Portable Ops is an odd entry in the Metal Gear franchise. Be it because of its poor accessibility on a handheld console that can definitely not hold its weight, be it because it has sprung countless arguments online to whether it is worth it to play or even debating about its place in the canon story line of Metal Gear, be it because ever since Acid and Acid 2 and countless mobile games people just stopped caring about the handheld titles in the series, being overlooked as mediocre or simply not giving them a try... Pretty much everything that could go wrong with going ahead and making a fully-fledged story made to fit into an already established and moving story line is simply been overlooked and underrated by many.

I've got to say that my first experience with the game wasn't the best. I first picked it up in my PlayStation Vita console, installed a patch that could let me play with dual stick controls (...because if you don't do this, the only way to move the camera would be with the D-Pad that is very conveniently placed on top of the movement stick in the console), and so I booted it up. The first look at it wasn't really all that great.
I noticed how the game ran pretty poorly in its actual hardware, a sub-30 fps at all times wasn't great for a series that is usually pretty slick and smooth in a technical level, coupled that with the fact that I was pretty much counting pixels on my screen when I was trying to take a guard down with Snake's tranquilizer pistol, it wasn't a really great two first hours and I kind of dreaded the fact that I was gonna have to be playing this but not Metal Gear Solid 4 or something else.

So, in my journey to see how could I improve this game experience I noticed that there was a 60 FPS patch for use with the PPSSPP emulator, and naturally I just had to try it. I put my save file in my computer, increased the internal resolution to 1080p and keybinded in dual stick controls... And, oh my god. This game is literally just diet Metal Gear Solid 3 absolutely shackled and limited by its original hardware its insane, and it doesn't surprise me how this didn't catch on to people even today.

Portable Ops is a following story to Snake Eater, if you think about it, it's kind of like a neglected Metal Gear Solid 3.5 and its main catch is on how the operation rolls out. In most Metal Gear games it's mainly Snake sneaking into some sort of facility without any prior objects of utility or weapons, these having to be found in the facility itself in order to get to advance forward, beat bosses easier or take out guards faster. And in that regard, this game is completely different to any other entry that tries to put its spin into the Tactical Espionage series.

In this game, due to how the plot is set up very early on, Snake doesn't have to work all alone anymore, but you instead have to sneak into different places around San Hieronymo and convince the guards that you take out to join your side to aid in the creation of weaponry, medicine, scouting different places to inform you of valuable arms that might be useful for your own mission, and with this you practically get to create your own army that's out to rebel against Gene who longs for a country inhabited by special soldiers at the expense of some of his own troops... And eventually Metal Gear coming into question.
A lot of these recruits have their own special abilities and are more fit to be dispatched in certain areas (such as tech or medical) than to use in battle, because you can opt for playing as 200 or so characters that you can recruit yourself, some even secret only able to be entered through passwords, they can all be equipped with their own weapons and if you have an unit that gets eliminated or depletes its stamina you can just roll out with another one, this works a lot for gathering objects when your inventory full.

Now, the bad part about this system is that in order to recruit members you have to take out guards, generals, medics and scientists, and that's fine since the stealth aspect of this game is pretty easy, but the one thing that turns away people the other direction is having to drag their corpse all the way back to the spawn area behind a truck to count them in. This process takes a long while if you're doing it by hand and you most likely will because I've found that the mechanic of leaving people nearby cardboard boxes with the other members of your team around for them to get captured simply doesn't work. I personally had to use fast forwarding in my emulator to make it less of a chore, and even then I had to repeat a few missions so that I could gather enough members for a sustainable medic team or spy unit, but it's something that you'll do once and never again hopefully, since most of the time you'll use Snake anyways, and unless you fight bosses there's no need for more than your trusty Mk22 since the enemies' routing is pretty basic and most of the maps you're gonna sneak into are pretty much enclosed, smaller spaces because of the console it was put on (but also works at its advantage because it makes for a bite-sized experience you can either binge or hop in and on every so often).

Having explained how the recruitment system works, the only thing that there is left to say about this game is pretty much its story, it's surprisingly good for a spin-off game of a seemingly low budget, it has great pacing, a great retrospective on Big Boss's actions through MGS3, and even a glimpse into the future that is the start of the whole franchise and a small array of familiar faces who make for bosses that are pretty much on par with mainline. I particularly like how they adapted the story to be in this very rough comic artstyle that fits the tone of the series perfectly and manages to absolutely bring the same movie-like vibe and action of the 3D titles to the portable system.

It's a shame that a lot of people won't look back to this game because it's been argued forever whether it is worth it or not because "it's not canon", when it was made carefully so it didn't contradict anything from the main story, expanded upon Naked Snake's story and even had the approval and overseeing of Kojima himself even if he didn't direct or write for it (he literally didn't want to drop MGS4 until this one was finished and out), and people worry about it because it didn't show up on a timeline? Gimme a break, the story is excellent for what it is and you best bet it's canon, it'd be a waste if it wasn't. (Manifesting it shows up as a remastered version in Master Collection Vol. 2 whenever that comes out three years from now on)

Overall, pretty surprising. Calling to the Night is a really good credits song, too.

Long before I started playing any of the games in the series, I assumed that the general consensus surrounding the Devil May Cry franchise was positive due to its sheer popularity, so when I found out that a majority of people actually hated Devil May Cry 2, I was both surprised and intrigued. Granted, a lot of my excitement towards playing this game was more out of morbid curiosity than anything, but I was still willing to give the game a chance to see if it wasn't as horrible as people kept saying it was, and I went into it with a half-joking "How bad can it be?" attitude. As someone who wasn't even that big of a fan of the first Devil May Cry game, I was baffled by just how much its sequel got wrong and just how incompetent it is, because while it wasn't outright unplayable (although it does border on that at times), Devil May Cry 2 was still an absolute disaster of a game that prides itself in being as dull of an experience as possible.

When I beat Devil May Cry on the last day of July, my thoughts on it were very complicated, but even with all of its flaws and odd design choices, I could at least say that the game wasn't boring. In Devil May Cry 2, though, boredom takes center stage, as it strips any ounce of challenge and depth from the first game's combat in favor of turning its core gameplay into a mindless shell of what came before it. In almost every situation you're thrown in, the absolute best and most effective strategy is to stand completely still and spam your gun button until all the enemies die, and since the melee combat is sluggish and unsatisfying and the enemies barely try to attack or even move towards you, this mind-numbing strategy ends up being your one answer to everything. Instead of trying to pull off flashy combos and alternating between melee and ranged attacks like in the first game, I was instead going from area to area and essentially mashing the square button until the battle music stopped playing while occasionally dodging an enemy's ranged attack, and the monotony of having to fight the same enemies using the same foolproof strategy while getting punished for trying literally anything else over and over again made playing this game feel more like Hell than the levels that took place in the actual Underworld. Speaking of which, Devil May Cry 2 replaces the Resident Evil-style exploration and puzzles of its first game in favor of making every single area in every stage take forever to get through, as Dante's slow running speed had me dodge rolling around these needlessly empty and bland locales just to get to the next section. Devil May Cry 2 also replaces the manual targeting of the original game with automatic targeting, and it not only made the boss fights (which were already a joke to begin with) take way longer to beat than they needed to due to your attacks constantly going in the other direction, but it also made activating the required switches nearly impossible with how the game would rather make you face the infinitely spawning enemies than the switch that you're deliberately trying to hit.

While the original Devil May Cry had some design choices that held the experience back for me, Devil May Cry 2 went beyond that and instead decided to add a bunch of features that were all completely superfluous, and I honestly found that to be more insulting. For some reason, Dante can run up walls now, and not only does he only go up a pitiful distance, but the only times where I ever actually used this move were all by mistake. The whole amulet mechanic is also useless, as the unlockable moves just ended up being incredibly situational during combat while also trying to sell the illusion of customization and player choice, and the required uses of each move for traversal both occurred exactly once immediately after they were unlocked. Despite all of these nonsensical additions, Devil May Cry 2 somehow managed to fail to fix one of the main issues of the first game, as the fixed camera is still disorienting to the point where it constantly obscures its objects of focus. On top of being absolutely miserable to play, Devil May Cry 2 also fell flat from a story perspective, as the nonsensical plot was made even worse thanks to Dante's personality being changed from a cocky goofball to a coin-flipping idiot that barely speaks. Having the second disc essentially be repeated content with a swapped protagonist was just an additional slap to the face, and this choice just screams lazy rather than giving the game any replay value. My hate for this game makes it so that even acknowledging its improvements on the original feels wrong, as the additions of an actual dodge button and the ability to swap weapons on the fly pale in comparison to just how bad everything else is in this game. Devil May Cry 2 was a chore of a game that felt atrocious to play, and since I've disliked both of the games from this franchise that I've played so far, I really hope that Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening makes up for it.

Do you like Genshin? Do you like Vtubers? Do you like FEH? Here’s all of that!

So this is the supposedly latest "mainline" game in this franchise. I know Engage is allegedly a game celebrating
the 30th anniversary of FE, but that's even worse. Bold move celebrating the 30th anniversary of FE with a game that doesn't look like FE at all.

FE always looked like anime and followed the latest trends in artstyle etc, but all character designs still had a coherent theme. The medieval europe aesthetic was always a big influence. Even in a horny game like Fates (even the Hoshido desgins were coherent for the aesthetics of the nation). Ignoring the fanservice most designs looked decent (though there were some stinkers like Peri).

But Engage looks like it has no theme at all. It's just "fantasy" and goofy. The character designs are all over the place like they're all from different fantasy gacha games.
These designs seem like a perfect blend of every currrent day anime design trope and it just looks soulless as a result.
This artstyle is by far the worst the series has ever seen, and it makes me appreciate Three Houses, SoV, Path of Radiance etc. all the more. You know what actually bothers me the most, more than just disliking the aesthetics of the designs? All the women I see look like goddamn kids and suffer from same face syndrome. And my god, the 3D models in general look absolutely atrocious. Even the past lords look like shit in this game's style. Engage is certainly more colorful, but that's honestly it. The textures in Engage are another problem, they're mostly not there. The textures on everything are so flat. Everything looks so artificial because of it. FE3H was not a good looking game but I expected more from a game that released nearly 4 years later.

This game looks like a dollar store genshin that collabs with FE, but at least the Genshin characters look coherent for the themes and aesthetics of the nation they come from.
Colgate and friends look like a travelling circus. I remember when some pictures of this game leaked some time ago and people were 100% convinced that this was a chinese bootleg FE gacha, because of course they would.

Well, let's talk about the gameplay. It's FE so the gameplay was bound to be fun. People say that Engage is going back to its roots because the game "focuses more on the
tactical gameplay than the story, lore and characters". While it's true that Engage offers more variety in the tactical side of things, it still falls flat since the game is lacking some kind of balance. Thanks to the rings units are broken from the start. The problem is, to balance against this, you’d need to have absurdly difficult enemy units, who would invalidate all non-ring using characters and they didn't do that. Though, there are units/classes that are broken in general, so clearing maps wasn't really challenging. Engage offers average FE gameplay with some neat battle animation updates. There are some improvements, but also some step backs. But hey, at least we got weapon triangle back, right?
This is by far one of the easiest FE game I've played. Don't get me wrong, the gameplay is fun but it's not "more challenging" than the past games in that regard. Also, Engage got new game modes and mechanics that are straight up from FEH and I'm not a fan.

The story...exists. Most FE stories aren't really all that unique but can still be enjoyed as political dramas on surface level for most of the time (I greatly enjoyed PoR, Thracia and 3H)
Engage's plot is the most vanilla, over the top anime story in this franchise and I mean this in a bad way. Yeah, it's even more "anime" than Fates. The story simply does not live up to previous installments in the series writing-wise.
Oh and Emblem heroes don't factor much into the plot at all, even Marth.

Also, I hate the "but FE was always anime!!!" argument. Yeah, no shit. Anime can have different genres, artstyle and a difference in tone and groundedness. Not every modern anime has to look like a generic moe harem isekai. Because you know, even "anime" can be serious. And it's not like the series cannot try to do that these days - see SoV and 3H. Now, I'm not against lighthearted plots in this franchise, but Engage's plot is just a joke that overstays its welcome way too long. It's been a while since I cringed so many times while playing a game.

The cast is also the most forgettable one. None of the characters felt unique or interesting in any way. Everyone here is meant to either be a laugh, a bland stereotype, or combination of the two. So, tiresome one-note gimmicks whose character profile never left the draft drawer but was put into the game anyway. Supports heavily focus on the character's gimmicks, which got annoying very fast. The supports are not engaging in any way. It's quantity over quality. All of them are very short, but I appreciate that they fully voiced all of them.

Honestly, the only reason I played this game is because I love Fire Emblem and wanted to give this game a chance. I enjoy FE gameplay, but even good gameplay can get tedious and boring if I don't care about the rest of the game. After finishing a map, I got rewarded with more over the top anime crap and meh characters. I was just not invested enough because of that and hated my time with it as a result. See, I love plenty of gameplay-focused games. The issue is that Engage isn't structured like a gameplay-focused game, it's structured like a game with a shit story featuring shitty characters. Does it give you a rough outline of a story to then let you play freely with no distraction? No. It's not a dungeon crawler, it's not XCOM, it's a very classic FE game with tons of character introductions and interactions that are wasting your time, they're just bad. I can't just admit the game's writing is so shit that it's better to skip every cutscene and call that "gameplay-focused", it's clearly a failure and not the intended experience. That was the worst experience I had with a FE game.

The only interesting thing about Engage are the past lords but if I want to see them I just play their games, where they look decent and not like...this. They're also not even able to
interact with each other or are all that relevant in the story, so whats the point of this "celebration"? That you'll point at your favorite lords and clap? That's what FEH is for. This game that shoves in generic anime designs, gags, lines, acting, same baby face women, and non fitting outfits and other elements is for me the worst FE game. I hope the next one will be better, because this was very disappointing after FE3H's big success. I understand that Engage is supposed to be a goofy and lighthearted "celebration" of this franchise, but why is it mainline? And why is it done so bad? There are many other and better ways to celebrate this franchise that I came to really love. But not like this. It's nothing more than a soulless cashgrab.

(The game leaked a few days ago, so I had the chance to play it early.)

Intelligent systems, is this a bit?

As soon as it was announced Engage is a game that was raising a bunch of red flags. Nostalgia baiting, the awful focus on a myunit, gimmicky new mechanics and fucking GACHA? The whole thing really looked like intelligent systems giving into the worst tendancies of post-awakening Fire Emblem.

And y'know, if that was it, i'd probably be at least fine with that. Fates, even revelations, one of the dumbest fucking things i've ever played, are all still at the very least, compelling. I have like 100 hours in Fates, embarassing as that is, because the Fire Emblem formula is still pretty great, conquest has like 5 good maps and the bad stuff is mostly ignorable. I have played fucking Gaiden to completion even after Echoes was out just to see what was up.

With engage ive got 15 hours in it and I can barely stomach a moment more. I want to keep going because I love FE. But I absolutely cannot stand this game.

Yes, like Fates, Engage is a game that falls prey to IS' stupid tendancies. But the real sin with Engage is that what has been cribbed about just does not gel together at all.

