case by case: GAA 1-4: green with envy
I've never been so owned.
Welcome back, once again, to Case by Case, our ongoing series going through the Ace Attorney series one case at a time! Last week we had a low-quality client; this week we get to meet a famous Japanese novelist! Spoilers below.
Continuing this game's theme of featuring unusual cases, this marks the first case in the series which is just straight up not a murder case. No one is even suspected of having died! I think this is a narrative strength of these games having a jury, so the requirement is removed for having The Guy What Done It break down in court and confess his crimes in order to get our client off; you just need to persuade some jurors. It does take a bit of punch out of the final cross-examination, though: the stakes are a bit lower. You can feel the last few moments of the case going in your favor, which makes the stakes feel a bit lower.
Natsume Soseki is a renowned Japanese novelist who spent a few years in England at the turn of the 20th century; he's a real person, you can read about him. This is noteworthy because this is is the first time a real person has appeared in the series; it's also noteworthy because his portrayal is not exactly flattering. He's nervous, fidgety, paranoid, possibly delusional, and extremely extra at all times. He is also the perfect foil for our beloved protagonist, Ryunosuke.
This game is a story about being a stranger in a hostile land. Soseki has been here for a year and the isolation has very nearly broken him; Ryunosuke has been here for two days and has already had the man he just represented in court fabricate evidence for him before burning to death inside that very fabrication. He is feeling lost, and isn't sure whether he can continue. But while Soseki withdraws into himself, Ryunosuke has Susato, and also weapons-grade weirdo Herlock Sholmes, to believe in him and help him keep his head up high. And he can't just abandon someone like Soseki, someone who could very easily be him, to his fate.
I like this case, structurally, but I would like it more if the twist that the body had been moved across the street was more heavily foreshadowed. You don't really get much out of the investigation segments; a few clues early on could have made that moment feel a lot cooler. As it stands, it feels like you only find out what side of the street it's on immediately before the big reveal. Similarly, I like the novelty of "this particular stabbing was actually entirely accidental". We have had accidental deaths before, but usually that person at least knew what had happened. Here, Mrs Garrideb has no idea that the knife she threw at her husband1 caused any harm to anyone; that she is guilty of negligently almost killing someone is as much a revelation to her as it is to the rest of the courtroom.
Van Zieks gets several moments in this case which seem to be meant to humanize him. He shows a moment of unexpected kindness to the police constable who tampered with the crime scene so that he wouldn't have to cancel his anniversary dinner, and at times he seems almost helpful to Ryunosuke's attempts to dig up the truth. I have a hard time figuring out what to make of our resident Dracula.
We end up revisiting a lot of these characters, including a few that we met for a few brief moments, in the next game, at which point we will get to delve in even greater detail into the squalid conditions Soseki was forced to live in. Which ties nicely in with the closing remarks from Mr Sholmes at the end of this episode, where he talks about bright lights casting deep shadows and the darkness lurking beneath London. Which, yeah, it's easy to see why some of that starry-eyed luster from our young students about to embark on their voyage might have worn off by now.
Anyway, that's about all I have for this week. Stay tuned next time when we'll be doing a bit of light intellectual property theft! I can't wait.
This whole bit is kind of uncomfortable, especially given that the text treats it with levity.↩