case by case: 1-3: putting the hammer down
We return once again with my I-still-intend-for-this-to-be-weekly series examining every case in the Ace Attorney series. Last week our boss got murdered and we took down a vastly powerful espionage and blackmail agency more or less by accident; this week an actor is being framed for a murder. Spoilers below.
This is the first case that follows what I would consider the most traditional formula for the series. There's a lot more characters involved, and there is a satisfying sense of unraveling what happened, as we see things that don't quite make sense based on the information that we've been given so far, until, in the final act, there is a major twist which changes our understanding of the whole case. They lean more heavily into this trope later on, with a big cinematic moment and minigame to really bring it home.
I love the twist here that the murder actually did not take place where we thought it did. It's pretty well foreshadowed--there's a lack of blood at the alleged scene of the murder, and it's pretty well established that no one at the scene could have done the murder besides your client, Will Powers. But there are some red herrings, and that moment of revelation is pretty satisfying. It's fairly basic as big twists go, but it works and it's a great way to set up expectations for the rest of the series: the information we are given is often based on assumptions, and assumptions are frequently wrong.
I remembered more about this one than I expected to, partly on the strength of the twist, and partly because of how interesting it is that the murderer was acting in self-defense, and that the victim, Jack Hammer, had, in fact, planned to commit a murder and frame our client. It's not complicated, but it's compelling; after two fairly basic cases to show us the ropes we really get to see how much thought goes into each one of these.
The main thing about this one that I don't like is the side sequence involving doing some trading card trading in order to get further clues, which feels less directed and a little bit random. Not awful, but "present a keycard to Oldbag so she will give you a trading card", while there is technically some info that leads to that being the correct thing to do (it is mentioned at some point that she wants to visit the place where Hammer died; it's not really clear why she wouldn't have access to that place already), still feels a little out of nowhere.
This one gives us Edgeworth helping us out when he realizes that the witness we're questioning definitely did it--and hints at the past he shares with us. It's also where we first meet Oldbag, who, rather like Larry, is just so delightfully awful every time we run into her. And of course it gives us the Steel Samurai, whose theme plays through my head basically constantly.
That's about it for this case. Next week, we have the original finale for the first game and now technically the penultimate case (but still spiritually the case that wraps up this game's arc, DLC does weird things to meta-arcs and I'll talk about that when I get there), Turnabout Goodbyes. I'm looking forward to it.