Main issue is bloat, on a gameplay level. Part of the genius of Fire Emblem is how really quite simple it all is, and how limited the resources and options really all are. The best section of the entire franchise, and it's not even close, is Thracia 776's Munster arc, a section which truly relies on you making the most of an incredibly limited toolset and pushing it as far as you can against overwhelming odds. Of course, over the years the complexity inevitably increased, to mixed but often positive results. Engage firmly goes too far though.

The big problem is the mixing of the social sim stuff from 3 houses whilst also incorporating its new stuff with the engage system and so on. Being able to boost stats and stuff in a hub was questionable but mosty worked in 3H, a game structured around it. In Engage all the stat boosting, friendship boosting, animal handling(why), minigames (WHY) are mindnumbing roadblocks to the fun strategy. These sorts of things have never really sat right in FE, where the ways damage formulas and speed formulas in particular work make tiny stat boosts often have huge implications, but this goes way too far in a game system very unsuited to it. It essentially stretches the preperations stage, already too long in most FEs, to being the majority of the game. It's unnaceptable.

And it's a real shame as a lot of the changes in the gameplay department are actually really good. Map design is probably the best it's been since radiant dawn, unit balance doesnt seem so overfocused on a small amount of strong units, bosses actually move about and honestly the engage system, regardless of it being insulting to the original characters and whatever, is a pretty neat gimmick honestly. It's a way more balanced version of pair up that gives effectively more burst damage and interesting techniques, which combined with enemies being generally stronger than previous games makes for an interesing loop. Obviously, its in this game so the execution is flubbed - the rings being limited in number kinda undoes the balance improvements on its own, and the skill inheritance, bonding, and gacha ring stuff is yet more pointless fluff to waste your damn time.

If the game just had the engage system over lets say, Radiance series levels of prep and other stuff going on, the gameplay could have been great, probably the best the series had seen in over a decade. But there's way too much going on to waste your time and it does not gel together.

The story and characters are so bafflingly bad I don't know who it's even for. As ludicrously bad as fates' are, at least it's very easy to pinpoint what's going for - the sheer power trip of being infalliable corrin, the stupid golden route both sides-ing and being able to have children with your big booba wyvern riding sister. Engage's is less bad in the "IS is down bad" regard, but it's worse in that it just completely forgets to have anything at all. It's completely hookless, the world and characters feel like they've got nothing going on at all, and it all feels very rote. The mystical/dragon elements feel tappen onto a pretty normal fire emblem plot and all they do is make the MC less personable and relatable. FE has only really had a good story in like 4 games, but it's structure as a series has always made it very easy to connect to characters and it has never dropped the ball this hard, and it's not like it's even trying something.

The whole game is just a confused mess, and doesnt even seem to be sure of who it's appeal is for. It's nostalgia bait to an extreme whilst barely resembling the simple, down to earth nature of those games. It goes for a simpler structure, dropping choice and most of the social sim elements (which people quite liked even if they're not entirely my bag), but keeps just enough of them to be really annoying. Characters are less of a focus for some reason? Romance is less of a thing? I can't even tell who this game is for because it feels like it consciously does something to alienate a fan of every game in the series, and it certaintly isnt for new players. Even as a "we needed 20 more characters to eventually put in heroes" joint it's a complete failure.

I hesitate to say this is the worst FE - Revelations is truly awful - but even Fates had like, an idea of what it was going for, as bad as what that is and as bad as it's execution is. Engage is aimless and awful and for the first time ever, it's easy for me to put an FE down.

TL;DR: Hollow Knight is a uniquely fresh take on an exploration game that perfectly captures the principles of what it means for a video game to be fun. While its DLC is somewhat of a slog, the main game offers excitement at every turn for hours due to the amount of effort put in to build its world and story. It’s easily one of the best games I have ever played.

In almost everyone's lives there is a time where we are exposed to something so new we feel lost. It might be because we're going somewhere as exciting and large as the Grand Canyon, taking in every inch of its magnificent view from high above the ground or somewhere small yet crafted with such incredibly painstaking attention to detail that it's difficult not to admire it, like a museum. The world is full of new things to experience and when we humans are faced in a situation where we are to venture into the unknown our natural tendency for curiosity wants us to explore. We want to explore until every single turn, building, and other exciting thing is just etched into our memory. Even if we may find danger, there are very few things more thrilling to us humans than experiencing something new to distract us from our lives.

Hollow Knight takes this basic human instinct and turns it into a game. The foundation of Hollow Knight's story and gameplay is built on mystery and exploration and the game expertly and delicately crafts a world very unlike any you've ever seen. I can confidently say there are very few games that can offer an experience as charming, satisfying, and fun as the one presented in Hollow Knight. It's more than just a game, it's a thrilling journey through one of the most captivating universes ever put into a story.

When you start this game, you are introduced to The Knight; the main character of this story whose background and motivation is unknown. All we know is that he travels to a strange wasteland, equipped with nothing but a robe and a nail and starts from a cave. From the very first minutes of the game, the mystery has already begun. From here, how does the game help you solve the mystery? The answer is that it doesn't. At least not in any way traditional games do. There are no explicit objectives, there are no markers beyond the ones you set yourself, and there is not even an end goal to be achieved. You are, in the most literal sense, lost from the very beginning and it's up to you to find your way again.

This design choice perfectly reflects the philosophy that Hollow Knight sets out to prove works effectively. The only way to progress in this game is to explore. The game almost never tells you what you need to move forward, you have to figure it out for yourself by looking at things like your surroundings, interacting with characters you meet across the world, and learning to effectively traverse the map using the tools you've been given and the tools you find along the way as you explore. The game continues this practice all throughout its runtime.

Many modern games seem to assume the player is downright stupid or incompetent and feel the need to post tutorials at every second of the game or mark out explicitly in your face where you're supposed to go next to progress the game. The end result of this practice is that people become disassociated with the world the game is trying to build. "Who cares what this character is or what they're saying! I just need to move onto the next objective so I can be done with this game!" To me that is the very antithesis of a video game. Video games are meant to immerse people in them and to have developers build an entire world full of characters and locations only to have it completely ignored by the player feels downright disrespectful to the people who made the game.

Hollow Knight truly feels like what a video game is meant to be because of how heavy it leans on the player building their own path through the game. I would daresay that it's probably one of the most liberating games I have ever played because of how much freedom it gives the player while they play the game. Because there are no objectives or even a single order the game's map can be explored, the player is effectively forced to pay close attention to where they've been, what they've seen, and what they want to see next. In other words, it's a game purely driven by your own curiosity.

Of course, all this talk about exploration is meaningless if the world to be explored is boring. If every location in the game felt the same or did not have any substantial depth to them, this exploration would get boring very fast. Naturally then, Hollow Knight's locations have been carefully crafted such that there is variety in every single location.

When you start the game, things feel small; you start in a very boring town and there's only one way to progress; moving down into the depths of Hallownest. When you start, the game deceives you in this way by making you think that Hallownest is small and the only thing of note are the various caves full of Geo (in-game money) for you to get. However, Hollow Knight's map quickly becomes a hydra; explore one part of the map and then two new locations appear. After even a few hours of playing, you quickly realize that one small hole you found before has turned into over 10 different locations that are waiting for you to explore them. By the end of the game, the map becomes so massive that you start wondering how you even thought the game's map was so small to begin with.

While these locations are all a part of the same map, each one feels very distinct. Much like Minecraft biomes, the place you are exploring can change not only appearance, but tone is just a matter of seconds. One moment, you are in the calm, lively, open spaces of the City of Tears and the next you are in the dark, ominous, and crowded caves of Deepnest in your exploration. Each of these locations comes pact with their own set of enemies, music, and story that’s just waiting to be sought out through thorough investigation. Whether it’s talking to characters, searching through the remains of the deceased for a key item, or just plainly observing the scenery, every single location in Hollow Knight has some unique aspect it adds to the overall lore of the game.

It’s also worth calling out the interesting approach this game takes to developing its lore, story and mystery. There is almost never a point in the game where it’s just reciting some story to you or giving you some ten minute flashback about what happened in the past. It’s hidden in every aspect of the game. In fact, it is so hidden it’s possible to get through the entire game without really having any kind of understanding as to what is going on in the world.

There are some games out there that just drown the player in a completely unnecessary context that distracts from playing the game. While it’s nice when games have world building, there are times where I just want to play the game and not be given a 10 hour lecture on fictional science or politics. When a game has that kind of world building they want to give, they usually jam it away into optional side conversations that a player can activate if they want to learn or in what’s usually called a “journal” entry by some character you never get to meet. This is also, in my opinion, a very poor practice primarily because it’s incredibly boring and very inorganic. Many of these things feel like they were just given a second thought and exist to extend the game’s runtime/content for advertising.

In other games though, the developers do treat the world building with respect and at least put some effort into giving the backstory in a fun way. One of my personal favorites is how the backstory for Rosalina is explained in Super Mario Galaxy. While it’s optional and short, the medium it is told through is Rosalina reading you a children’s book that goes over her experiences and how they formed her into who she is when you meet her in the game. It fits the theme of the game well and it’s just a nice piece of context that you aren’t required to know about if you want to just play the game. However, it’s not quite perfect because you actually need to stop playing the game in order to get that context. It’s almost as if in many games story and gameplay are treated as two distinct entities that need to be separately fleshed out in order to work.

Hollow Knight does away with this and interleaves the story with the gameplay. When I said that every aspect of the game has some lore behind it, I really do mean every aspect. Even things as insignificant as how the signs you look at for 5 seconds get rebuilt after you destroy them have lore behind it. Despite the lore being incredibly deep, the interesting thing is that it’s often not exposed to you through optional side conversations or the typical journal entry you find lying on the ground. It’s exposed to you as you play the game. And no, it’s not through cutscenes or character conversations that just halt the gameplay. The story is embedded in the gameplay. It’s in the look of enemies you encounter as you play. It’s in the architecture of the buildings that form each of the in-game locations. There is even a whole ability you can earn that allows you to learn lore by reading the thoughts of enemies while you fight them in combat. Everything is meticulously placed for a reason and the game challenges you to think about why things exist as you explore the game. Super dedicated Hollow Knight fans have investigated every single thing put into this game and even today, years after the game launched, they are still finding new things that deeply change how they look at the story and world of Hollow Knight.

The major benefit of this gameplay-first approach to storytelling is that much of the lore and story is effectively optional. Again, you do not need to invest yourself in the story to enjoy Hollow Knight and many people find a lot of fun out of just speedrunning the game. But if you do choose to invest in it, it’s not as boring as reading a bunch of dry text. It involves actually playing and improving at the game so you can unlock hidden things. In other words, the game rewards you for exploring and being curious by offering things that change your view of the world. There is a legitimately fun reason to want to understand more about Hollow Knight and dig into it. To me, that’s one of the primary things that makes Hollow Knight such a brilliant and captivating game. It’s a continuous cycle of the gameplay supporting the narrative and the narrative supporting the gameplay that is just almost never done in many games today and it’s hard to put the game down without getting an itching feeling that you missed something important.

World building and story, while critical to exploration, they are just half of the whole. The gameplay of Hollow Knight is the other half that completes the game. In Hollow Knight, the gameplay mostly involves two things; platforming and fighting enemies.

On the platforming side of things, this often involves traversing new areas on your quest to find key items and progress. At the start, the controls you are given for platforming are rather simple; you can walk, jump, and hit things with your weapon, a nail. Naturally, as you might expect, where you can go with just these three abilities is rather limited. However, once you play the game more and explore new areas, you encounter bosses that give you brand new abilities that help you reach not only more places, but also help you backtrack very quickly through places where you’ve already been. You can earn abilities such as a very quick forward dash, a double jump, and even a hook that helps you climb walls. Getting these abilities after exploring for a bit is such a satisfying experience. Almost immediately it’s easy to see how these abilities would help you get to places you’ve never been to before and exploring these new areas is just like getting a gift for Christmas; you don’t usually know what you’re going to get, but it’s probably something good.

Despite the numerous abilities you get throughout the game, it never feels overwhelming and it also does not feel like any of these abilities are put in randomly. In most situations you use about 4 of these abilities (the exact abilities depend on what you’re doing) and they are very easy to master even after just a few minutes of using them. It’s a common trap for games to introduce very “one-off” abilities that feel like they were made with the sole intention of getting through one specific part of the game and then are never intended to be used again. In Hollow Knight, even things that were introduced to you within the first hours of the game will be used again up until your last hours of playing the game and it seems Team Cherry had the discipline to make sure they were adding in only abilities that could be used more than a couple times throughout the game. The result is that the set of abilities to help you platform is rather small, yet large enough that you actually have to think about how your abilities can be used in unique combos together to help you reach new areas in the map. Sometimes you need to climb up a wall then do a double jump dash to get to where you need to go. Other times, you need to carefully dash then do a double jump to avoid an obstacle or enemy. Again, the abilities are easy to master and by the end of the game you feel like a real speedrunning pro with how you use these abilities in tandem to traverse the map.

Next is the enemies. As I’ve mentioned before, every area in the game has a unique set of enemies. While there are hundreds of different enemies in this game each with their own unique quirks, the important ones are the big bosses that you encounter along the way. These bosses are usually what give you access to new abilities such as increased health, damage, or perks (called charms in the game) as well as access to new areas in the game. What’s interesting about these bosses is how you can feel your progression through the game as you fight them. If you are playing the game normally, you will typically encounter each boss once, yet each boss, in addition to the abilities they offer, give you some additional knowledge that helps bosses later on. Knowledge in this game comes in two categories; “factual” and “intuitive” knowledge.

As every boss in the game has a very small set of attacks and phases to them, there is at least one strategy that works very effectively for each boss in the game. Strategy is either using your abilities in the game to effectively dodge and attack the boss or coming up with an optimal charm build that works against the boss. I would call this knowledge “factual” as you get to experiment with combos against bosses that can be leveraged against other bosses as well as interesting quirks about the gameplay system that can make your life easier for some other bosses. In other words, these are factual tips that can help out later. For example, one interesting thing that people might not know when starting out is that you can attack spikes while jumping to get another bounce off of them. This is useful for quite a few bosses that require a good amount of dexterity to fight effectively.

The other form of knowledge is what I’ll coin “intuitive” as there’s really no numbers or factual thing about the gameplay that you’re learning, but just general things that can be applied to bosses later on. Things like how to get better at dodging attacks, how to be more confident and precise with your nail strikes, and how to effectively leverage spells to take out bosses quickly fall into this category. As you play the game more, you become more comfortable with its combat systems and learn how to effectively make use of them based on your style of play. If you are more of a pro at platforming, you can equip charms that will help you move around faster and more precisely which makes it easier to dodge attacks. If you’re more of the brawler type, there are charms and abilities that help you tank attacks while also dealing a lot more damage.

