case by case: 4-3: tying up latouse ends
Another week, another writeup by me of a murder in the Ace Attorneyverse. Last week we helped the mob out with a little family problem; this week the murder happens live in concert! The character names in this game are a lot harder to come up with punny titles for, I gotta say. You know the drill by now, but tradition compels me to tell you regardless: spoilers, after the cut.
So this time there's a murder during a performance by Prosecutor Gavin's band, and Apollo is one of the people who discovers the body and Gavin is still prosecuting and I feel like even by Japanifornian legal standards there are several conflicts of interest here that we should at least be acknowledging.
The main thing I remembered about this case is having to watch the video of the song maybe a few more times than I would have liked to. This is, of course, the problem of adding video as evidence that you have to sift through: it takes a lot longer to watch a video than it does to read a few lines of text or look at an image, and there's more going on, so you're more likely to have to consult it multiple times.
The song is fairly inoffensive, at least: it's not like last time where they thought it was appropriate to have the video accompanied by some irritating circus music. And the weird ghostly memories of my past self and my overall improved literacy in the language with which these games communicate information to the player meant I didn't spend as much time on it as I did before. What I didn't remember is that we would also have to listen to it using a mixing board to isolate tracks; most of the time it was pretty obvious what to look for, but the final time (which mercifully has no penalty for failure) I definitely was having a hard time identifying what they wanted me to point out.
The other thing I remembered about this case is feeling that the investigation scenes on the tiny 3DS screen I was playing on were extremely cluttered and hard to parse. And just as I anticipated, being on the Switch really makes those scenes feel a lot better. (It helps that the Switch version also shows you what you've already investigated, a feature the DS version did not include.)
The conclusion of this case sets up the ideas being suggested in the next case, which I'll explore in more thorough detail there, probably; for now it's notable that the critical flaw that the game is suggesting the Japanifornian legal system has is its overreliance on Decisive Evidence in order to prove things. I'm not sure that's actually the takeaway from these games, but it does seem to be suggesting that maybe it isn't reasonable to require the defense to be able to provide a single piece of evidence that proves both their client's innocence and the guilt of another person.
I like this one; the twist that the murder happened at an entirely different time than was initially assumed was well-earned (and foreshadowed by the autopsy report and the fact that the victim died, to our eyes, almost instantly after being shot in the arm), and the resolution to the ongoing mystery of "why did the murderer seem to make everything look like it was following the lyrics to a song being performed" has a very satisfying conclusion. And I enjoy the cases which explore the corruption within the legal system: we have a cop smuggling contraband for the Chief Justice, which . . . does suggest that things are pretty dire right now. It did feel a little odd that the autopsy report never really comes up; there were a few pieces of evidence that, to my recollection, went entirely unused, which is pretty unusual for Ace Attorney cases. But that's not really a complaint, just an oddity.
And that concludes this week. Next week we get to solve multiple cases! It's complicated. There are magicians in it. I'll see you then.