逆裁1はそんなによかったのに、今回はどうして？

ユーモアは確かにある。最初の編はすごいと思う。そこから急降下…
狩魔冥はだるいキャラだ。御剣に比べなくていられなく、冥の方には個人性ゼロ。
ケースを解けたら物語はすごい楽しいが、ケースを解くのは不可能と近い。攻略を使って、正解な答えをわかっても納得できず「この証拠をこの時点で突きつけても意味はなんだろ」とよく思う。逆裁2は多くの場合、自分のルールを構わず、間抜けた命令をプレイヤーにだす。ある尋問、同じ揺さぶりを何度も繰り返したら出てくるセリフが勝手に変わってしまい、ストーリーが進む。理屈パズルゲームがヒントなしでこのような直感に反した解き方を期待するのが許せない。

Shu Takumi's name is spelled "Skill Boat."

Continuing replaying through the original releases of the original Ace Attorney trilogy, next up on the list was of course Gyakuten Saiban 2. Now while it has been like eight or so years since I last played these, there were still at least a few things about this game in particular that I remembered quite disliking. A few puzzles in particular I remembered the solutions to, even all these years later, just because they stumped and frustrated me so badly back in the day xD. I overall remembered not really liking the game nearly as much as the other ones I played back then, but overall I still remembered it being mostly fine. It took me a bit over 20 hours (probably, as this game doesn’t count your playtime at all) to play through the Japanese version of the game on real hardware (that being my GameBoy Player).

Narratively this game is a straight up sequel to the last one. While the first game covers Phoenix Wright’s first year as a defense attorney, this game covers his second. Miles Edgeworth is replaced with the daughter of one of the first game’s antagonist, Franziska Von Karma, and Phoenix gets a new sidekick in the form of Maya Fei’s little cousin Pearl. However, despite this game having the exact same writer/director as the previous game, the writing is so aggressively inferior that for years I thought for sure it had to have been written by someone else. The issues are really so widespread and varied that it’s hard to pick just one place to start, but we may as well start by taking a look at our new cast.

Maya ends up actually spending a lot of this game occupied with other things (whether of her own will or otherwise), so Phoenix’s main partner is Pearl for roughly 2/3rds of the game. This isn’t a terrible problem, really, as Pearl is cute and funny, but she’s also just a weaker copy of Maya in most ways. She’s silly, she’s not very worldly, and she can summon Maya’s dead big sister Mia (which is super creepy, given that they still give her huge boobs with cleavage even though Pearl is an eight-year old), and she just doesn’t have the chemistry with Phoenix that Maya has. The one case that Maya is actually around for the entirety of really helps drive this point home as well.

However, as much as Pearl is a sorta wimpy replacement for Maya, the much worse addition to the cast is our new prosecutor, Franziska Von Karma. Over the course of the first game, Phoenix and Edgeworth have a relationship that covers the span of the entire story. Thanks to Phoenix, Edgeworth slowly realizes that his world view of “victory at any cost” is a harmful one, and that he can very much use his talents as a prosecutor for something other than just getting guilty verdicts. Edgeworth becoming a better person through his relationship with Phoenix is easily one of the biggest strengths of the first game’s narrative. Franziska, on the other hand, is a VERY underwhelming replacement for him. Morally, she is nearly exactly the same as Edgeworth in the first game (victory at any cost), yet even then she barely has any character arc to speak of, and that which she does have is very poorly done (giving her the whip back at the end is also one of the most astonishingly misguided bits of character writing I’ve seen in a while, hot damn). She is more or less narrative dead weight and just Edgeworth’s hype woman, warming his seat until he can make his triumphant return in the game’s finale. She feels very disposable as a result, and she’s mainly just a conduit for the game’s very poor sense of humor (that sense of humor being that being cruel and mean to people is always funny, which comes off far more often as mean spirited than funny).

This, in turn, is a factor of the game’s larger problem with how it writes its women. Women are never allowed to be as complicated, flawed, or even straight up evil as their male counterparts. This is, to a degree, a problem that the first Ace Attorney has as well, but it’s MUCH more of a problem here. Whenever a woman is evil or bad, it’s always underlined with this ultimate reveal of them actually being scared, weak, vulnerable, etc. While it’s not like men are never emotional, absurd, or foolish in Ace Attorney 1 and 2, the fact that they get to be more than that while women don’t is very difficult to ignore for me. Women seem to always be written with this underlying assumption that they are fundamentally caring and sensitive creatures, and it means that their writing is fundamentally hamstrung from the start.