You might notice I am going deep into the combat system of Hollow Knight to explain the last few points. That’s because I am trying to illustrate that the gameplay itself is another form of the brilliant exploration the game utilizes. Beyond finding new areas, the game encourages you to experiment with enemies and abilities to match your style of play and to improve overall. I think that’s another key to why the exploration in this game works effectively. This game is not simply walking and exploring. Your progress is impeded constantly by huge and hard bosses looking to be an obstacle. At these points you are faced with a choice; you can try and fight the boss and experiment until you’ve mastered them or you can turn back and look for new abilities that will help you fight the boss. While there is often no correct choice, what you choose has major implications on what your experience will be in the game. Some players may choose to challenge themselves and take on bosses without having too many abilities under their belt. They will die a lot early on, but quickly ramp up on “intuitive” knowledge as they will not be relying heavily on abilities to take out bosses. This is critical for fighting very skill heavy bosses that appear near the end. On the other hand, you can also prioritize exploration and finding items which helps with getting through the easy bosses early, but makes things a bit of a struggle when fighting hard bosses at the end. This is what most people would call the “risk” aspect of the game and in this sense, the fun of the game is coming up with strategies to mitigate it. When should I fight this boss? Should I explore this area now or save it for later after I fight X? And certainly your choices are not the end all be all. If you fight a boss a few times and find it to be too hard, there is no shame in trying out some other area in the hopes it will reward you with something that will help you. Hollow Knight’s death system encourages you to take risks and face only minor penalties when they don’t pan out as you expect. When you die a little shadow is at the spot you died and you lose your money as well as a bit of your capacity to hold soul (the thing that powers your attack spells). To regain this, you just need to go back and kill the shadow. Once done, you’re back to exactly as you were before and nothing was lost except a bit of time. So it’s certainly very easy to experiment with bosses and have fun with learning their attack patterns as well as what works and what doesn’t.

So overall, the key to Hollow Knight’s fun is in its exploration. How you choose to explore the map. How you choose to fight bosses, And how you choose to solve the mystery the game has laid out in front of you. All of these things work together to give a unique take on risk versus reward that is unlike one I’ve seen in a game. There’s plenty of fun to be had in Hollow Knight even after the credits roll and after spending over 82 hours in the game myself, I can say that the base game has very little to be upset about, especially for the very low price tag it has on it today.

Now that I’ve talked about what works, let’s also spend a bit of time talking about what doesn’t work too well.

While this approach of letting the players explore the game completely works at the start while there are things to explore, it becomes a bit of a burden near the end. As I’ve mentioned before, the map is very huge once you’ve explored a good amount of it. At some points you run into walls that you cannot pass simply because you don’t have the right ability for it. Unless you were keeping track of all of these with markers, it’s extraordinarily hard to remember where you’ve gotten stuck before. Sometimes you can see it because the in-game map is cut off at the point where you were stuck, but other times it’s difficult to pinpoint every location on the map that’s cutoff. Sometimes these incredibly small entrances can be holding very key things to getting completion in the game, so it was rather annoying finding these places again without a guide.

There are also some things that are not even shown on the map or hinted at at all that are key to progressing the game. For instance, the last two DLCs in the game are accessed by breaking a couple of hidden walls in different areas. These walls are not shown on the map, there are no abilities to help you find it, and there are absolutely 0 interactions or objects in the game that allude to the location of the DLC. You just somehow have to have the eyesight to notice the wall is breakable when you pass it which is really annoying. At some point I just gave up and looked up a guide on where they were. I wish for things like this there was some indication as to where you needed to go to access it, but maybe I missed it. This really only becomes a problem when you are trying to complete the game though. I was able to pass the game without 100% completion without a guide just fine.

Lastly, there is the Godmaster DLC. This is the last DLC of the game and it essentially adds boss rush modes to the game. These boss rushes have you face bosses you have fought throughout the game previously as well as new bosses created just for the DLC. While I like the concept from the surface, its execution isn’t that great and it really goes in opposition to the points I made before. The exploration in this mode comes from the new bosses; the old bosses are sometimes slightly modified (e.g. for one of the bosses they removed the floor and made it so there are only floating platforms available to stand on). While that’s fine and dandy, to get to these bosses you have to go through bosses you’ve seen before. As I’ve mentioned before, these bosses are pretty hard. Some of them are fairly easy once you’re at this stage of the game and have pretty much every ability and upgrade in the game, but some bosses are a challenge even at this point. You have to be extraordinarily good at these bosses to beat the rushes (also called pantheons) and often that requires hours upon hours of practice. It’s very easy to get discouraged as a result.

The final pantheon is probably the worst of them all because in addition to adding new bosses, it takes pretty much every boss in the game and jams them all into a super mega boss rush that lasts for about an hour. And even worse it’s sorted by easiest to hardest meaning you are more likely to die at the end where you’ve spent the most time. Dying in the rush means you have to start at the very beginning with the easy bosses again. I have no idea why there are no checkpoints anywhere in the final pantheon. It just becomes an absolute slog fighting the first 30 bosses over and over again because they aren’t that hard. It’s really only the last bosses that cause trouble. Even dumber is that the final boss in that rush can only be practiced in isolation after being fought one time meaning you have to waste 45 minutes of your time to even get good enough to fight them. At this stage, the aspects of the game that were fun are now gone because all it is is just practicing at getting better at execution. You aren’t experimenting anymore and you certainly don’t have a choice of exploring other parts of the map for better abilities as you are already at your peak at this point. It just becomes a waiting game for the boss AI to finally like you and give you the win. I think just attempting this final room added 60 hours to my playtime. Your reward for this suffering is an achievement and a new ending so unless you really want it, I wouldn’t recommend going for it.

Hollow Knight is a really great game. It’s clear that Team Cherry put their absolute heart and soul into making sure this game was perfect and they did not disappoint. Every aspect of this game is polished. The gameplay is absolutely fun and it's clear they had a vision to make exploration the driving factor of this game from the very beginning and it shows in every aspect of the game. My only gripes with the game are if you are trying to be a completionist and do everything, but even then if you are dedicated enough to complete the game, I’m sure you could look past these flaws. I would highly recommend this game as not only just a fun game, but also as a project many other game developers can look at to understand the basic tenets of making a game fun. Hollow Knight may seem like a small game from the outside, but it has a lot of heart and soul to offer the player and a lot of charm to back it up. We will meet again when Silksong finally comes out.

>Naka: You're awful, Nomura.

>Nomura: Me? I'm Awful? How am I awful?

>Naka: Telling me Square would allow me one chance for an console action game, and then giving me mobile game budget. Making me release that demo knowing full well people would hate it, and then refusing to give us more time to finish the game in spite of the demo reception. You then pushed it out to die on the same day Monster Hunter Rise comes out. You invite me to your company to make a game, but you just wanted to make fun of me. You're just like the rest of them.

>Nomura: You don't know the first thing about me pal. Look what happened because of your ego, what it lead to. You ripped of DBZ, canned Sonic Xtreme, added a human/anthro subplot in 06, and when SEGA finally had enough they kicked you out only for you to repeat the same stupid mistakes once again.

>Naka:Laughing

>Nomura: You're laughing. Your game bombed today and you are laughing.

>Naka: I know. How about another game, Nomura?

>Nomura: No, I think we've had enough of your games.

>Naka: What to you get when you tell an action game enthusiast he can make his dream game-

>Nomura: Stop.

>Naka: ...and send him to a publisher who abandons him and treats his project like cheap cash-in trash?!

>Nomura: Call the police, Kitase.

>Naka: I'll tell you what you get. YOU GET WHAT YOU FUCKING DESERVE!

TL;DR: A fairly weak entry in the Ace Attorney franchise that sets itself up for great things, but fails to tell a compelling story. While fun at some points, much of Dual Destinies is often irritating to play through due to how much it forgets the games that came before it.

Next in my journey through all of the Ace Attorney games is Dual Destinies. This game has received tons of criticism from both fans and newcomers alike and after playing through the entire game for a second time, it’s hard not to hop onto the hate train. Much like Apollo Justice, Dual Destinies presents innovative and fresh ideas at the cost of ditching the previous games that came before it. This completely new direction is seen in all facets of the game from the story to the art to the gameplay. While it’s great to see Ace Attorney trying to stay fresh and fun, in this game, it’s often not executed as well as it could be.

To start, let’s talk about the story. Dual Destinies takes place not too long after the events of Apollo Justice and focuses on continuing the plot of the Dark Age of the Law that it set up. In Dual Destinies, Phoenix makes his return to the courtroom after 7 years of being a hobo with the intent of ending this Dark Age of the Law chock full of corruption from the courts. By his side he has Apollo and a new attorney by the name of Athena Cykes who excels in psychology. Already in this description, there are a couple of things wrong with the game.

The first problem is that Phoenix is making a return to the courtroom. I said in my review of Apollo Justice that one of the great ideas they had with Phoenix’s character was to put him on the side and away from the spotlight. While the game didn’t live up to this idea, it was certainly interesting to think of how the game would be if Phoenix stayed as Apollo’s mentor and let him have the great moments of that game. In this game, they do the complete opposite of this good idea and have him take the spotlight again. With his badge back, he is now once again the protagonist of the game when he really has no business being one anymore. Not that I don’t love Phoenix Wright, but if Ace Attorney wants to convince me that their new characters are worth anything, they have to give them moments that give them value. With Phoenix at the helm again, he steals these moments and pushes everyone else to the side.

The second problem is that they’re introducing a new attorney into the mix. While Athena Cykes is a fine character, in my opinion, there is no room for her to actually be an attorney here. They have barely even started exploring Apollo’s character and adding in Athena Cykes means they have to spread time more thinly across all the characters. In the end, the breakdown is that Phoenix gets 2 out of the 3 story related cases, Apollo gets 1 story case and 1 filler case, and Athena gets 1 filler case. Even in the game after this, Spirit of Justice, she again gets 1 filler case and nothing else (and this filler case she gets happens to be the worst case in the game). So overall, even though the story is centered around her, you don’t even get to see her act as an attorney at all. They made this mistake once with Apollo Justice, and they made it yet again here. This is irritating point number 1. Things get worse when you consider how the game ends. More on that later.

After the premise, there is the actual plot of the game. As I mentioned before, the plot of the game focuses on this concept called the Dark Age of the Law. The Dark Age of the Law began when Phoenix presented forged evidence in court 7 years ago and a prosecutor commited murder. People began to lose faith in the courts and defense attorneys and prosecutors alike had been taught that in the end, only verdicts and results matter instead of finding the truth. I think this concept is fantastic for a followup game for Apollo Justice where literally the villain of the game was the embodiment of this concept. They had the perfect continuation for the game,so you would expect it to at least callback to the events of that game, wouldn’t you? Well if you did, you’d be dead wrong; Dual Destinies doesn’t even attempt to do anything like this. They set themselves up with the perfect opportunity to correct the mistakes of Apollo Justice and at the same time tell a plot that fits perfectly into the new story being built up. But instead of taking this opportunity, they just completely abandon Apollo Justice and start from scratch. By scratch, I mean literally start everything from scratch. This is irritating point number 2.

Let’s start with Phoenix. In Apollo Justice, Phoenix’s character was completely different. He made sure to rarely show emotion and act like a mature attorney. In the one case in Apollo Justice where you play as him, there’s a sense of experience and calmness from him. He doesn’t even panic when charges of forging evidence come on him and he always keeps a straight face in the most harsh of situations. It was an absolutely perfect embodiment of the lessons he learned after the events in Trials and Tribulations. In addition, it was perfect for that game since they constantly make mention to even the tiniest of emotions giving away people’s intentions and character. One tiny movement of a finger was enough for Apollo to take advantage of people’s weakness and find the truth and Phoenix made sure to give nothing away.

In Dual Destinies, he completely regresses to how he was in the first game. Every 5 seconds someone needs to bring up the fact that he bluffs and whenever he’s trying to make legitimate points in court, they just bring it down by saying it’s a bluff and he’s just some third rate attorney. Even in situations that are very easy to get out of, Phoenix loses his cool and breaks down into a cold sweat. I think there were almost no points in this game where Phoenix could do anything without hesitating and acting like a complete newbie. I miss that confident Phoenix from Apollo Justice and having him regress so much in this game feels like a disservice to what happened in the trilogy.

Next, let’s talk about Apollo Justice. If you have read my review of Apollo Justice, you will know that I am not a fan of his story in that game. The highlight of his story in that game was his origin. The game spends a fair bit of time explaining how his true parentage makes him special and gives him his powers. They don’t wrap up all loose ends though and leave many things for his origin to be explored. Dual Destinies decides to take that setup and do absolutely nothing with it other than to use it as leverage for yet another backstory for Apollo. I don’t know who put it into the head of the guy writing stories for the new Ace Attorney games, but there are far more interesting ways of making a character relevant to the story than to give them a tragic backstory. Ryunosuke in The Great Ace Attorney doesn’t even have one, yet in every single event in the story, he earns his place. More than being an attorney, his heritage and resolve are what are vastly important in making him feel relevant in every single case you play in. Apollo is only relevant because of the backstory the game gives him and they use this approach every time they want to expand his character. Instead of giving him natural growth, they just make him remember what he learned from some tragic backstory that he has. It’s quite boring in terms of character development and serves to only make his character more complicated than it needs to be. To be clear, I’m not saying that giving a character a tragic backstory is a bad idea, but when it’s the only form of development a character gets (like Apollo) it’s very bad.

Besides characters regressing, you also have a brand new plotline that focuses on Athena’s backstory. While Athena’s backstory is hyped up much at the start of the game, it only becomes relevant in the last two cases. The last two cases focus heavily on a murder that took place at a space station many years ago as well as a second murder that happened at the space station recently. While the cases themselves aren’t bad, their effect on the overall plot is horrendous. To talk about irritating point 3 here, I’ll need to delve into spoilers.

=== BEGIN SPOILER FOR CASES 4 AND 5 ===

In the last two cases, we see both Athena’s and Apollo’s backstories come into full play. Apollo is grief stricken as the murder victim is his childhood friend Clay Terran and Athena has to recall the events that made her lose her mother’s life. This stuff is the good stuff; we learn more about Apollo and Athena as characters and we get to see their beliefs come into play. It’s very reminiscent of AAI2’s conclusion where Edgeworth’s actions help people choose their own paths in life, even if they’re different from the path the people before them have taken. In the end, much of Ace Attorney is about finding the truth, no matter what form it takes. Whether it’s being a lawyer and exposing criminals in court, or being an astronaut and searching space for the cosmic truth, everyone has their own way of finding the “one truth” at the end of the journey.

With that being said, the way the 5th case concludes takes this premise and completely throws it out of the window for shock factor. The villain of that case, The Phantom, is easily one of the worst written villains to ever grace Ace Attorney. He has absolutely nothing to do with what came before in the games and comes completely out of nowhere in the last case. His only personality trait is that he can wildly vary his emotions and the only real connection he has to the main plot of the game is that he’s a villain who committed a crime. This is exactly the kind of character that has no business being in Ace Attorney in any capacity. The game tries to make you think he’s some kind of intimidating presence, but he comes off as a pussy because of how little he actually does.

To explain this better, I will compare him with someone who is similar, Shelly de Killer. Shelly de Killer in Justice for All is a force to be reckoned with.

