case by case: 2-4: juan for the history books
Another week, another of my riveting investigations into the cases of the Ace Attorney series. I was going to make a joke about St. Patrick being good and leaving me a murder case for St. Paddy's day but I write these a week before I post them so I have a backlog if something comes up so the joke would be pretty stale by the time this posts. Last week we hung out with some circus folk; this week we get to defend the star of a popular kids' samurai show who was accused of murder, while having to deal with our good pal Oldbag! It's quite different from last time actually. Spoilers below.
If you had to ask me which case would be mostly focused on, you know, soul-searching and what it means to be an attorney and the ethics of defending someone who is definitely guilty, I probably wouldn't have guessed it would be the one where a celebrity hired an assassin to kill a rival who was planning to air some dirt on him. Which isn't to say it lacks in the drama you'd expect from that description, but that's not really the focus here.
Our boyfriend Edgeworth is back, and it turns out he's been doing some soul searching and has learned that it is bad actually to use treachery and deceit to achieve a guilty verdict. The way this case is written it follows up on 1-4 rather than 1-5, because 1-5 was written later despite coming earlier in the game's chronology. It still works, but it ends up feeling a little odd in retrospect since 1-5 is very relevant to Edgeworth's personal crisis. (You could probably do some light rewriting to make it work without really changing things but it is debatable whether that's desirable in a remaster such as these, and it is a pretty minor flaw.)
So here's the core conceit: we take the case of the suspect because a professional assassin has kidnapped Maya and says he will kill her if we don't get an acquittal. It seems someone (in this case, Adrian Andrews, a character who will show up again in a future case) stumbled upon the scene of the assassination and decided to frame our client for the killing, and it just so happens that our client is also the killer's client, and part of the whole package deal is apparently making sure you don't get arrested for the crime. (This sort of mess feels like it would probably work better if you just had an attorney on retainer but I expect our murder man hasn't had to deal with a situation like this before, so we can give him a pass, I guess.) Our murder man also shoots Franziska so she can't prosecute this case, which leads to Edgeworth taking up the mantle of prosecutor, which . . . can't say that worked out in his favor, if we're being honest.
In the early section we are convinced that our client is actually innocent, because we didn't see any psyche-locks when our client says "I didn't kill anyone", which frees us up to focus on investigating; the ethical questions come into play later once we have a pretty solid idea of what's going on in the case. Probably smart narratively.
This one also gets what is possibly my favorite gag with psyche-locks, where Oldbag gets four psyche-locks over a trivial bit of gossip, all of which are unlocked as soon as we give her a piece of paper with the victim's autograph on it.
Overall I like this one. Great character moments, and I like Adrian's story here--she ends up becoming the emotional centerpiece of the story, and also gives us a mystery to piece together when the actual murder is pretty straightforward. Pacing is decent; it might be a little long but that's probably to be expected for a finale. It does struggle a little, I think, from trying to be too epic, but I'm prepared to forgive it that one.
And that concludes the second game! Up next we have Trials and Tribulations, where we will get coffee thrown at us a fair bit and where the game starts having us play as characters who aren't Phoenix. So stay tuned for another tutorial case, where, if memory serves, we get to defend some absolute loser who definitely has no business stepping into a courtroo--it's Phoenix, we're defending Phoenix. I'll be there if you will.