because he had it pointed in the wrong direction or something. If he was messing with his camera, you could also say that he was looking at something else (the camera). Or, you can present the camera as evidence. These all seem reasonable to me, but the game is so scripted that you have to present the camera as evidence; the other two are wrong, even though the second one especially makes sense: he didn't see the murder because he was looking at something else, his camera.

Other times, you just have no clue what you are supposed to guess. Like, now this kid is talking about how he took photos but deleted them. I've pressed him on every part of his revised testimony, but don't know what I'm supposed to present as evidence when. I presented the camera a couple times because it seems to me the photos might still be on the camera. I presented the photo of the Steel Samurai because like somehow that might be his photo (even though it came from security footage, who knows?!). I presented the spear (murder weapon). I was wrong enough that I got a game over.

This has happened enough times that I'm just going to call it quits on Phoenix Wright. I like the game. It's funny. The character animations especially are great. I love watching the witnesses get all bent out of shape. I like the absurd narratives. But that does make it hard to impose logic to solve a case! The game has its own logic and I'm tired of trying to follow it. I did look up rankings for cases, and it seems that cases 4 and 5 in this game are among the best ones. Of course I got tired of it during the 3rd case! I can't imagine another 10 hours of this though, even if the next two are supposed to be really good. I've got other "treadmill games" lined up to try.