He first off actually does stuff. He kidnaps Maya and makes demands of you. It’s clear if you don’t appeal to his commands, he will not hesitate to kill Maya. The Phantom doesn’t do anything like this and just relies on his name to carry him. This completely removes any sense of fear or intimidation from his character. It’s not enough to just say he’s a dangerous criminal; we need to actually see it in action to be scared of it. The one who does any actual kidnapping in this case is someone who is not at all related to him.

Second are the rules they follow. Shelly de Killer is an honorable assassin meaning he lives by a strict set of rules and expects his clients to do the same. If he is betrayed, then he will not hesitate to seek revenge. This trait is used beautifully in the final case of Justice for All to catch the true killer. The Phantom’s only rule is not to expose his identity. He doesn’t want his identity exposed because he runs the risk of being assassinated himself. This would be a fine rule if it was actually followed. This stupid idiot, as soon as Phoenix starts grilling him, pulls out all of his spy gadgets, starts ripping off his masks, and varies his emotions (which by the way was directly stated was something only the phantom can do). He is practically screaming out that he is the Phantom by existing. It’s only when Phoenix points out the obvious conclusion with evidence that a sniper takes him out. How could anyone have conceived a villain so horrible at following their own rules?????

Lastly, we have their relevance to the game. In Justice for All, Shelly de Killer is super important to the message of the game. Finding the truth is not an easy thing to do and sometimes sacrifices must be made in search of it. Justice for All’s finale gave the player serious questions to consider and a choice to make. The game even lets you make this choice and choose for yourself what it means to be a lawyer. Even though it doesn’t affect the story, the choice itself and the implications of the player’s choice could only have been proposed if Shelly de Killer actually posed a serious threat to the player. In Dual Destinies, the goal of the plot is to end The Dark Age of the Law. You would expect someone who is actually involved with the law and the courts would be the big baddie at the end of the road. Instead, you get The Phantom whose only connection with The Dark Age of the Law is that he blamed a crime on Prosecutor Blackquill a bunch of years ago. The game treats it like The Dark Age of the Law is something that could be solved simply by catching this random spy who committed a crime. But that’s not at all true from what the game presented us. The Dark Age of the Law is a mindset; something that is drilled into lawyers even when they’re in school as case 3 showed. Catching one villain who is barely connected to the courts doesn’t seem like it does anything to change the mindset of people. This would be a good middle chapter to a longer running story on The Dark Age of the Law, but the plotline just kind of sizzles out here.

=== END SPOILER FOR CASES 4 AND 5 ===

So overall, I’m not a huge fan of this plot. It has great moments in it for sure, but the main plot is pretty terrible. It reminds me a lot of Apollo Justice; instead of just being a fairly simple game that introduces new characters, it feels the need to just up the trilogy in weird ways and it tries too hard to achieve it. It tries to be different than the trilogy, but new isn’t necessarily better when it comes to plot. Forgetting everything that happened before and starting over is the worst thing a sequel to anything can do. It’s a shame to see that Dual Destinies is taking this route.

The plot is my biggest gripe with the game, so the next few points should hopefully be shorter. Next up we have the gameplay. The main difference in the gameplay here is the introduction of the new Mood Matrix mechanic. During a trial, when a witness does not want to testify, you get the opportunity to conduct a therapy session with them and observe their emotions during the crime. As they show you their emotions, you find ones that seem out of place and continue this until there is no more discord left in their emotions. I think on paper, this is actually a very great and creative mechanic. It’s fairly simple and intuitive to understand. You just look at a testimony and find a contradiction using the 4 emotions. Nothing too out of the ordinary with normal gameplay. In addition, there’s a wide amount of variety possible with it. The game itself takes great advantage of the variability and has segments where emotions can run out of control and also points where you can use evidence to point out contradictions with the witness’s memory.

The big problem with the mood matrix is how it’s applied practically. The mechanic in practice is far too easy. If you get an emotion wrong, there is absolutely no penalty. Also, to avoid any ambiguities, the game makes it painfully obvious what the wrong emotion is most of the time. If there’s a point where the witness says “I saw the dead body with blood pouring out of their eye sockets in an incredibly gruesome way,” the game will put Happy over it. There were almost no points where I got stuck on the mood matrix, but for the rare occasion where I did get stuck, I could just guess literally everything with no penalty. It’s practically begging to be skipped. In Apollo Justice there was some penalty for getting perceive wrong so you had incentive to at least try and think.

Other than that, the gameplay is pretty similar to what we’ve seen before. Trials and investigations are still the main method of gameplay and there are short segments in the investigation where you get to use Apollo’s bracelet and Phoenix’s Magatama. These segments have also been made easier since there’s also no penalty for making mistakes there which is different from the way it was before. Perceive specifically has been made 1000 times easier since the game only uses it during investigations and there’s also a huge glowing icon whenever you’re supposed to use it so you never have to actually think of when to do it. This is a pretty big downgrade. I liked how it was used in trials to make progress whenever you hit a dead end and were stuck. It also took a bit of thinking since the game put it in cross examinations with multiple statements. Now it’s pretty brainless and feels like a chore to get past since you have to slowly wait for the right statement to find the nervous tick on. Taking existing gameplay and making it easier for no reason is irritating point 4.

Next we have the characters. I’ve talked at length about Apollo and Phoenix, so let’s try Athena next. Like I mentioned before, Athena is a fine character, but she isn’t given that many chances to grow as one. We learn about her tragic past near the end of the game, which is great, but a major problem is that they basically gave away all of it and didn’t really leave her with a place to belong once they were finished. In Spirit of Justice, I constantly asked “why is she still here” whenever she did anything. It’s not that I don’t like her, but rather what purpose does she still have in these games? Her story wrapped up quite nicely in this one and there aren’t any more avenues of her character left to explore. I have an itching feeling that if they make another Ace Attorney game with her in it, they will give her another tragic backstory to give her a sense of purpose. It was more than possible to get around this by actually giving her her own set of beliefs that are different from Phoenix and Apollo. What did she learn from her traumatic experience other than that she can mix psychology and lawyering together? The game doesn’t spend any time expanding on this so her character is still unclear.

As for side characters, they’re alright. Blackquill is an absolutely amazing prosecutor and he's incredibly funny. Perfect antagonist for an AA game. While he doesn’t have the emotional impact that someone like Edgeworth or Godot had, he does well enough on his own to warrant a thumbs up from me. The case specific characters are at least what I expect of AA, but they aren’t that great. One of my favorite things about playing The Great Ace Attorney was that almost every character put a huge smile on my face and made me gush out with all sorts of emotion. Everything from their distinct personalities to their designs was something I absolutely loved. Dual Destinies doesn’t really have that kind of impact on me unfortunately. While colorful, many of the characters are lacking charm. It’s hard to describe what “charm” here constitutes, but I think most people who have played this game and The Great Ace Attorney (or even the trilogy) would agree that there is something different about the characters in this game and the characters in that game that just makes them more likeable.

Lastly, we have art and music. After seeing both The Great Ace Attorney and Spirit of Justice, looking back at the 3D models in this game makes it feel like the game is unfinished. There’s a certain level of polish in TGAA and SoJ that this game is missing. It’s hard to describe what that polish is, but it’s easy to see when comparing two pictures of the games. There’s also a distinct lack of 3D animation in this game. Having those animations in The Great Ace Attorney and Spirit of Justice really made the game feel more alive. Most of the heavy animation in this game is done with anime cutscenes, and while many of these are justified, some could have easily been replaced with just 3D animation that would have fit it better. Some examples include Phoenix entering the court for the first time in the game and when they find Apollo knocked out in the destroyed courtroom.

As for the music, it’s alright. It’s up to par with the Ace Attorney standard, but it’s nothing special. It has a nice space theme throughout it, but I’m not really a huge fan of it. Something like Trucy’s theme, which was styled to fit the soundtrack of AJ, doesn’t fit that well in this game since it sounds like you’re eating at some fancy restaurant as opposed to getting ready to explore a complicated plot at the space station. It’s a very mixed bag of really good tracks and tracks that work well on their own but don’t fit the overall theme of the game.

So overall, Dual Destinies is not a terrible game. It gets many things right and it’s often fun to play through. Its main issue is that it doesn’t fit at all into AA continuity and irritatingly just ignores it while it tries to be fun and unique. I love it when it’s just sticking to what was fun about the previous games while twisting the formula slightly. The DLC case is the perfect embodiment of this. It’s not unnatural for Ace Attorney to do weird things like cross examine animals, but the ending of that case is something that is done very rarely if ever in most cases. It’s plain and simple and doesn’t overcomplicate things. Unfortunately, most of the other cases don’t follow its example. I personally wish this game didn’t exist and Spirit of Justice came after it since it fits in better with the story. Unfortunately, this game continues to be in the main Ace Attorney franchise, and despite how much Capcom tries to make us forget about it existing, it’s already too deep to be forgotten.

What's ultimately the saddest part about all I'm about to describe is that I was legitimately hyped for this game. No joke, when it was unveiled as Project Sonic 2017, I was ecstatic. I didn't care if Classic Sonic was coming back, I loved Generations and if this was just more of that with original level themes and ideas then so be it. Unfortunately when the following trailers started to spill out, more and more red flags were raised, and then afterwards the game was unceremoniously released. I didn't think it was bad on my first playthrough back in Christmas of 2017, just kinda whatever, bit disappointing and not as good as Colors or Generations, but still better than Sonic Lost World (which I also thought was just kinda ok back then). Years passed and now I have officially 100% Sonic Forces (don't ask why, I don't understand myself), and after experiencing everything this game has to offer, I can confidently say that this is a game that I thought was originally just kinda ok to mediocre to a game that is flat out bad.

There's a lot I want to get into but I think it would be simpler to discuss the main gameplay styles before talking about the rest of the game as a whole. First I'll start with regular Sonic. He brings the boost formula back as seen in Sonic Colors, Unleashed, and Generations though his gameplay leans more towards Sonic Colors but worse. His movement is stiff and the 3D movement is terrible, his acceleration is jacked (he goes from a slow walk to an extremely quick sprint in a millisecond and it's super jarring), his jumps are sluggish and the double jump barely does anything at all, the stomp often feels bad to use, the only fun (huge asterisk) movement option he has is his airboost which allows him to completely Superman leap over ridiculous distances and skip huge chunks of the level. I don't think his movement is too big of an issue since boosting makes the handling a non issue most of the time, but he's still not as fun as he was to control in Colors, and he's nowhere NEAR as fun as he was in Generations. He also doesn't have a drift which just kind of confuses me seeing as how there are plenty of ample opportunities to introduce sharp turns to make the levels more exciting (and sometimes they do that but the turns feel automated), but they often don't because he doesn't have a drift.

Classic Sonic is the one I constantly hear as being labeled "the worst one" but honestly, I found Classic Sonic to be the best part of Forces lol. That's not to say he's good, far from it. He's nowhere near as fun as the actual Classic Trilogy and Mania, and he's nowhere near as fun as Classic Sonic in Sonic Generations, but his controls worked with the levels fine enough, drop dash is still fun to use, the time trial missions with him can be pretty fun and there's pretty decent design to be had with his levels (Ghost Town and Chemical Plant in particular), but that's about all I think he has going for him.

Avatar is the new playstyle introduced in Sonic Forces. While I will praise the character customization till the cows come home (because it is pretty neat admittedly), it is by far the worst part of this game. His handling is just as bad as normal Sonic's except you don't have a boost to fall back on so you're stuck with the awful jumping and 3D movement. The homing attack is slow and sluggish, and the grapple points where you use their grappling hook to traverse through a stage happens automatically via homing attacking a point or just letting the game use it for you so this mechanic is just uninteresting. The main form of attack the Avatar has is a Wispon, a gun that takes on the properties of certain Wisps (and yes Wisps are indeed back for this game). The enemy encounters just boils down to "mash/hold the right trigger to win" because they're disgustingly overpowered, have obnoxious range and so any enemy encounter the game throws at you is pure fodder. You have a variety of options to choose from in terms of which Wispon you equip but when it comes to combat all are pretty much the exact same in terms of effectiveness, you would only pick a particular Wispon to use the specific Wisp that goes with it (such as Lighting for the Lighting Wispon, allowing the Avatar to use the light speed dash) to access certain pathways.

In terms of level design, this game offers almost nothing of worth. Sonic's stages are literal straight lines most of the time, with occasionally interesting 2D sections but most of the time are awkward in design with sluggish simplistic platforming. Classic's stages as I said earlier are probably the most enjoyable but still have their fair share of an abundance of hidden springs and boosters and obstacle placement that just feels really odd. Avatar's is probably the worst offender in this category, if it's not blatantly recycling Sonic's stages (like Park Avenue), it's chock full of a bunch of wisp capsules, rings and dash rings splattered all over the place and hardly any of it matters. There are also tag team stages that puts you in control of Sonic and your Avatar at the same time. It's not like Sonic Heroes where you can switch between these characters on the fly, you just control Sonic one moment, and when you use a wispon you control the Avatar the next. Nothing really noteworthy in any of those stages besides the memeworthy double boost sections. All of these stages fall short in terms of length, some being roughly a minute long and not much more than that. Way too many stages in Sonic Forces have issues with being overly automated and just sort of ending abruptly. I don't think besides Ghost Town that there's a genuinely decent satisfying level in the entire game, and when I find the design of a stage to be somewhat interesting I can't even enjoy it because it's like 30 seconds in length. The bosses are unremarkable too. The first Infinite fight is surprisingly pretty solid but everything else is not very good, and quite often they just recycle bosses they've already used previously but with a new coat of paint.

As for the 100% completion I managed to achieve, getting everything in this game is simply exhausting. You know how dumb it was in Sonic Generations where you basically had to replay Classic Sky Sanctuary a minimum of 3 times just to get all the red rings because 3 of them were on separate paths? Well imagine this being the case for EVERY SINGLE LEVEL in Sonic Forces. There are 3 collectables in each stage: red rings, silver moons and numbered rings (with only the red rings actually being anything of worth and actually unlocking anything). The thing is, the numbered rings don't appear until after you grab every single red ring in the stage, and then afterwards the silver moon medals don't appear until after you've grabbed all the numbered rings. This equates at the very MINIMUM for 3 playthroughs of every single stage, which is ridiculous. I didn't like playing through these stages once, let alone 3 times each. And on top of that, you have all the missions and achievements to collect, one of the achievements asking for you to get 100,000 rings. That isn't an achievement, that's a literal grind, and that's what all of this feels like - a grind. It got so tiring so fast that I wanted to put the game down and quit several times with how monotonous it got, and playing through these stages multiple times only further highlighted the issues I have with the design structure and pacing with each of them.

Finally, and I do think I need to address this, the amount of blatant asset reuse is ridiculous. There is so many elements ripped straight from Sonic Lost World that you would be forgiven in wondering if there were any original assets in here at all, from the sound effects, the character animations, the returning numbered rings, even the final Infinite fight and the Metal Sonic encounter has them inexplicably summon the "cutesy" motobug from Lost World because they couldn't be bothered with making something else. Apparently even the controls and coding were reused from Lost World as well. Wanna know why Sonic's acceleration is so janky? It's because they just took the run button from Lost World and smoothed it out to try and turn it into a proper acceleration, and it worked as well as you would expect (even the boost is just Super Sonic from Lost World). There are even rumors stating that the code for wall running and parkour is still leftover in the game but was never put in.