AA2’s misogynistic approach to how its female characters are written isn’t the explicit cause of why I say the writing is bad (any more than the racist caricatures or the profoundly toxic attitude towards suicide are), but they’re part of the larger structure of why the game’s writing is so weak. The game largely being focused around female characters who are then written so poorly means that the story is very flimsy as a result. This game lacks any meaningful meta-narrative that covers all four cases (with little it does have being confused and contradictory nonsense), and Franziska being such a paper thin bench-warmer of a character is a very big reason for that, in my eyes. It would be one thing if AA2 was just a less well realized story than its predecessor. It might even be something I could look past. But with its combination of poorly written and very distasteful characters, it’s a mish-mash of bad taste and weak writing that makes for an experience that is as difficult to care about as it is just generally unpleasant to go through.

This is also not helped at all by the game’s relatively weak case design either. We still have the same formula of more linear investigation sections alternating with the court room trial sections, but this game spices up both in very meaningful ways. First of all, the investigation sections are spiced up with the psycho lock system, which is basically just adding cross-examination sections to the investigation sections to make them a bit more than just reading text. Then, you have the trial sections, which are varied up by the changing of the penalty system. In the first Gyakuten Saiban, it was five strikes and you’re out (and in the original GBA version, you had to start from the very beginning of the case if you struck out, not just from your last save point). From this game forward, we have more of a health bar system, with different errors taking away larger amounts of health (and that includes several penalties that are simply an instant death if you get them wrong).

Both of these new mechanics are mired terribly by the generally bad signposting and illogical design that are peppered through the entire game. From the first case through to the fourth one (which, from its writing to its puzzles, is one of the weakest cases in the entire series, at least for me), you have at least one puzzle per case that is very unclear on what it wants from the player. Whether it’s down to an unclearly worded question or down to a completely illogical deduction you’re forced to make (with cases 2 and 4 having the worst instances of illogical nonsense, with number 4 having one that I’m still not sure of the logic behind reading it in either English or Japanese). It makes a game with an already weak narrative that much more weak on top of all that, as it’s very hard to care about a mystery or its deductions when the solutions seem so arbitrary. It easily turns into a vicious cycle, where, because you just stop caring about the mystery or the story, it’s that much harder to solve the deductions that are actually doable because you just keep doubting yourself that this logic is actually logical along the game’s strange lines.

There are other meaningful problems too, of course. For example, this version of the game lacks any mid-section hard save points as well as a speed-up feature of any kind, so failure is punished by wasting a LOT of your time redoing stuff you’ve already done. You also can’t restore health any way other than succeeding in breaking a psycho lock, so if you’re having trouble in the middle of a court section, you might need to replay through a LOT of content very frequently if you’re on something you only have once chance left to succeed on. But these pale in comparison to the poor signposting for the game’s mystery stuff. It all adds up to a game that isn’t fun to play wrapped up in a story that’s very difficult to find much enjoyment in on top of that.

The game’s presentation is at least a fine followup to the first game. While I don’t love all of the new songs, they’re by and large very nice evolutions on the overall soundtrack of the first game while bringing back a bunch of old favorites like the Steel Samurai theme. The graphics are also very nice. While there are honestly a few too many returning characters for my liking (it makes things feel a little stale after a while, but that’s a much more personal issue than anything else), the new characters have fun and well animated designs, and it’s just as enjoyable as ever to watch them strut their stuff. It just makes me wish it was all in service of stronger writing and game design, I suppose ^^;

Verdict: Not Recommended. I went back and forth for a good while on the verdict I wanted to give this game, but a conversation with my partner (who is played through this alongside me and disliked her time with it even more than I did) really helped clear things up for me. She asked if I’d recommend someone just outright skip this game and go right on to Ace Attorney 3, and I honestly couldn’t think of a reason to not answer ‘no’. The story isn’t particularly important to later Ace Attorney games, and both mechanically and narratively it’s just a generally quite unpleasant time. There’s enough other far better Ace Attorney out there that your time is simply worth better. Even for someone like me, who has played AA games after this and know how much better they are, I struggled to find the motivation to continue on to the third game because my time with this game was just that bad. If that doesn’t speak to how difficult this game is to enjoy, then I don’t really know what can ^^;