Oh wow, what a ride!

I had only played the original Ace Attorney trilogy before, so I got to The Great Ace Attorney without having experienced the other installments and spin-offs. Even so, I never felt Chronicles was just more of the same, instead it really felt as a step forward with a fair share of new features that expand and refine the original formula.

Since at the end of the day we are playing a series of narrative adventures, let's get straight to the most important aspect of this package: its plot and characters. It contains the usual twists and exaggerations that are commonplace in the first games, and they are masterfully handled here. The plot (the specific of each case and the overarching one that spans both games) are very well written and superbly laid out, I never felt that any scene was lacking nor had any loose end stitched like a patch. Each case is well crafted and never loses the sense of discovery or progression, and there were few times (although they do exist) when I felt it was obvious what was going to happen. Fortunately everything is properly closed and explained by the end, avoiding the inclusion of a cheap cliffhanger to squeeze new installments out of it. This is a universe with many possibilities and Great Ace Attorney still has a long way to go, but the creators do not force the ending to give rise to artificial sequels, and that is something that honors them and I am very grateful for.

As for the characters, there is a great variety of them and they are all properly fleshed out. The secondary characters have a lot of charisma and their personalities are well defined, with special care put to the use of accents, dialects and other paraphernalia that contributes to make them a more colorful bunch. This is accompanied by sensational visual designs and a perfect animation work, picking up the 'minimal animation' style of the original trilogy and translating it to 3D in a quite successfully, with fantastic results.

The group of main characters has a nice balance to it. On the one hand, we have the set of protagonists who are direct heirs to the Phoenix-Maya-Edgeworth trio in the original. In that sense, they are similar characters in terms of approach and personality, but they still feel different and some of them (I will not tell which one so as not to spoil the surprise to anyone) have a deep additional development in the last third of the collection. On the other hand, the remaining main characters breath new air into the formula that expands beyond themselves.

I'm talking, of course, about the world-famous Herlock Sholmes, who is a more experienced and resourceful counterpoint to the lawyer-to-be protagonist, while also acting as an occasional comic relief. With Sholmes comes the first (and super fun) new feature of Great Ace Attorney: the Logic and Reasoning Spectacular events. They are a series of scenes that act as a breaking point in the exploration process' pace and consist of a kind of "dances" between the famous detective and our protagonist, where mysteries and contradictions in the crime scenes must be solved, sometimes with the presence of those involved using our observation skills to assemble together the puzzle of the event in question. These scenes are a blast and I always felt like I wanted more, the animation and sound work in them is out of this world and every time I reached one my heart started pounding with excitement. Great gameplay design here.

The innovations do not end there, however, and the already classic trials have undergone an important facelift. This time, one additional "party" is included in the judicial process: the people's jury. In each trial we will have to convince not only the investigating judge but also the members of the jury of our position, sometimes using their own arguments against them and pitting them against each other to achieve our purpose. It involves an additional degree of reasoning in the trials that makes them more varied and deep. Besides, now there may be more than two witnesses testifying and being cross-examined simultaneously, so we will have to focus not only on their testimony but also on the reactions of the other people on the stand in real time. It does not have a great difficulty and it's almost impossible to fail when a reaction takes place, but again it contributes to breath additional variety and depth into the original formula.

As for the remaining features, this game achieves excellence in all of them. Visually it is, for me, the most polished of all the entries I've played, with a great deal of work done in environments, effects and, especially, characters. As I have already mentioned before, I am in love with their extravagant designs and animations, full of expressivity and personality even in their simplest instances.

Likewise, audio is quite amazing in this pack. The series' spirit is still there, keeping the old sound identity in menus and actions with SFX that are recognizable by any fan of the franchise, and in terms of soundtrack, this is arguably the best installment in the series. The themes have an immense quality, both the reimagined classic themes (few) and the new ones (specially all those related to Herlock Sholmes, really memorable compositions).

All things considered, this was a memorable experience for me, one that I've enjoyed every second of and I'm already missing. If you are into narrative games, there are few better representatives than this one, and if you are an Ace Attorney fan then this is a must stop.