I think the most sad and disappointing thing in all of this is how I had no incentive to play more of this game. Even on my first playthrough, I wanted to jump back in the game and get more S ranks and unlock more stages, but I then realized that the stages themselves and the unlockable stages are shallow and bite sized, and S ranks are stupidly easy to obtain anyway. There was just...nothing left for me to do. I think that's probably one of the worst feelings in a game you wanted to like at first, and replaying these same stages over and over again for 100% completion certainly didn't help either. I sincerely hope Sonic Team is taking their time and really making the next game in the franchise a special one, but because of this, I'm allowed to be skeptical. I'll wait and see what happens. Fingers crossed.

TL;DR: Easily becoming my favorite game of all time, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles poses itself as one of the best mystery stories ever conceived thanks to its colorful cast of characters, grand plot, and joyous gameplay. The team behind this deserves the highest of praise for their absolute dedication to this project.

Before I start this review I want to give a warning. I expect that this review will be incredibly long and contain spoilers for this game and other games in the series. I will clearly mark where the spoilers happen so you can skip over them, but if you don’t want to risk looking at them don’t read this review until you’ve completed them. This game deserves praise for everything it does and I can’t really talk about everything it does without spoiling some of it.

To start, let’s talk about my impressions of the game before I ever even played it starting out with the initial gameplay trailers. I first saw the trailers not too long after I had completed Apollo Justice for the first time and I started with the trailer for the first game. The first thought I had when I saw this trailer was fear. The major problem I had with Apollo Justice was one of identity. Who is this game about and who is it going to focus on? As I explained very in depth in my Apollo Justice review, the focus of that game was Phoenix Wright even though it wasn’t even in his own game. In these trailers, they heavily pushed the idea that the main character Ryunosuke Naruhodo was the ancestor of Phoenix Wright as if that’s the only reason you’re supposed to like him. It seemed to be his complete identity from the trailers since that’s the title he’s given. In terms of gameplay, I had expected much of the plot and world to dedicate itself to somehow pandering back to Phoenix Wright’s world and failing to form its own identity like Apollo Justice.

I am pleased to report that I was proven dead wrong from the very first case. When the first game, Adventures, first came out it was only in Japan. Some YouTubers had managed to translate the entire game and each of their cases into English though so I started by watching all of those videos for the first game. Even without playing the game at all, I was hooked into the game by almost everything that was presented. From the very first frames of the game, you are presented with something new.

The very first new thing you are presented with is the setting. This game begins in Japan during the Meiji Period; a time of great reform in Japan as it is the first time they opened their ports to the world in years. They had just finished signing a treaty with the largest superpower in the world at the time, Great Britain, and began to be greatly influenced by their culture. How does the game make this clear to you besides just flat out telling you? The dev blogs go into great depth on this, but the gist of it is that these references were carefully inserted into every facet of the game from the clothes people wear to the brief political debates characters have in the courtroom. Even the way the first case ends is heavily dependent on the events happening at the time. The point here is that the setting is not for show; this game and its story would not work at all if it didn’t take place in the setting it did. Already the game justifies one of its major selling points.

The next new thing you are presented with are the characters. In this game, the protagonist is Ryunosuke Naruhodo, a university student who has just been accused of murder! And not the murder of just anyone, but one of London’s most praised scientists. In order to avoid the harshest of sentences, he must team up with his best friend and aspiring defense lawyer Kazuma Asogi to prove his innocence. I think there are two things to point out here.

The first is that nowhere in this description or in this entire series is Phoenix Wright mentioned or even relevant. From the very start of Apollo Justice, his identity was linked to Phoenix Wright’s. I mean this in the most tight of ways; Apollo Justice could not exist without Phoenix Wright because he is so crucial to his development. That was the fundamental problem behind the identity crisis of Apollo Justice and it’s what made the game fail; Phoenix didn’t need Apollo, but Apollo needed him and so he was too dependent on him. In this game, Ryunosuke is the focus of the story and he doesn’t need to depend on anyone who has come before to tell his story. They even had rejected some themes that were too similar to the original Ace Attorney themes because the game looked and felt so different from the originals.

The second is that even though Ryunosuke is the main character, he doesn’t even start out as a lawyer. Pretty much every single main character in Ace Attorney has some tragic backstory that led them to where they are now and it’s this backstory that gives them a connection to the plot of the game. When this is done with moderation, it’s not a bad strategy. This is how Phoenix makes his mark in the first and third game. But this can backfire by giving us characters like Apollo Justice who constantly become the butt of Ace Attorney memes because he has so many backstories. In this game though, they decided to take a new risk and instead have Ryunosuke become a lawyer due to circumstance. Like backstories, this can also backfire; if Ryunosuke wanders aimlessly for the entire game and just says he’s a lawyer because he was forced to, then that makes him feel incredibly distant from the plot of the game. However, in this game, they take a careful effort to make sure that Ryunosuke has a deep emotional connection to every case in the game. As a result, his development feels a lot more natural than the characters with a backstory. More on this later.

The last thing this case gives you is new music and animation. One of the best things about any Ace Attorney game are the soundtracks and character animations. These two things are really what differentiate these games from just novels and it’s these two things that give each game their own unique identity and burst of excitement.

If you listen to the music in Professor Layton versus Phoenix Wright, for example, there is a very medieval and fantasy vibe present in the Labyrinthia tracks and a very refined vibe in the English tracks. These tracks are responsible for putting you in the right mood to investigate at any time because the tracks are specifically tailored for the situation. The Great Ace Attorney is no different. As the dev blogs mention, the tracks use instruments inspired by the time period and location the game takes place in. The first case takes place in Japan, so you get traditional Japanese instruments. But the twist is that, like I said before, Japan at the time was under a new era of reform due to western influence, and so little traces from the tracks that primarily play when the game takes place in London are also present even here. I think the one of the best examples of this is in this track that plays during the first case of the second game.

As for the animation, the animation in any Ace Attorney game is there so you can immediately deduce the personality of the characters from their motions. More hyper characters have more dynamic movements as an example. Ryunosuke in this case has animations that transcend anything the series has put out so far. His pupils and nervous movements at the start of the first case make the player feel just as nervous as him. Additionally the primary witness, Jezail Brett moves with slow and refined movements that immediately paint her as someone noble, but quickly change their meaning as you learn more about her true identity over the course of the games. These animations serve both as subtle foreshadowing for future events, but also are just plain fun to look at because of how fluid and neat they look in comparison to other games in the series.

These are the initial impressions I got just from looking at the first case on a poor quality recording of someone’s 3DS and just directly translated. Even through such a medium, I can already sense that this game had a grand vision for what it wanted to do and it would stop at nothing to achieve it. I knew this game was different from anything that came before it and I quickly watched the entire first game and the first case of the second one this way when it was fully translated by fans. Skip a few years later and we finally get both game packages together as a bundle in Chronicles. I said as much in my review of the first Ace Attorney game, but really this series belongs on PC. Playing it myself with a mouse and keyboard was a far better experience than I would have gotten with a tiny DS screen and stylus. These animations have a right to be looked at on a large high resolution monitor or TV because they are so dynamic and fluid. Additionally, the yellow filter that is put on the 3DS version is now gone and the characters look even more stunning and colorful than when I first saw them. Overall, I am pleased to say that Chronicles as a bundle and game truly is a great package even if you’ve seen everything it has to offer before. That’s why, for the rest of this review, I will talk about things not as separate games, but I will instead treat them as one mega game. I feel this is the intended way to play the game because both parts are so highly dependent on one another. If you, for whatever reason, attempted to play the Resolve first you would be deathly confused and if you tried to play Adventures only, you would make the producer of this game upset if you leave a review saying it’s incomplete.

With that, let’s now expand on the points brought up from the first case starting with the setting. With the exception of a few cases, the game takes place in the capital of Great Britain, London. The transition from Japan to London feels almost magical as almost everything is different from the setting from the first case. In the first case, things felt small; Japan’s courtroom could only seat a few people, you spend your time inside a small defendant’s lobby, and the opening cutscenes show very uncrowded streets. The very first thing you see in London is an enormous train station flooded with people that leads into a busy street surrounded by enormous buildings. It sounds quite grand, but the actual images being displayed and music playing seem to suggest the opposite; they suggest that these are just the day to day activities of people in London. Part of what makes this game so exciting to play is that it feels a lot like you’re looking through a time machine into the past and seeing what the world was like at the time. Even though the game doesn’t concern itself with being even close to historically accurate, just seeing things like jurors complaining that the trial should end because they have to get home soon to feed their family or Sholmes explaining how pawnbrokers are used by many people in London goes a long way to making it feel like you really are seeing just a small part of this lively world setup by the game. Spirit of Justice tried to go for a similar vibe with Khura’in, but I find the setting here more exciting since it feels like there’s more to be explored.

There are times though when the game steps away from normal London life and thrusts you into the heart of something grand. The very first locations you visit in London are the Lord Chief Justice’s office and the Old Bailey, London’s most grand courtroom. Both locations are incredibly enormous; the Lord Chief Justice’s office is structured like a giant clock and its gears moving echo through the room when it’s silent and the Old Bailey has at its center a giant pendulum with fiery scales that lean depending on the mood of the jurors. There are less imposing locations that you get to see later in the game like the Great Exhibition of London that further build the game’s world. A big part of the story and time period is that, like Japan, London was going through a great change as well in the name of the Victorian Era. The era was defined by Britain taking its place as a world superpower by adopting industrialization and science. This change can be seen by the constant references to innovations in science such as forensics, autopsy reports, and even hot air balloons. It’s also present in the way certain characters dress; Sholmes and Iris, for instance, were designed with a very steampunk aesthetic in mind to highlight this. The main point here is that the setting, even after Japan, works not only to give a glimpse into the time period the game takes place in, but to build characters up in smart ways and give a firm ground for the plot to play in. Like I said before, this game would not work in any other time period.

Next we have the characters. The characters in this game are absolutely the best in the series for two reasons; they are the epitome of fun Ace Attorney characters and they were carefully designed to support the setting and plot of this game as best as possible. Back in my review of the very first Ace Attorney game, I mentioned that one of its biggest strengths was that the people you talk to, both in trials and investigations, were full of color and personality. This is what made it fun to tap literally every single object in the background and it’s also why I despise Apollo Justice so much. Characters in Ace Attorney can easily make or break the game. I am pleased to report that this game is the exact opposite of Apollo Justice; instead of there being at least one reason to hate every character, there’s at least one reason to love every character. In this game every character gets the spotlight at least once, whether it’s someone as significant as Herlock Sholmes or someone as transient as juror number 3 in the third case. During the time in the spotlight, you get the zany and whacky Ace Attorney personalities that fans have come to expect from the series from over a decade of games.

What makes these characters the best though? It’s hard to describe generally, but I think for most characters it boils down to their role/impact on the story, the way they speak or dress, or the way they move around. No Ace Attorney game, even Spirit of Justice, has had the level of movement these characters have in their animations, nor the level of effort put in to make sure everyone is adding onto the setting of the game. Every character lends itself to the plot and world in their own unique way and it all culminates into a beautiful final product that’s better than anything put out there.

=== BEGIN SPOILER FOR CASE 5 OF ADVENTURES ===

Eggert Benedict (yeah I’m calling him that) is the best example of this I can come up with and I love him since he falls into all 3 categories. Storywise, his motive is inspired by the emphasis on a class system present in the time period and is responsible for showing the darker side of London by literally making a deal with Inspector Gregson in the middle of the case to make sure government secrets were not leaked. I don’t think there are many Ace Attorney cases with a smarter ending and the ending could only have happened thanks to his unique role in the story.

As for the way he speaks/dresses, his entire look was designed so he looks like a stereotypical rich London man. He has fancy suits, a staff with his initials on it, and speaks a lot more eloquently than most people in the game. The instant you look at him, you immediately feel he’s someone important that you should keep an eye on.

Lastly, his movements. I don’t think there is an Ace Attorney character with more funny and eccentric motions than this guy. Every single time he does anything, he just dances around with a straight face on and ends in a pose. Besides just being the funniest thing ever, it immediately tells you that he’s not the typical rich man his clothes would like you to believe he is. His secret behind the movements can be found by studying the motions of the Skulkin Brothers who he spent a lot of his childhood with. It’s a smart and subtle way of foreshadowing his motive without any words.

This character just makes me smile every time I see him because of how funny he is and how exciting he turns out to be once you investigate him. It’s not typical that I crack a smile/laugh every time I look at an Ace Attorney character, but it’s the norm in this game because of characters like him.

=== END SPOILER FOR CASE 5 OF ADVENTURES ===

That was a big spoiler, but in addition to the character talked about here, I feel also obligated to write a paragraph about how great Herlock Sholmes is. Whoever decided that he should be in this story deserves a raise and a promotion because it was the smartest decision they could have possibly made. He fits in perfectly with the story and time period the game is going for. In a time so heavily influenced by scientific advances and investigations, there is no better choice than him. In the Sherlock Holmes stories, he often solves crimes by investigating things that were normally written off as irrelevant such as the type of shoe the criminal wore or what they smoked. He did this using a wide variety of chemicals he makes himself. Herlock Sholmes takes a similar approach in his investigations and is often ridiculed for it in this game. He also adds on to the mood the game sets which is that you’re on a grand adventure that should be told for all time in stories. Each chapter opens up as if you are reading a Sherlock Holmes novel with all its witty writing and dramatic language. His animations and references also feel like they’re taken straight out from the novels. His banter about violins and his bowing animation that looks as if he just gave a concert to an enormous audience are testaments to this (that are directly mentioned near the start of the first novel A Study in Scarlet no less). Lastly, his Dance of Deduction is the greatest gameplay mechanic ever put in Ace Attorney. I will talk more about this later, but what works here for his character is that it both gives him the eccentric personality of a standard Ace Attorney character, but ties him directly to his counterpart in the novel since many of his incorrect deductions are based on the short stories in the novels.

=== BEGIN SPOILER FOR CASE 5 OF ADVENTURES ===

My favorite incorrect deduction that is based on one of the stories has to be the one in this case where he incorrectly deduces that Eggert Benedict’s crime is trying to dig a hole underneath the pawnbroker and rob the Great Exhibition’s funding. This is a direct reference to an actual crime inspired by Sherlock Holmes.

=== END SPOILER FOR CASE 5 OF ADVENTURES ===

Now onto the plot. For the reason I gave before, I think this is the biggest reason why Chronicles is the best way to experience these adventures. Both sides of the story feel incomplete without one another, unlike most Ace Attorney games that came before. The plot spans across 10 cases and is intricately set up for a majority of them. There are only 2 filler cases out of the 10, but even the two filler cases have a nice little subplot to them that connect them. The point here is that this plot is enormous and incredibly wide in scope and is therefore the most ambitious Ace Attorney plot to date.

