“OBJECTION!” I loudly state to my long suffering release-day Nintendo Switch. It is hot in my hands, but not nearly as hot as the lead I am currently chasing down. There is something nefarious afoot, and while I may not be in the courtroom – everywhere I go is a makeshift hall of justice.The gormless twit staring at me has made a logical fallacy, and it is my duty to deploy my weaponised intellect to not only correct him but crush his spirit and break through to the truth.
This is the familiar taste of the Ace Attorney series, every bit as invigorating and silly as the entries that came before it – only the flavour is a little more divergent this time around. You see Ace Attorney Investigations has a pretty spectacular gimmick to shake things up a bit: You can use your legs to walk around.
Now stay with me on this one. Yes, technically you navigated environments in titles like Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney or Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, but it was more of a screen-to-screen affair, like navigating a real estate listing. Ace Attorney Investigations blows up this formula by actually representing your hotshot little lawyer man within the environment. Now, during your investigative outings, you can actually ambulate your bad self to different things and people to both scrutinise and chat respectively. It is refreshingly awesome, and I can see why the folks who picked the title up on their Nintendo DS back in 2010 were humming about it. It is magnificently freeing to be out of the courtroom – away from the stand and the slamming of gavels, because injustice and evil are nomadic beasts. And this serves protagonist Miles Edgeworth just fine, considering the game starts with a murder occurring in his very office.
That encapsulates the experience of Ace Attorney Investigations, literally putting your foot to the pavement and sorting shit out in the open, exploring and digging up the clues you need to make logical, factual deductions. These go together like puzzle pieces, quite literally allowing you to fit together your findings and get some tactile feedback to what you were suspecting. Why was something in a place? Was it connected to a person who had visited that space earlier? What happens when you form your web of intrigue and show it to the suspect, do they baulk and provide a testimony for you to pick apart? The whole formula could have easily come first in the Ace Attorney timeline of experiences, serving as an explanation of how things are handled prior to hitting the courtroom. In some ways, it actually rounds off a particularly harsh edge that the series has endured for a long while, the ‘suck-it-and-see’ approach to figuring out a hunch binned in favour of actually weaving discoveries together into a logical conclusion.
The mechanic of actually navigating environments is one that quickly settles into feeling like it should have been there all along, particularly when you start to inhabit scenes that are packed full of other characters. On more than one occasion, the wheel will be taken out of your hands and you can witness the scene play out with characters animating and moving independently to progress a narrative point – essentially performing a novel cutscene in a game series very well known for being rather static. One of these examples actually played beat for beat with a range of suspicions that I had been harbouring within a certain case – the actions of the dude on screen basically painting a picture of exactly what I was missing. It was a dynamic bit of storytelling and clue-dropping that I had never really seen within the franchise up until this point. As part of a larger picture, it elevates the experience to feeling a little more like a point and click adventure than the often hard to describe blueprint of the standard Ace Attorney journey.
That said, it just isn’t Ace Attorney without some other-worldly weirdness to turn a rote real-world action into something more fantastical and game-like. In this case, the ever cool and logical Miles can employ a mental game of Mind Chess to break down a person’s stash of secrets. Introduced in the second Ace Attorney Investigations title, it can be likened to Phoenix Wright’s magatama and Apollo Justice’s bracelet as a way to add a little more gameplay to your fact finding options. In the mind of Edgeworth, he will literally envision the opponent’s secrets being defended by chess pieces – he can then send his own conversational pawns to break through the underlings in hopes of eventually taking the queen. That queen will always reflect the juicy stuff, often being the critical missing piece of an investigative puzzle.
Where mental chess differs from things like the magatama is that it feels less focused on guess work. The conversation topics all lead to further clues, which can then be used to work through other topics. The chess metaphor is a great visualisation of the method behind Miles deductive reasoning, and because it isn’t represented in game as some MacGuffin – instead simply being a mental technique used by the prosecutor – you feel more like a genius investigator, rather than some cheat-code wielding weirdo. It is a great interstitial element to keep the game feeling like a game, rather than just a visual novel with extra steps.
One last thing that I deliciously took for granted was the stellar sprite work within this revisit. I never got my hands on Ace Attorney Investigations during its heyday – and the sequel was never translated, so seeing these games on their native platform had to come to me by way of YouTube and using the “Old Sprites” feature in the remaster. These old sprites had their own charm to them, but they are clearly native to the Nintendo DS – and when put alongside the new art, it’s hard to justify using them. Every character is crisp and emotive in that signature Ace Attorney style, with their over-the-top expressions and hilarious reactions – made all the more awesome via the enjoyment you get from the investigative navigation segments, seeing them milling about the world. These sprites could easily get by with some standard set of idle and talking animations, but they are rendered with a huge variety of moods, gestures and signature character actions – like Franziska von Karma cracking her iconic whip.
The preview only offered me a paltry amount of the content within the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection, stopping well short of the more serious business that was clearly due to occur in the second game – but it is clear that these titles have commanded the same amount of love and respect that went into the predecessor collections, with every expectation met as to what someone would want for DS titles that have been forward ported. Short of some well-hidden catastrophic mistake, you can almost guarantee that this collection will be as deserving of a spot on your shelf as the rest of the Ace Attorney adventures.
Ace Attorney Investigations Collection is slated for release on September 6 this year.
Previewed on Nintendo Switch // Preview code supplied by publisher
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Known throughout the interwebs simply as M0D3Rn, Ash is bad at video games. An old guard gamer who suffers from being generally opinionated, it comes as no surprise that he is both brutally loyal and yet, fiercely whimsical about all things electronic. On occasion will make a youtube video that actually gets views. Follow him on YouTube @Bad at Video Games