case by case: 4-4: misham the point
Welcome once again to Case by Case, the project where I stay up too late on a Monday playing Ace Attorney games. Last week we listened to some music; this week we are promised a magic show that never comes--jam tomorrow, indeed. Spoilers after the cut.
If the finale for the third game nailed the sense of the grandiose finale, this one does a great job of capturing something the tense unraveling of a dark mystery. It gives us payoff for the full game, including the motives for why our mentor did a bit of light murder in the first case, and what Phoenix Wright has been up to all this time, and what happened seven years ago. The first two segments are fairly straightforward, including a little flashback where we get to play out Phoenix's fall from grace. It's a nice touch!
The bulk of this case, though, is in the extended "MASON system" investigation segment, where we, playing as Phoenix, have to investigate a bunch of different scenes from seven years ago and the present day, and use the bits of information we glean from those to investigate other scenes. Some of this doesn't strictly make narrative sense but it's a series of interlocking puzzles to unravel as you piece together several mysteries, all of which tie in either with this case directly or with some of our characters (notably, Trucy and Apollo). It's very satisfying structurally; you get all the background info you need, and then you use the information you've gleaned to unearth the last information you need: the "why" of our old mentor Kristoph Gavin murdering the victim from the first case. (It was only one of a string of planned murders intended to silence some people who might be able to prove that he's the one who tricked Phoenix into presenting falsified evidence back in the day and thus getting him disbarred.) The fact that there are essentially three separate cases you are investigating here complicates describing things somewhat, but as with most such things it's easier to follow when you play through it.
And of course, this is the first and last case where the so-called jurist system is used (I suspect this was named deliberately to annoy legal nerds, because "jurist" and "juror" are not synonyms). The basic premise goes something like this: people are recognizing that it's a little unreasonable to require a Japanifornian defense attorney to definitively prove that a specific person committed a murder in order to acquit their client, so they've decided to try out bringing back juries. The whole setup and conceit is a little strange; why, for instance, are they letting disgraced former attorney Phoenix Wright just hand-build a trial? But it leads to an interesting subversion of the usual final act formula where the killer is on their last rope, it's obvious they did it, and they are able to keep stalling out by demanding proof until they finally crack. Gavin, this case's real killer (he did a bonus murder!), makes the demands, and then Gavin, this case's prosecutor, says "Yeah, unfortunately this one has a jury, sorry bro", and then murderer Gavin freaks out about letting the hoi polloi into the courtroom, and . . . then the game asks you, as Juror No. 6, whether our client is innocent or guilty. (Another odd touch: you can get a bad end by voting "guilty", but since Juror No. 6 is an actual character I'm not really sure why, except that it provides a satisfying way out of the framing device for this section.)
It's telling, I think, that this system just vanishes without a trace in subsequent games (unless you count the way juries work in the Great Ace Attorney games, I guess). Because while it is addressing what is clearly a flaw with the fictional legal system, that isn't, I think, a flaw in the game design. The murderer's desperate demands for evidence are the puzzle-mystery equivalent of a boss having a second phase. It creates a lot of tension. (The text does also have a little bit of a questionable idea of how juries are supposed to work.)
Which puts this case in an odd place: I think it's a good case, but there is a fundamental flaw in the framing conceit that this is a test run of this new system, and it's probably the right call to abandon the experiment, at least from a gameplay perspective. Gotta keep us working for it, you know?
Anyway, that's all for this case, and thus, for this game. As I predicted, I liked this game a lot better on Switch; the backgrounds feel much less cluttered for the investigations, and that was my primary complaint. It's also a lot easier to spot whatever weird tells the game wants us to look for (though I was still a little tired of that mechanic by the game's end; not enough guidance, and it can be quite time-consuming if you don't know what you're looking for). I even liked Apollo more this time around, though I still think Phoenix is the better character.
Next week we're moving into the 3DS era, with 3D models and Athena Cykes and a prosecutor who throws birds at us. I have at least one opinion about the design of those games, and you will probably hear it soon! I'll see you then, friends.