=== BEGIN SPOILER FOR AJ, DD, and SoJ ===

I think it is important to make a quick note about my feelings about the most recent Ace Attorney games. It’s certainly not easy to craft a plot over a duology of games. If people absolutely hate the plot of even one game, then the entire thing crumbles. The place where I think this effect is most present are in the 3 most recent games to the mainline Ace Attorney series which are Apollo Justice, Dual Destinies, and Spirit of Justice.

AJ was not a great game in my eyes since it didn’t really do much to make Apollo an interesting character without Phoenix. As I noted in my AJ review also, they had the potential to make this work. DD could have been a game where it was only Apollo and Phoenix working side by side to solve cases with Phoenix acting like a mentor to Apollo. Instead of trying to recover from AJ though, they completely discarded everything it setup. Klavier Gavin and a few other obscure references seem to be the only things that have survived from that game when it had so much more to offer. DD’s goal instead was to just completely hit the reset button on Apollo’s origin story and give him a new one. Because of that, again, DD had the same problems as AJ; it tried to shoehorn both Apollo and Phoenix while also shoving Athena into it. With only 5 cases (and two of them even being filler!) there’s absolutely no time for any meaningful development for these characters. So what did they do in SoJ? They hit the reset button again and, while it was a bit more successful, it still had the same problems. Athena literally only gets one case and it’s one of the worst filler cases in Ace Attorney. Phoenix and Apollo split the plot, but they once again start Apollo’s backstory from scratch because they can and he feels completely fragmented as a character because of it.

When Adventures came out, it wasn’t well received because it felt incomplete. Ryunosuke’s story only felt like it was just beginning and people wanted closure on the plot. Though, instead of just forgetting about it because of negativity, the team for this game had the resolve to see their vision through. They took what they had made in the first game and expanded on it. They effectively forced things to have relevance by making them important in the second game. That is how you recover from negativity. Resetting a game loses all the work and greatness forever, whereas this repurposes it and gives it value. I hope the team behind the mainline games takes this example and learns from it.

=== END SPOILER FOR AJ, DD, and SoJ ===

Besides being ambitious, I think this is also one of the more darker and thematic plots in Ace Attorney. I think the most engaging thing about the end of Trials and Tribulations was its ambiguous ending. There’s a lot to look at and examine in that ending, character-wise, and it ties directly into the central themes of the original trilogy.

=== BEGIN SPOILER FOR T&T AND ALL OF CHRONICLES ===

The big reveal at the end of the Bridge to the Turnabout was that Godot was the one who killed the victim after he had seen she was channeling Dahlia Hawthorne through her. At the end of that case, a lurking question was about the motive. Did he kill to protect Maya Fey, or did he do it out of revenge? He gives evidence that he might have done it out of revenge, even though he knew that wasn’t actually Dahlia Hawthorne, but everyone comforts him by believing in his desire to protect Maya Fey. That’s what leads to his saying of “A lawyer cries only when it’s all over” having significant meaning.

That is the key behind the brilliance of the whole trilogy; this message of an unwavering belief in finding the truth. There are people out there who are unable to defend themselves because they lack the knowledge or power to do so. Only by pursuing the whole truth and nothing but the whole truth can we hope to decide if these people are truly innocent or if they deserve judgement for their sins. That’s what makes this question so powerful. Is Godot innocent or guilty? We can’t truly decide until we have seen the whole truth, which is impossible. Not even Godot himself seems capable of knowing the whole truth. So what do we have left to rely on? Faith. The evidence is the only thing that matters in court, but the evidence doesn’t tell the whole truth and so we’re left with our emotions. Do we believe that Godot would be capable of ending a life out of revenge? By Maya affirming that she believes in his innocence, that’s enough for him and it’s all he needs to hear to say the case is closed.

Chronicles seems like a natural expansion of this question. What happens when your faith is misplaced and you’re betrayed? This betrayal is present all throughout the duology. Ryunosuke is betrayed by McGilded after he puts his full effort into defending him, Barok van Zieks is betrayed by his older brother Klint and his best friend Genshin Asogi after it turns out Klint was the infamous criminal The Professor, and Gina is betrayed by Inspector Gregson after it turns out he was part of the organization known as The Reaper. Many different views are presented throughout this game to answer this question. For Barok and Gina, their answer at one point was to completely shut the world out. It’s better not to trust anyone so there’s absolutely no risk of being betrayed later. However, we humans are imperfect social creatures; we cannot hope to do everything ourselves and must rely on other humans at some point.

That’s where Ryunosuke’s unique vision comes in. Even though he himself was betrayed, he knows that there is nothing he could have done about it. He didn’t have the whole truth in his hands and so all he could do was trust in the innocence of his client since he was a defense lawyer. If he is betrayed, then so be it. We must have the resolve to move forward and believe that the truth will come out eventually as long as we try and pursue it. The game explains this a lot more eloquently than I do, but that’s the gist of it. Because of his view, both Barok and Gina change their points of view and trust Ryunosuke to defend them with their lives. They also both deal with their own betrayals in their own way. Barok discloses the information of Klint being The Professor publicly and takes on Kazuma as his apprentice. Gina still remains a Scotland Yard inspector to honor Gregson’s mentorship and kindness to her. That’s both growth and a natural continuation of the themes laid out in the trilogy which already makes it a perfect sequel.

In terms of character growth, Ryunosuke goes on a fundamentally different journey than Phoenix Wright, even though they both end up in similar spots by the end. Continuing the point I made a while back ago where I said the game has a lot more natural growth, by the end of Chronicles it is quite clear that Ryunosuke is fundamentally different in his ideals. He starts out simply as a vessel for Kazuma’s mission to change the legal system for the better, but over time the game starts to give him more freedom and choices to make on his own. In case 3 of Adventures, he questions whether it’s right for a defense attorney to go against their client in the name of the truth, and it actually gives the player a choice. Even though the choice doesn’t affect the story, the game really plays off this feeling the choice gives you for the remainder of the game; what is a defense lawyer’s job? Is it the pursuit of truth or the defense of their client as written in the law? This is the question that is played on for the entire duration of the game and it feels a lot different from how Phoenix grows because Phoenix starts out with this vision of defending those who cannot stand up for themselves long before he even becomes a lawyer. Seeing Ryunosuke come into it naturally as he builds his own beliefs about the situations he’s thrown in feels a lot more natural than the growth Phoenix had in the trilogy in my opinion.

=== END SPOILER FOR T&T AND ALL OF CHRONICLES ===

Stepping away from the themes, I just really love how gradually the plot is built throughout the entire game. It’s a slow ramp up that feels a lot more natural than the typical style of the series which is to throw everything at you at once at the very end. It’s the opposite of Ace Attorney Investigations. The benefit to this is that you get to build your own theories as the game progresses and it feels incredibly satisfying to see the truth come out even if your predictions were right or wrong. You have time to think about the implications of certain pieces of evidence/information and see your views of characters change over time slowly instead of all at once like a slap in the face. I wish more games in the series would adopt this style.

Next up we have the gameplay. Like Trials and Tribulations, the game doesn’t really make use of many new gimmicks to keep itself entertaining. There are two legitimately new gameplay components and they are Dance of Deduction and Jury Examination. Everything else in this game can be found in some other Ace Attorney game. I mentioned in my review of Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright that the key to making good gameplay mechanics is to make them not too out of reach from what the player is familiar with so they can instantly pick up on how to use it. Dances of Deduction and Jury Examinations both fit this description since Jury Examinations, as the game itself says, are nothing more than cross examinations. You just pick two jurors (occasionally pressing them for more information) that have contradicting statements and pit them against each other. It’s an extension of a mechanic that was introduced in Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright and here it’s utilized much more. As for Dance of Deduction, it was much more of a risk since it’s a genuinely new mechanic. In these dances, Sholmes attempts to make two deductions about the crime scene. When he explains his deductions he sometimes gets some parts of it wrong and it’s up to you to fix the problems in his deduction. Notice that this really boils down to something players are familiar with; pointing out contradictions in statements and correcting them.

They’ve passed that check, but what makes them different from a mechanic like perceive or mood matrix? I think, currently, the fundamental problem with these two mechanics is that there’s no way to introduce a challenge to either of them. With perceive, the goal is just to pick out the thing that moves while the witness is talking. Often they either tell you the answer or make it so incredibly obvious what’s moving that you never have to use any brain cells to figure it out. With the mood matrix, it’s the same thing. Either the emotion is so obscure that you just have to guess and hope you picked up on what the game devs were thinking or they make it so obvious what the faulty emotion is that you don’t even need to be paying attention to figure it out. Adding penalties onto either of these things won’t fundamentally change that the mechanics need to be made easy so you can get it. With jury examinations, the goal itself is so clear and obvious that they’re allowed to make it harder by putting more subtle contradictions into the juror statements. With Dance of Deduction, they make it harder by making what you’re deducing that much more outlandish/ridiculous.

Dance of Deduction specifically is unique here since the way they make it harder is by being more creative. That’s a rather weird thing to say about a gameplay mechanic. Most games just turn up some nob and make the AI a little more accurate or a little smarter. Here it’s up to the writers of the game to make the deduction itself difficult through the writing. They’ve effectively forced themselves to write a good gameplay mechanic and that is what makes it one of the most interesting game gimmicks I have ever seen.

=== START SPOILERS FOR CASE 3 OF RESOLVE ===

Another part of what makes it a great mechanic is how useful it is to you the player. In my review of Apollo Justice, I said another major problem with perceive is that it’s generally not helpful at all sometimes. With perceive you often deduce things you could have easily figured out an easier way. With Dance of Deduction though, almost every single deduction is something you could not have figured out yourself because of how ridiculous it is. No case better exemplifies this fact than the one in case 3 of Resolve.

In this deduction, you are chasing down conman scientist Enoch Drebber when you go into his bedroom and find that everything has been flipped upside down! In addition, you find a red device in the center of the room with a clock at its center. From this, Sholmes deduces that the device is an anti-gravity device that Drebber made use of to escape the room. Yes, you heard that right. This is on the level of ridiculous that not even Professor Layton versus Phoenix Wright would accept, and that’s what I love about it. You have no clue what the outcome of the true deduction will be once you’re done, but already you’re dying of laughter because of how outlandish this one is. It’s a simple way to make Sholmes feel as whacky as a normal Ace Attorney character while introducing a fun mechanic into the game. It’s brilliant.

By the end of the deduction, you learn that the device in the center of the room is not actually an anti-gravity device, but a bomb and that Drebber is hiding in a safe in the room to avoid the blast. You end up defusing the bomb with 7 seconds to spare. That right there is the beauty of a deduction. You just figured something out that you could not have figured out without the mechanic and it proves that it was actually useful to go through all of that work and flair.

=== END SPOILERS FOR CASE 3 OF RESOLVE ===

Lastly, no Ace Attorney game would feel complete without the art complementing the novel. This includes the music and animations. I’ve said a lot of what makes this music and animation special already, so I don’t have much to add here. I will say that the art here really captures the essence of what this game is; it’s an Ace Attorney game with its own identity. Listening to the soundtrack makes it 100% feel like it belongs in the catalogue of Ace Attorney, but it’s so fundamentally different in instrument and sound choice that it stands out from anything that has come before it. From a 3D modelling perspective, the animations are very reminiscent of what you’d see in Dual Destinies and Spirit of Justice, but animations are more fluid thanks to the introduction of mocap which makes everything look much more realistic and smoother. You also have fully animated 3D cutscenes at some points in Resolve which are something that I think should show up in the series much more often because of how cool it looks. Lastly, you have 2D art pieces as well that sometimes complement the game in the form of anime cutscenes and banners. The one that shows up when you complete the game is my favorite.

This review went on for a really long time, but I hoped to capture just a small hint of what this game has to offer you as the player. Chronicles, on top of these games, also features behind the scenes content that goes into far more depth than I possibly could with this review. I personally had a blast going through every single piece of unused music, concept art, and video looking to see the development process. I really wish every Ace Attorney game was so open with its development process because of how much I loved reading the commentary here. After reading all of it as well as all of the dev blogs, I can say without a doubt that the team behind this game put their entire soul behind this project and it really shows. They had wanted to give us so much in such short development time that I cannot thank them enough for their hard work on this product. I strongly recommend everyone who has played this game to spend some time going through the escapades and other special content because of how fun it is (and it’s why I linked a lot of it in this review!).

Overall though, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is a fantastic game. It gets every single thing it does right thanks to its single vision and resolve to get the vision realized. It has the best music, characters, and plot in the entire Ace Attorney franchise and manages to stay true to the original trilogy’s style while breaking some common conventions fans are used to. It’s one of the most unique spin offs of a game I have ever played and I hope we get more of it in the future, especially since I've already gotten every accolade. No Ace Attorney game has left me so depressed wanting more!

TL;DR: An interesting entry in the Ace Attorney franchise that has fun gameplay, but lacks the story and characters that make Ace Attorney a world class franchise.

Back all the way in my review of the very first Ace Attorney game, I noted that one of the primary reasons the game stuck with me for so long was because of its exceedingly colorful cast of characters and dramatic story. Especially in the HD remake for PC, it's hard not to stare at how bright every single background and character is and so I would go through extra effort to make sure I tapped everything in the environment during investigations. Even though investigations themselves were simple preludes to trials, what made them fun wasn't the gameplay, but the time spent meeting interesting people. In Ace Attorney Investigations, it's rather the opposite. I absolutely adore the gameplay, but I wasn't that invested in the story or characters.

To start, let's talk about the gameplay. In this game, instead of playing as Phoenix Wright as you did in the trilogy, you play as his rival, Miles Edgeworth. He is a prosecutor traveling the world to study foreign judicial systems. Instead of being divided into trial and investigation segments, the entirety of the game takes place in investigations (as the name of the game implies) where your job is to look for clues in the crime scene that point to the real culprit of the crime. To this end, the standard investigation style has been revamped greatly.

For the first time in the series, you are now free to walk around crime scenes and explore different areas within it. Whilst exploring, you are sometimes given the opportunity to deduce things about the crime scene. Gameplay wise, this boils down to pointing out an area that seems strange and then presenting evidence that explains what's strange about it. In addition, as you gather clues, Edgeworth keeps relevant facts inside his head. When you gather two facts that are related to each other, you can connect them together using Logic™ to gain more insight about the crime. Lastly, when you gather enough clues about the crime, you will typically find yourself debating with another person about the details, cross examination style. Debates are effectively the replacement for trial segments.

Even though these changes are quite few in number, they make the game feel quite different than a normal Ace Attorney game. In a standard Ace Attorney game, the investigation acts like a necessary ramp up to the trial mode where the actual fun happens. Investigation segments, when done normally, are typically long segments where you read blobs upon blobs of text that you need to soak up like a sponge so you can act competently during a trial. In this game, and many future titles after it such as The Great Ace Attorney, investigations no longer feel like this. They are instead treated like first class citizens where finding out truths in the investigation is as important as finding them out during a trial. In this game, it's taken to the extreme by having the gameplay and plot in full support of finding out the truth in crime scenes and I think that's what makes the idea of this game welcome into the AA franchise. Investigating this way is fun and it's exhilarating when you catch the true culprit right at the scene of the crime and bust contradictions right at their source.

