Justice for some

Most of the game's spirit remains unchanged.

I've just finished the entry that I originally skipped in the Ace Attorney series - Apollo Justice - and throughout most of the game, I wondered why it was regarded as the black sheep of the series. In a rather brave move, it doesn't feature Phoenix Wright as the player character - but he's still around, generally acting much more intelligent than when you were in control of him over the last three games and sounding like he's been taking elocution lessons from Alec Guinness. The direction they've taken his storyline is... surprising, and may leave some people who worked through the first three games feeling cheated, but the madness of the situation isn't left unremarked upon.

But I was later to find out that the trouble with the game wasn't just the character change - indeed, I certainly didn't miss Pearl and Maya - the problem was really that the overarching story was very unsatisfying. Frequently when talking about this series I've mentioned the lunacy of the entire legal system in this warped universe, and as it happens, this game goes some way to actually agreeing with me and talking about plans to change it. However, all the characters seem to succeed in doing is making it slightly worse.

This time you play as Apollo Justice, a young defence attorney with notably manly hands, unfashionably rolled-up sleeves, hair that would kill someone if they fell on to it on a crowded subway, and the silliest macho name since Jake Bullet from Red Dwarf. From the beginning it's clear that he's something of a Phoenix fanboy, practicing his signature courtroom shouts and adding his own mantra "Time for Justice!", which would quite possibly be in the running for the world's worst catchphrase if the lifetime achievement award for this hadn't been secured many years ago. (Interestingly, though that series only had thirteen episodes ever, they still managed to say it somewhere in the order of six thousand times).

Just like in the previous games, it's your task to find the impossibly unlikely truth beneath murder situations that seem clear-cut, by wandering round a version of Japan desperately half-disguised to resemble America and interviewing another batch of clearly mad characters such as Richard O'Brien with stick-on eyebrows and a bowl of noodles on his head. I did get some impression of why the game might be disliked at this point, because on the whole there seems to be a rather higher-than-average tosspot quota among the witnesses (take, for example, this mob boss's son with some sort of terrible speech impediment from the second case) which made me rather uninterested in talking to them, or actively wanting to finish trials as soon as possible - not because of the tension like before, but because I would rather wander around aimlessly in the investigation sections rather than be forced to communicate with them any further.

The prosecutor is a different story, though - you're now up against Klavier Smeghead Gavin, from Bill and Ted's Excellent Prosecution Office. In addition to his role in the trials, he's the frontman of "The Gavinners", a band clearly named by someone who doesn't know what rock bands are named like, and is also a sort of Hollywood German, which is to say that he speaks perfect English with the occasional "ja", "nein" or "Achtung!" thrown in at random. Unfortunately for him, this dialect meant that I couldn't mentally voice him in anything other than a ridiculously camp Bavarian accent. It's unusual that he's very friendly towards Apollo throughout the game - on the one hand it's nice that you're not in danger of being literally whipped by the prosecution, or having to defend under a hail of full coffee mugs, but it means that you never feel anywhere near the amount of satisfaction at knocking the case down - he's virtually always calm, unflappable, and just shrugs everything off as it comes. It seems that reasonableness doesn't make for good drama.

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Still, opposite him and under the eye of the judge, you start off pestering witnesses as you mean to go on, pointing and shouting at them a lot, and eventually you break through their innocent act, whereupon reality breaks apart and you're transported to bloody Moonside. The Satanic echoes of the backwards interrogation music playing against the swirling otherworldly background reminded me all too much of Ecco the Dolphin all over again. This is the new Perceive section, and though I'm sad to say it, I had to conclude that it's rubbish - I could stand it a couple of times, but later on in the game you have to scour a witness's entire upper body piece by piece looking for slight tics on every word, and it's like doing a page of Where's Wally while looking down a kitchen roll tube, without the benefit of knowing what Wally is even dressed in or whether he's actually a kumquat instead.

Still, the cycle of starting off clueless and gradually building up to big reveals works well enough - oddly, I noticed the game was a lot higher-fidelity in general than Miles Edgeworth's game from a couple of years later, making frequent use of video sequences in addition to the sprites. In particular, there's an interesting part near the end of the game, where the interface completely changes to a Tron-like computer system and you're invited to find the fragments of the case throughout the universe, to reach and gather them through time. Jumping from the past to the present and back in some sort of elaborate dream sequence is a nice break from the usual cycle of the game, and after having to cope with Perceive during the trials, the psyche-locks seem like an old friend. After spending so long piecing the whole puzzle together, I was all ready to enter the final trial and bring the main villain of the game down - to solve a murderous gambit that had been going on for seven years by chipping away at his confidence and presenting carefully chosen evidence to - oh, it's finished.

Yes, the same problem that dragged me out of Puzzle Agent appeared again for me here - though this time, it's a slightly different situation. The game does reach the conclusion that you've been looking for, but bafflingly chooses to do it in a way that robs the player of the big moment that they've been waiting for. The final part of the game involves one testimony (solved by using the stupid Perceive mechanic again rather than by any feat of logic), and presenting a couple of items that turn out not to matter very much, because after about twenty minutes of the game running itself, it's revealed that as this was all a trial run for the new Jurist system, you've done enough to win anyway.

And for the post-conclusion, it decides to do something different again - for some reason it chooses to bring the player out of the courtroom to present them with a choice of "Guilty" or "Not Guilty" as the final decision of the game. It seems to be trying to evoke the decision near the end of Justice For All, but there's absolutely no moral ambiguity in it at all - they seemed to forget that making this situation interesting requires a dilemma, rather than giving you a direct choice between the thing that you've been striving to achieve all along and the thing that you've been trying to prevent. It seems to only exist so that if you choose the wrong one it can go "Well, that was a stupid thing to do, you've ruined everything you'd been working for, and the defendant died in hospital. You dickhead."

I liked the rest of the mysteries and up until that moment I was going to say that the game was nowhere near as bad as everybody says it was, but I've got more annoyed at that conclusion the more I think about it. It wants you to be as impressed with it as you were with the Phoenix Wright games, but this time, it really isn't as clever as it thinks it is.