case by case: 5-🐋: doing (c)rimes

09 Jul, 2024

Welcome back to Case by Case, the series where I play what some might consider an unreasonable amount of Ace Attorney! There's a heat wave here in Seattle so, given that last week we wrapped up the main game of Dual Destiny, it seemed appropriate to bust out the summer funtime adventure murder DLC case, where our client is a whale! (Though I would have played it even if it were not appropriate, obviously.) As always, spoilers after the cut.

Going into this one the main thing I remembered from having watched a playthrough before was the big "there are two whales" twist at the end; it's impressive how little that actually changes about that case, in retrospect. There is a much more impactful twist (crime scene is not what we thought it was) earlier which I didn't recall; we'll get back to that later.

This one is mostly pretty fun! I feel like our murder man du jour is . . . probably on the problematic side of things, but there is a nice novelty of having Marlon be entirely redeemable--we do have a murderer in 1-3 who is acting in self-defense but she's also kind of not a great person. Here it's purely an accident, and the narrative concludes with him getting his job back a few months later.

An interesting facet of this one is that, as a DLC case, it contains tutorial elements for everything we do, because we could theoretically be playing this first, but it structurally feels like a full case: two investigation segments, two trial segments, a decently-sized cast of characters and a lot of evidence to sort through (including several "discarded evidence we don't need anymore" moments). They could easily get away with doing this for the first case of every game, I think, but I appreciate that they don't do this; I have a fondness for the tutorial cases, simple as they are; they help with overall pacing and the simplicity can be used to put in some foreshadowing and plot details that might otherwise be lost in the more complicated cases.

I mentioned an impactful twist earlier; we find out that the crime scene is different than initially thought, which has happened enough times in the series now that it doesn't come as a shock. This one is notable because the game just sort of hands it to us, which, in a nutshell, is my main complaint with Dual Destinies: it just sort of hands things to us. This does make the pacing much more reliable, since you won't get stuck at a pivotal moment, but it also takes away that feeling of being clever for having worked it out, that beautiful "aha!" moment where one puzzle piece moves and everything else clicks into place and you get to think "I did that, that was me."

It makes the games a lot more frictionless¹; it's much harder to get stuck, it's much less likely that you'll hit a point in a trial segment where you're just brute forcing the solution, but losing the thrill of discovery does, ultimately, make for less satisfying experiences. I still enjoy the cases and still enjoy puzzling things out, of course, but I end up feeling like I'm taking a more passive role than in the first trilogy.

We will be taking a break next week, as I'll be out of town next weekend and I have exhausted my one-week buffer of cases (and also I need to take a couple breaks so I can make AAI happen as close to launch as possible); but after that we will be back with Spirit of Justice! I haven't played any of SoJ, and though I watched parts of a playthrough of it I don't think I will remember more than the odd bits and pieces. I don't, in other words, really know what to expect from this one, and that's an exciting place to be. I'll see you then, friends.

#case by case