So far, everything seems hunky dory. Though, this is a majority of my praise of the game since it's basically what you're promised before you ever start it. In order for this game to really be something worthy of Ace Attorney it needs a plot and characters that meet the series standard. Does this game have either of those? In my opinion, no. I wasn't thoroughly invested in the plot and characters as much as I wanted to be, and I find that to be an absolute shame for a game with so much promise.

Let's first talk about the plot. In my mind there are really two plots that are built in this game; one that focuses on taking down a global smuggling ring and another that focuses on the great thief Yatagarasu. These plots are connected to each other, but it's really the smuggling ring that gets the bulk of attention in this game. I think that's an absolute shame because that plot is rather boring.

Most of the villains in this game are people who are involved in that smuggling ring and each one has the exact same motive; they killed because they are greedy and/or want power. Certainly it's not a bad motive, but typically in Ace Attorney, that motive is substantiated by something more powerful to make it not feel cliche or boring. As an example, take case 3-2 which focused on the thief Mask☆DeMasque. One of the big reveals of that case is that he became a thief to pay for his wife's excessive spending. He loved her, but he wasn't confident that he could keep her around if he didn't give her everything she wanted, so he resorted to theft. It's a greed motive, but it's substantiated by something that gives it a bit more flavor. The best villains in the series have motives like this, but surprisingly, AAI has absolutely no villains that fit this description.

What also makes this plot boring is that it's incredibly shallow in terms of both development and personal stake to Edgeworth. In terms of development, the smuggling ring plot only gets developed at the end of each case. In the first three cases you only hear small things about it, but you don't actually learn anything about what it is the smuggling ring is doing until the last two cases. This is a thing that is done often in AA, even in the newer games like The Great Ace Attorney. They take a filler case with absolutely no meaning to the main plot, but then slap on one bit of context to the end of it to make it relevant. What makes it tolerable though is that it's not done for a majority of the cases and the filler itself is actually fun. In The Great Ace Attorney, it's only done one time, but in this game it's done for 3 cases which is over half the game. The result is that 90% of the smuggling ring plot is crammed into the last case and it feels incredibly bloated as a result. It also starves the other 3 cases of any kind of sense of relevance for no good reason. Lastly, it also makes it so Edgeworth can't get any personal connection to the events of the game. He doesn't even start formally investigating the ring until the very last case of the game.

So overall, this smuggling ring plot was developed quite poorly throughout the game and when you actually get to investigating it, there isn't that much excitement waiting for you. The plot was too ambitious for the amount of setup it got in the other cases. I do understand why they went with such an ambitious plot though. Gameplay wise, it justifies why things need to be settled at the crime scenes themselves; if they weren't the culprits would have more than enough opportunity to change the crime scene however they wanted and hide the truth forever. The urgency of the situations give rise to things you wouldn't normally see in a standard Ace Attorney investigation like your best friends getting arrested right at the scene based on flaky evidence. One of the main characters in this game, Investigator Lang, often places incorrect charges on people with the excuse that they don't need to find the true culprit yet because they can wait for the trial. So the plot works for the gameplay's style, but as an actual Ace Attorney plot, it's quite shallow and leads to the endgame feeling horrendous. The real meat in my opinion is the Yatagarasu plot.

The Yatagarasu plot focuses primarily on a thief who steals in the name of justice. He acts as a vigilante and often gets evidence illegally. What's great about this plot is that it's pretty much the opposite of the smuggling ring plot; every character in it has purpose and it ties directly into Edgeworth's core beliefs and story. Interacting with the Yatagarasu has made him rethink what the law is and how it should be used not as a strict tool for people to take advantage of, but for people to mold and fight injustice with. It has the stakes you would expect from an Ace Attorney plot, but the issue is that it's way too short. It gets brief mentions in the first 3 cases, the bulk of its plot in the fourth case, and resolves itself halfway into the fifth case. If this was the whole game, then I think people would have been more invested in the plot of it. It also opens itself up to a logical explanation to the cool Little Thief mechanic that gets used a few times throughout the game. Investigating scenes with Little Thief is, in my mind, an underrated and underused mechanic in this game.

That's about it for the plot. It had promise, but ultimately it came out flat because of how ambitious it was trying to be without proper setup. But even though the story itself may not be that great, we at least have the characters to love, right? I personally would disagree. Out of all the new characters in the game, the only ones I really fell in love with were Kay, Lang, Badd and Yew. Every other character was some cog in the boring smuggling ring plot or a repeat character from some previous game. It's weird how much time this game spends with cameos. I think if you were to keep track of the amount of time spent with return characters as opposed to new ones, you'd find that new characters don't make up a huge portion of the runtime of the game. That's a bittersweet thing for me since, as much as I love AA characters making comebacks in games, I really was looking for something brand new from this game. The return characters basically hijack most of the good moments from the new characters unfortunately.

So to conclude, AAI is a game that has incredibly fun gameplay, but an underdeveloped story and cast. In my opinion, it's a real shame that this is the one that got localized into English and not the much better sequel that takes full advantage of the game's features. I miss wanting to touch literally every single thing in the crime scene. I miss pun names that made it easy to remember everything. I miss just cracking a smile every time I saw AA characters. There are far too many things missing in this game that I can't bring myself to like it that much. It just doesn't have the same heart and spirit that the titles before (and after) it have. I applaud the team who made this game for going out and trying something new and I recognize that making spinoff games like this is no easy task. But I really wish they had taken a different direction with it. They clearly learned their mistakes when it came time to make the second game, but this is the game that somehow has seen a localization and a remake on mobile in HD. Life can be cruel sometimes.

TL;DR: An absolutely epic adventure that never ceases to be interesting or thrilling. It takes the best parts of Professor Layton and Phoenix Wright and combines them into an incredibly satisfying experience.

At the time of this writing, I am currently on a quest to play every single Ace Attorney game again. I have made it through the entire trilogy as well as Apollo Justice. In my replays of these games I have undergone quite a journey with regards to what my view of a perfect Ace Attorney game is.

In my Trials and Tribulations review, I mentioned that the game was great because it stuck to providing simple and familiar gameplay and expanding on its story and characters. For me, this is really all an Ace Attorney game needs to do to be successful in my opinion. Later games in the series aren't as great because they complicate the simple and working formula with terrible and complicated gimmicks that distract from the main reason I play the games.

I bring this up because after going through PLvsPW for the first time, I have to once again question what it means for an Ace Attorney game to be great. The reason is that, even though this game is quite bold in terms of how much it changes the gameplay of a standard Ace Attorney game, it succeeds in providing an experience that feels right at home for me. This game is a beautiful blend of the new and creative as well as the familiar and it achieves this blend by mixing together the best aspects from both Professor Layton and Ace Attorney games into a brand new formula that just works.

To see this formula, let's first start with the gameplay. Like Ace Attorney games, each part of the game can be divided into two distinct categories; investigations and trials.

Almost all investigations take place in the town of Labyrinthia, a place where magic is real and stories are reality. Even though the town is quite small, there's almost never a place you can go that isn't brimming with life and something interesting to look at. Part of the fun of an Ace Attorney game is just tapping everything in the environment to get some fun dialogue from the main characters or some side characters. This game not only encourages the player to do this by providing very uniquely designed background characters, but it also mixes in hidden puzzles and hint coins into the background so you're more than encouraged to look around and take it all in. I personally didn't use any of the hint coins, but I still got them because it was a lot of fun searching for them. It's a beautiful setting with equally beautiful life living all around it just waiting to be explored.

Where investigations differ from the standard Ace Attorney fare is that you do not spend most of your time talking to witnesses or examining crime scenes. The bulk of your time is spent solving puzzles, Professor Layton style. What once used to be a very long prelude to the much more fun trials is now replaced with shorter investigations and puzzles to keep your mind occupied. That is to say, you are almost never doing nothing in this game. While the puzzles can sometimes be completely orthogonal to what's going on with the plot, they serve as a fun distraction from reading a bunch of text for hours. It's a unique way to spice up long investigations while keeping Professor Layton fans happy. I loved all 70 puzzles in the game and just wanted more by the time I finished.

The next gameplay component are trials. While the first trial is the standard Ace Attorney trial format that we all know and love, the subsequent trials are what make this game outstanding. From the second trial on, all trials are witch trials where you defend your client from accusations of being a witch. The key component that makes these trials work is absurdity. There is no way in hell that you could say the defendant flew away from the crime scene or turned invisible in a standard Ace Attorney game, but that is the norm here. Because witch trials are allowed to be so absurd, the gameplay is allowed to expand in tons of new and interesting ways.

For instance, one new gameplay component is that the game puts every witness on the stand at once now. Yes, all witnesses testify at the exact same time. The last case even has you cross examine 10 witnesses at once. By doing this, testimonies feel fundamentally different; it's not one person's point of view anymore. Statements can vary wildly in claims to the point where every witness says something completely different. This allows you to use witnesses statements as evidence for contradictions and allows you to get the opinions of other witnesses while another talks. This exact same mechanic would be replicated in The Great Ace Attorney and in both games the mechanic is done exceptionally well.

The key thing to note here though is that it's not complete absurdity. Even when trials deal with magic, things still follow logical rules. The rules are not complex and are kept simple on purpose to avoid making the gameplay feel convoluted. Many later Ace Attorney games fail to have this kind of discipline when they add new mechanics to trials and, like I said earlier, it distracts from the fun parts of those games. The new gimmicks in this game work because they're incredibly natural extensions to the simple gameplay of Ace Attorney and they aren't infuriating to make use of.

Next let's talk about the story. I think this is the point where many people tend to criticize the game. For me, the story in this game is very well done, even if it needs to rely on a lot of asspulling to get it done. One thing I really love about this story is that there is absolutely no filler. None. Zip. Nada. Every single chapter of this game is dedicated to telling one narrative and it's interesting to see when pretty much every Ace Attorney game has at least one filler case in it. The game is never distracted and is always telling the main story in the most interesting way it can. Even with this focus though, the pacing of the story is very inconsistent as the game goes on. I would say 60-70% of the story is told at the very end of the game in the epilogue and the earlier parts of the game are just setup for the endgame.

Because so much of the actual story is in the end, I'll focus mostly on that. The end of this game is dedicated to explaining pretty much every mystery that was brought up before. Every chapter before it sets up the dominoes and this chapter knocks them down. The main person responsible for knocking down the dominoes is Professor Layton. For some reason, he becomes an absolute genius at the end of the case and basically solves every mystery himself. He stops himself at some points to give other people (AKA Phoenix) a chance, but everyone constantly remarks that he already knows the answer to everything and he leads the case so forcefully into the truth. The reason this is required is because the plot dug itself so deep into a hole that the only way out was to pull magic plot stuff out of the smartest character's ass.

The previous paragraph sounds bad and if you read other reviews here you'll see other people complain about it. But in my opinion, it's quite tolerable. Ace Attorney is no stranger to having some wacko science or magic be the focus of a plot. The last case of the trilogy depends heavily on spirit medium mumbo jumbo to be interesting and it's the best case in the trilogy. What these cases both get right is that they use this asspulling to develop its characters meaningfully. The interesting part of those cases isn't debating the how, it's debating the why. Why do these characters make the choices they do? What goals are they trying to achieve that require them to resort to such ridiculous methods to get them done? These questions get satisfying answers by the end of the case and it leads to one of the most compelling plots in the series.

Because this story is so dedicated to putting its characters center stage, we get some of the most interesting characters in the series. Espella Cantabella is the focus of every chapter in the game and once you learn her story, you can't help but love her. Even antagonistic villains like Inquisitor Barnham get a good amount of the spotlight as they all work towards finding the truth of the town. Besides the new characters, you have the main characters Professor Layton, Phoenix Wright, Luke, and Maya. When they team up, they have really great chemistry together. This chemistry works well with jokes as well as emotional moments. The game designs its story such that the characters can relate to one another very well and play off each other in unique and interesting ways. It's hard to say how exactly this is done without delving into spoilers so I'll just say that they do something very interesting in the last case that relates to the title of the game.

So with all that said and done, what's bad about this game? For me personally, the only really bad thing is the voice acting at some points. The voice acting ranges from incredibly good to I want to claw my ears out. More often it's towards the latter. While characters like Layton, Luke and Maya often sound just fine, other characters talk in a way that irritates me to death. Thank goodness this only happens for cutscenes and select pieces of dialogue. This game would have a 5 star rating with better voice acting.

Overall though, this game is definitely the most unique Ace Attorney game out there. It mixes in Professor Layton puzzles with the standard Ace Attorney gameplay while also adding its own unique spin to trials. As someone who's seen most of the series, it's incredibly refreshing to get a game as creative as this. It doesn't stray too far from what I love about Ace Attorney, but it's not afraid to take calculated risks with its story and gameplay. Every trial is exciting and makes for top tier material in the series. There's no hope of this ever, but I do hope we get another crossover some way some how on PC. This was a delight to play.

TL;DR: A very poor entry in the Ace Attorney series that marked the beginning of a shift away from the founding principles of the games.

I'll say it plain and simple; Apollo Justice is the worst Ace Attorney game in the series by a long shot. It's not only bad because it fails to achieve it's primary goal, but it also sets in precedents that stain future games in the series. Before we get into a deep mauling of this game, let's first talk about what this game does get right at the minimum.

So at its bare minimum, it's an Ace Attorney game. This means you do get the standard Ace Attorney gameplay that you like. There are trials and investigations and when the game is just being an Ace Attorney game, it's really fun. I love pointing out contradictions and there aren't many points in the game where I was straight up lost. Additionally, the soundtrack in this game is really good. It's unique and catchy. As far as positives go (except for some small ones I'll talk about at the end), this is really about it. All 2.5 stars are because of this and nothing else.

Now let's get into the bad starting with the high level. The first thing anybody immediately notices when looking at the box for this game is that it says "Apollo Justice" and has two pictures of him on there. So the natural thing to think is this is a game about Apollo Justice and it will have many new things to love. This is the expectation I had walking in and what you get is exactly the opposite. This is not a game about Apollo Justice at all. This game seems to want to be about everyone else, but him and to me that's the biggest problem of this game. It's a game that's too scared to do anything new with its new protagonist and so they throw him into the shadows as a side character. Yes, the protagonist of the game is a side character to his own story. To understand why, let's first talk about gameplay.

If you've played Rise From the Ashes from the first game, the gameplay in Apollo Justice isn't that much new. Investigations are almost the same in this game except they add on more science gimmicks such as x-rays and footprint analysis. I can see that they were attempting to make investigations more fun with these gimmicks, but they're not that fun. I don't get much joy out of wiping the screen of my DS with the stylus 100 times trying to ink out someone's handwriting. At their best they're neat little minigames and at their worst they're irritating distractions that make me want to toss my DS at a wall. My point is I would have genuinely preferred a simple and normal investigation as opposed to just throwing in these lazy science minigames. I will say though, investigating evidence in 3D is actually an interesting gimmick that is used a lot in later games so credit to that.

As for the trials, they're pretty much the same with one new addition; the new perceive gimmick. This is supposed to be Apollo's differentiating factor. When a witness tells a lie, you can occasionally zoom into them and slow down time while they are talking and find their nervous habits. These habits give you clues as to what it is they're lying about and provide a unique way to make progress in cases without explicitly providing evidence. This sounds like a good idea on paper, but there's two main problems I have with it.

