case by case: 2-3: regina's specter
(Editor's note from the far future: this is easily the best title I came up with over the course of this series.)
The inexorable march of time has brought us to another case in the vast oeuvre of the Ace Attorney series. Last week we enabled Maya's get-accused-of-murder habit; this week it's time to hang out with some circus folk. Nice? Spoilers below.
Turnabout Big Top is a land of contrasts. The core story revolves around an uncomfortable love-quadrangle-in-which-one-of-the-angles-is-in-a-coma which focuses on the victim's sixteen year old daughter, which . . . not really a fan, if we're being honest. (Fortunately, it doesn't lean too heavily on it.) But this case also does a great job of portraying this cast of (un)lovable misfits as forming their own little found family, and this helps underscore the overall tragedy of the case. I'm not a fan of several of the characters but the dynamic is solid. I dunno, it's complicated.
Structurally this one is solid; the investigations and trials are well paced, the twist is interesting and does a decent job of explaining away the contradictions you encounter; it does feel a little bit like the bit where our client assaulted the ventriloquist was just forgotten (indeed, the ventriloquist just sort of stops mattering after their testimony is done), which does make the happy-adjacent ending feel a little bit more hollow, but I'm willing to let it slide.
This is, to my recollection, the first time the game starts just penalizing you for clicking "press" on the wrong bits of dialog, which in my estimation detracts every time it appears, given how integral to the trial segments' core loop "pressing every statement and trying to compare them with your understanding of the case" is. (I also feel like this stops being a thing in later games? Maybe I'm misremembering. We'll find out together, maybe!)
What I didn't remember is the extend to which Franziska von Karma is portrayed as . . . not really in control. The implication, I think, is that she attempts to arrange how everything will go in advance and attempts to suppress any information that doesn't go her way, and is not particularly good at adapting to the unexpected. But she does have a whip, and violence solves many situations that planning cannot. (We do find out that Edgeworth may have done a little bit of light sabotage of Franziska's case to help us out, which probably doesn't help her. Though she refuses to take the killer's attempt to bail her out of looking like she botched this investigation.)
And I think that does it for this case. It does some things very well and several other things . . . . less than great. Next week we conclude this game, and we once again get dragged into the world of celebrities in costumes doing murders to each other. But also: professional crime! I know I'm excited.