case by case: AAI 2-2: dark knight of the soul
Welcome back once again to Case by Case, that thing I do with the Ace Attorney games! Yesterday we averted an international incident, sort of; this week we're going to jail! Spoilers below.
So, someone has done a bit of light murder on our pal Bishop, the murder man from last week, right here in the detention center, which also apparently doubles as a prison. So Edgeworth investigates, because he's there and, y'know, he was about to prosecute the victim in court, until the Committee for Prosecutorial Excellence shows up and informs him that he's been taken off the case for his handling of the previous case; instead, some kid who is clearly entirely inept is to handle it. That seems suspicious! I have suspicions!
In order to continue investigating, Edgeworth convinces his old pal Fender (the lawyer in charge of his late father's old law office) to let him temporarily work as his assistant. Fender is pretty unhappy about Edgeworth's whole "becoming a prosecutor in the von Karma school of prosecuting" thing, but is willing to give him a chance to prove he's turned over a new leaf.
We will, I suspect, be seeing a lot more of the characters we met here--Fender, our dad's old partner; Winner, the inept prosecutor; and Gavèlle, the . . . judge who seems to have made Winner her pet and does investigations herself? She's the one from the aforementioned Committee. They are certainly an interesting bunch.
Taking place in a prison made the logistics of this one a fun puzzle to work out: since the victim was in the holding cells, not the prison proper, the discovery of his body in the prison makes any proposed "how did this murder happen?" theories raise a lot of questions involving a fair amount of smuggling and conspiracy. Every proposed solution feels a little bit inadequate, right up until we get to the last one: the warden did it, out of apparent paranoia that the new inmate was actually here to murder her at the behest of the professional assassin who has been extorting her for his entire stay here. She has all of the tools to make it work without needing it to be so convoluted. I like how many reasonable suspects there are at various points of an investigation in these games so far; it makes the process of investigating and narrowing them down feel very rewarding.
We end this one up with Fender suggesting that Edgeworth should consider becoming a defense attorney full time, and Edgeworth seems at the conclusion of this episode to be seriously considering it. (Spoiler alert: he decides against it!) That seems to be the thesis for this game: Edgeworth deciding what it means to be a prosecutor in a society where the legal system is so corrupt.
Anyway. This one was fun! The Committee is going to be our villains for this game, I suspect, but suspicious behavior aside we don't really know what their whole deal is. In the meanwhile, we get to solve a little prison murder, and learn a bit about Edgeworth's dad. Not a bad way to get the ball rolling!
And that's all I've got for today! I think our next case will be . . . tomorrow, I think? It's Monday, right? I'm writing this in the past, I have no idea. But tomorrow, probably, we will be . . . baking a cake? Why not? I'll see you then, friends.