case by case: GAA 1-5: the final benediction
It's a serious faux pas.
Welcome back once again to another installment of Case by Case, our weekly foray into the murder-filled world of Ace Attorney. Last week we dealt with a rather high-strung client; this week it's time to wrap up the first Great Ace Attorney game! Spoilers below.
This one is a long one, but I finally found someone who did a little writeup of how long not only the cases are, but the individual segments are, so I was foresightful enough to take a break halfway in. It's allegedly about nine hours total, neatly divided into four investigation segments followed by four trial segments.
The murder in this one doesn't happen until around the end of the third segment; we meet and chat with the future victim, a pawnbroker, we have dinner with the crew, and then the murder happens after all of that. There's a lot of information being presented, laying the groundwork not just for this case, but for the way this case will ultimately lead into the story for the next game. At the end of the investigation we aren't left with a clear idea of what exactly has happened, but we know now that McGilded, our client from the first case here in England, definitely did the murder, and also that there was a lot more going on in that murder than we suspected--something about discs that play in music boxes and using a pawnbroker as a dead drop; a lot of questions and not a lot of answers, as you'd expect for halfway through. We know we have a locked room mystery, and at a glance it seems more unreasonable than usual to assume our client did it, but we don't have a clear picture of what happened.
Then we move onto the rather lengthy trial segment, where our understanding of events moves from "pawn shop robbery gone wrong" to "there is something more sinister at work here" until, finally, we drag the murderman we met much earlier onto the stand, and ultimately come to the conclusion that this whole affair, including the McGilded case, was about a communications officer stealing and selling government secrets by encoding them on some specially made music box disks. We even find out who murdered him (also our murder man); one set of mysteries, at least, is neatly tidied up.
Thematically this one leans strongly on trust, and what that means; it isn't just bringing the McGilded case back for the sake of tying up the mystery, it's bringing it back because that was an instance where Ryunosuke trusted his client and had that trust betrayed. Ryunosuke decides to trust Gina even though, under duress, she helped McGilded cover up his crime; Gina learns that placing her trust in someone (in this case, Ryunosuke) can be very powerful. This theme, of course, runs through all of Ace Attorney to some extent, but the fact that Ryunosuke has been betrayed here makes it hit home a little better here. And the fact that despite enduring the hostility of London he is able, at the end of everything, to tell Prosecutor Dracula that at the end of the day, everyone is still just a person inside no matter where they're from, gives us a nice little emotional coda to that whole theme, making the game feel like it's wrapped up.
But of course it hasn't. We still have our murderess from the intro trial to deal with, with her unknown motives for killing Dr. John H. Wilson; and then we find out, because Iris Wilson (Sholmes's child genius companion) cracked the cypher on the message, that our best friend Asogi, and Inspector Gregson, and Dr. Wilson, are all mentioned in the top secret message this whole case was about.
I think this is the only time in the series that events that happen in the trial become important for their own sake; Gregson acts oddly at several points and we are expected to recall his odd behavior later in order to make some deductions that do not appear in the court record. It's interesting. It's also interesting that Gregson is abetting the murder man in order to recover classified info; we're meant, I think, to feel that he was put in an impossible position, but one can't help but feel that he had a way out of this that wasn't quite so likely to lead to the death of an innocent girl. But then, we are also clearly meant to feel that his actions were wrong, despite his predicament, so who's to say.
And that wraps up the first Great Ace Attorney game! I like how willing they are to break the formulas here; my sense is that while the other games are focused first on crafting a mystery and then telling a story about it, these are focused first on crafting a story and then putting a mystery in it. Which is interesting; the mysteries in the main series games are pretty universally very satisfying, but in this one I'm really playing more to see the story unfold, and less to puzzle out what happened.
There is a small chance I will be taking next week off, since this case has burned through my backlog and I'd like to reestablish that before I continue, but also given that the next case is an introductory case, the odds are pretty good that I'll be able to get that out of the way on the weekend and still be on track to update again next Monday. Stay tuned either way! The RSS feed will update, as will my Bluesky account.
It's hard to believe we're only weeks away from the actual end of this series, and I'm excited to see where this story ends up with all of you. But until next time, friends, take care of yourselves.