case by case: 2-1: for the byrdes
Our weekly foray into the twisted world of Japanifornian law has brought us to the first case of Justice for All, the second Ace Attorney game. Last week we learned about scientific investigation; this week we get hit over the head with a fire extinguisher. As ever, spoilers below the cut.
Video games often provide narrative justification for providing us with a tutorial, and in this one, the narrative justification is that the murderer has hit us on the head with a fire extinguisher, for reasons that are initially unclear, and thus given us cartoon amnesia. This gives our defendant, Maggey Byrde, the excuse to tell us how to use the Court Record and about pressing witnesses and presenting evidence.
The short investigation-free nature of these tutorial cases somewhat constrains the possible narrative: it can't be a complicated case, the twist can't be huge, and the number of involved characters has to be fairly small. This one, like the last one, is a murder committed to conceal the culprit's involvement in another, fairly petty crime, and the murderer then attempts to frame a nearby bystander by self-reporting and saying he saw the defendant vent. is amogus still cool, am I doing this right)
I didn't talk about Payne last time he came up, which is appropriate because Phoenix doesn't seem to remember him even after getting his memory back. He provides a bit of narrative justification for how the tutorial cases are so easy compared with the other cases; it would probably feel a little strange to absolutely dunk on the prosecutor in the first case and then have the game treat them as a force to be reckoned with later on. The thing about Payne is as a character he's not particularly remarkable (just kind of a sad little man), but his existence creates some great moments in later games in the series, which I'll talk about more when we get there.
This is the first time we are given the option to present people in the court record as well as evidence. We do this twice in this case, and both times are fairly well prompted (though oddly this change wasn't tutorialized), but I have some memories of this being somewhat frustrating later on. (I also think we lose the ability to do this in later games, so maybe the devs agreed with me?) We'll see how it goes, I suppose.
Some stray thoughts before I wrap up:
I can't remember if "the victim wrote the killer's name . . . in blood!!! (or occasionally some other less interesting material)" ever ends up not being a lie, but so far it has never been. I find myself wondering if it's ever been a thing "IRL", as the kids say.
It would probably be a crime not to mention Phoenix's nightmare in the prologue about a gigantic floating judge crushing him with a gavel; they didn't have to put that in, but they did, and the game is better for it.
And that's it! Next week we go back in time to that time Maya was charged with murder. Again. I'm sure she'll be fine.