The first is that it's not really put to good use half the time. The appeal of this gimmick is that it allows you to figure out things you normally wouldn't have figured out without it, but often times, the things you perceive are incredibly obvious or could be proven with evidence normally. For example, one use of perceive is in the second case when you are trying to provide a reason why the killer would go back to the victim's clinic after leaving once. You have the reason in evidence and could easily have just presented it, but they made it a perceive moment with no reason why it needed to be. Of course, there are moments where this is put to good use, such as the first case where you hit a wall and use it to branch into a new theory, but when it's not used well it's pretty disappointing.

The second is that it doesn't feel like natural at all in this game. In my review of Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright, I noted that the appeal of the gimmicks in that game was that they felt like natural extensions of the simple gameplay we're used to in the trilogy. It was incredibly easy to see when the gimmick needed to be put to use and as a result the game didn't need to hold your hand every single time you were supposed to use it. Here, perceive is so outlandish and unnatural that the game needs to basically give you the answer to the perceive almost every time you use it. There's no fun to the gimmick if half of its uses are spoiled for you by the game itself. With psyche locks, the game restrains itself from telling you exactly what you need to do to break the locks. Sometimes Phoenix thinks to himself that he has all the evidence he needs to break the locks, but he never tells you how to break the locks because the actual lock breaking is something players are already familiar with from trials. You do get used to perceive in later games and it gets more natural over time, but for this game, where you only ever use it like 5 or 6 times, it's painful to see it go to such waste.

So to summarize the gameplay, there is certainly something new here. The issue is that the game tries to forge a new identity with its gameplay through scientific minigames and perceive, but it doesn't do it well because it's caught in the middle of trying to stick with stuff we're familiar with and be something new. The developers don't trust us to use perceive freely because it's not something we're familiar with. Scientific investigations amount to just bland minigames most of the time because they want to keep investigating the same as it's always been but they wanted to do something different. Because it's caught in the middle here, it's hard to figure out what this game is trying to be. Is it trying to create a new image for Ace Attorney starting with Apollo or is it trying to stick with what's it's good at with new characters? Until the gameplay decides what it wants to be, it can't deliver something consistent.

Next let's talk about the story. The story is where this game really sucks. Right at the end of the first trial, Phoenix himself says that this is Apollo's story. There has never been a greater lie in the entire series.

The whole narrative revolves around events that take place 7 years ago where Phoenix Wright submitted forged evidence and lost his badge as a result. For the past 7 years, the courtroom has become more corrupt in its practices and Phoenix believes resolving the mystery behind this forgery will begin a revolution towards more just trials. He sets out to gather evidence relating to the trial from 7 years ago which involved a group of magicians called the Gramaryes. Due to his investigation and his efforts to instate a new jury system, he is able to find and convict the true culprit behind the forgery and usher in a new era for courtroom trials.

Notice that summary of the plot did not mention Apollo a single time. Apollo's only role in this game is to serve as a defense attorney for Phoenix because he lost his badge. He's basically a puppet for Phoenix to talk through anytime the main story is talked about and it hurts to watch. Some may argue that Apollo is indeed involved in this story because of a reveal at the end of the game that connects him to it. But that to me seems like a lazy way to include him into the plot of the game. Apollo has no personal stake in this plot at all. If he lost one of these main trials, he would lose absolutely nothing. This is in stark contrast to Phoenix Wright who defends people like his mentor's sister or his childhood friends and in this case, the future of his newly adopted daughter.

The original trilogy goes through great lengths to make sure these trials are about Phoenix Wright and appallingly, this game does too. The only plot relevant cases are the first and fourth one (yeah the third one doesn't count). The first trial of this game has Apollo defend against contradictions for the first bit, but when it actually gets interesting, Phoenix basically hijacks the defense since he already knows every contradiction. Apollo gets no time to shine in this case. In the fourth case, Phoenix is basically the guy who does 90% of the investigating and figures out the entire mystery by himself without ever going to a trial. Apollo in this last trial basically just repeats what Phoenix found out. He even credits him as the guy who made it happen and the villain, when he breaks down, screams out Phoenix's name. Again, Apollo doesn't do anything himself and is just a puppet that relays Phoenix's findings. The other two cases are the only cases where Apollo actually gets to do his own thing, but those cases are the worst in the game because they're filler cases with terrible characters and premises. More on that in a bit. The main point here though is that if there are any good moments in the game, they're stolen by Phoenix. Phoenix's character was already finished with the trilogy so not only does he take these crucial character building moments, but he also does nothing with them because he's already learned the lessons from them. It's absolutely astounding to me that Phoenix is nowhere on the cover of this box, even though he's the guy at the center of everything in this game.

Like I said earlier though, Apollo does get some moments of his own, but those are found only in the second and third case which are filler cases. There are only 4 cases in this game and so Apollo only gets his moments in half the cases and in the half of the cases that don't mean anything to the plot.

The second case honestly feels the closest to a familiar Ace Attorney case in this game. It has a minimal amount of gimmicks and it's relatively short with only two investigations and two trials. The issue with this case is how it ends. Because it's short, there are only 2 witnesses. From the moment you start investigating the second time it's incredibly obvious who the killer is. But why is it so obvious? Because the killer goes and does stupid stuff that basically guarantees they'd be caught. For example, for some unexplained reason the killer swaps out her shoes for the medical shoes leaving her old ones at the scene of the crime. I tried looking at the scripts and Google for a reason why she does this and I legitimately can't find one, leading me to believe her goal was to get caught so Apollo could look good. Because obvious clues like this were left everywhere, it doesn't take Apollo any time to grind her in court and win. It was so fast and obvious that she didn't even have a proper breakdown and just confessed because she got bored of testifying. I honestly don't know how else to interpret this ending. This is the most boring ending to any Ace Attorney case I've ever seen and as a result Apollo doesn't even feel that cool in the end.

As for the third case, it's simply the worst Ace Attorney case in the series. No case comes close to the amount of pain I've suffered while playing this case. First, let's start with the premise. The premise is absolutely stupid. You are defending Machi Tobaye, a piano player who is blind and a child. The victim is a huge bodyguard that was killed by a revolver that has been claimed to be so powerful shooting it even once will break your arm. The prosecution claims that because the shooter shot twice and missed a shot, they must have been blind and there's only one blind guy! What????? Good thing they quickly abandon this premise and just go with "he was the only one who could have done it because he's small." This is still dumb because he had no injuries at all meaning he couldn't have shot the gun, but it's not as dumb as the previous one they went with. Besides the premise, there's the gameplay. The gameplay consists of using a mixing board and listening to the same song and video 10 times. If you are tone deaf like me, the mixing board just turns into a game of guessing until you get the right thing. The video you are forced to watch 10 times over is so slow, boring, and awfully made that it's a pain to even watch once. Oh and you can't skip it so you're forced to watch it every time it comes on. Notice I haven't even talked about Apollo yet, these are just the gimmicks. These gimmicks are the most irritating gameplay moments I've ever had in the series and if I ever see them again I'm going to shoot that revolver 20 times at my DS. As for the case itself, it's fine. The contradictions and twist In the middle are cool and it plays like what you'd expect from a normal Ace Attorney case. I just wish this case had more relevance to the events of the main plot because it's clear they were trying to connect it, but I didn't see a connection other than just one person existing. It's unfortunate that one of the only cases Apollo actually gets his own cool moments in is shadowed by so much pain and agony.

Lastly, let's talk about the characters in this game. I hate 90% of them. Of the 10% that are good, they are the Gavins, Trucy and repeat characters like Phoenix and Ema. Pretty much everyone else in this game is either incredibly boring or irritates me in some way. Apollo is boring because of the reasons I described above. Almost every witness in this game irritates me to death because of how much of an asshole they are. Zak Gramarye, for example, orphans his daughter so he can escape the law, gets Phoenix's badge taken because he withholds crucial evidence from him (that he doesn't tell him about for 7 years >_>), and motivates the main villain of the game to kill people by being mysterious and condescending during a game of poker. I can find at least one reason why every witness is annoying or an asshole and that spot is usually only reserved for the worst of the worst in the original trilogy. The best witnesses in that trilogy typically are motivated with funny or good intentions and only act the way they do because they've fundamentally misunderstood something. Almost nobody in this game acts like this and they just choose to be assholes for the sake of being assholes.

So overall, this game sucks for a variety of reasons. It puts its main character to the side for the sake of highlighting characters we already like, it sacrifices simple Ace Attorney gameplay for cheap and annoying gimmicks, and features a cast of characters that are boring and painful to talk to. It basically forgets what made the originals great and tries to capitalize on their success in the worst way possible.

What is most painful about this game is that they were clearly trying to make it work. There are some really good and interesting ideas in this game that never make it past this game because of how terrible the rest of the game is. I would have genuinely loved if Phoenix remained a hobo for the rest of the series and acted as a mentor to Apollo. Then maybe if Apollo didn't get his time here, he'd get another chance. The MASON system and jury system was genuinely interesting and I would have loved for either of them to see a comeback. Only the jury system comes back in a completely different fashion in The Great Ace Attorney. Instead what this game told the developers was that they just needed to try again with a different set of characters and gimmicks. That's where Athena Cykes and her mood matrix comes in. That's where the Divination Seance comes in Spirit of Justice. While these aren't bad gimmicks, it's clear that the culture of Ace Attorney is now to try and shove more and more gimmicks into the games instead of focus on the simple principles that make great games like the first or third one. Trials and Tribulations literally made no changes to the gameplay of Justice for All and it was the best game in the series because of how well written it was. If the writers would just slow down and actually write a consistent story about one character, I think that would make for better games. But unfortunately, starting with this game this is now the new standard for Ace Attorney games and it's hard to forgive and forget the one that started it.

TL;DR: An absolutely exciting conclusion to one of the greatest video game trilogies of all time. It's filled with fun characters, a dark yet deep plot, and the iconic Ace Attorney shenanigans fans love making it one of my favorites in the entire series.

To me, the mark of any great sequel to anything is how well it builds off the original. Great movie sequels are defined by how they take the themes and feeling of the original film and take them into new and interesting directions. The same is true of video games, except the job is arguably more challenging. With films, there is more freedom to explore new places, characters, and concepts. Video games are often tied to down to the same or very similar gameplay, leaving little room for improvement.

Why do I bring this up? Because, despite the challenge of living up to the first game's expectations, Trials and Tribulations manages to take the concepts and ideas established in the first two Ace Attorney games and create something that both feels like an Ace Attorney game, while also providing new experiences that make it better than the original.

To start, let's discuss the gameplay. The gameplay in Trials and Tribulations is nothing new. There are two main gameplay components; trials and investigations just like the previous games. In fact, if you've played the second game, Justice For All, the gameplay is exactly the same with no modifications. For a full analysis of the gameplay then, it suffices to check out my reviews of the first two games. The important point with the gameplay is that it's what Ace Attorney fans are used to. The only difference is that in this game, the investigations and cases are polished with mastery from two games worth of experience. Episodes like the first game's Rise From the Ashes tried to go in the opposite direction and add new gimmicks to make the gameplay more interesting. Generally, when a game in this series does that without much thought, it just takes way from the two components people actually like about the games which are the trials and investigations. This game simply takes what Ace Attorney players love and gives it to them with no strings attached and it feels perfect.

So then, if this game doesn't provide us with new gameplay, what does it give us that's new? The answer is simple; an intriguing story. A major problem of the second game, Justice For All, is that most of it doesn't actually build off the plot of the main game that well. Of the 4 episodes in that game, 2 of them are just filler episodes that have no consequence or relation to the rest of the series or game. These 2 cases are often considered by players to be the worst in the trilogy because of this. However, in Trials and Tribulations, every case has some role to play in the grand scheme of things. Even filler cases play off the ideas and concepts established in the previous games in some way, and it makes every case in the game feel important.

To give an example, consider the second episode in the game, The Stolen Turnabout. In this case you are the defense attorney for a thief who has stolen an urn from an exhibit. In every episode before this, you are hardwired into believing (almost) every case is a murder case where your defendant is not the guilty party. As a result, you fight your hardest to get the Not Guilty verdict and win the case as you would normally. However, there is just one small little problem. By getting this Not Guilty verdict for your client, you have basically provided the opportunity for him to be a killer in a murder case. Oops. In just one trial, the game takes your expectations and just flips them completely on their head in ways you wouldn't even expect. Almost every episode in this game does some kind of unique twist to the formula we're used to and it makes every episode feel special as a result.

But like I said earlier, it's important to remember that the gameplay is unchanged, even with these twists. Players familiar with the franchise will feel right at home, even when the game throws these twists at turns at them. It's an interesting blend of the unexpected, but familiar that makes it so intriguing to play through. This idea of taking things you are familiar and mixing in new elements to create something better is expressed best through the new prosecutor for the game, Godot. His character development and story tie in directly to the plot the players have seen in the past two games, but the game goes through great lengths to make sure that he's still his own person, even if he is living in the events of the past. Unlike Franziska von Karma, he's more than just a repeat of the generic prosecutor who wants to trump Phoenix Wright for the glory. He's here to trump Phoenix Wright for a reason that can only be found by looking back at the plot the games have already laid down for you. Like Edgeworth was in the first game, he's also the center of attention for this game and he does not disappoint.

Overall, this game to me is the definition of a perfect sequel. It takes what people love about the series, amps them up to 10 and also sprinkles in some new twists to make it distinct. It's a coffee with just the right amount of creamer to make it a delicious treat and is definitely worth playing the entire series for, even if it's nearly 20 years old.

TL;DR: An absolutely exciting gameplay experience with incredible dialogue and a tense atmosphere surrounding every aspect of it.

As someone who hasn't played the first Portal (as of the time of this writing), I wasn't sure what exactly this game had in store for me. I had heard praise for its gameplay and many people call it one of the best video games ever because of it. Are these criticisms justified? In my opinion, yes. Portal 2 provides not only incredibly fun and unique gameplay, but it also has a chilling atmosphere surrounding it which many consider a step up from the first game.

Let's first talk about the gameplay. The gameplay is rather simple. The game is divided into a set of rooms and your goal is to exit the room. Of course, there's often a catch; sometimes you need to press a button to open the door, sometimes you need to launch yourself to the door, and more. This sounds like an incredibly boring concept, however, it's made lively with the addition of the portal gun which allows you to shoot 2 portals on the wall that let you travel instantly between them. Each level also adds its own twists with things like lasers, robots with guns, and launchers that vary the gameplay a lot between the rooms.

The big thing with Portal 2 is that it's not a game you can win by just brute forcing solutions. The game encourages you to sit down for a few minutes and think about what you could do to solve the puzzle and exit the room. The solution is almost never straightforward and the fun is in thinking how you can abuse your surroundings to get to where you need to. One interesting example is through using a portal to launch yourself and build momentum. A famous thing to do is to shoot two portals on two horizontal surfaces so they face each other, jump in to get speed, and then shoot a portal on some platform to launch yourself upwards. It's ingenious solutions to puzzles like this that make the game a masterpiece. Solving a puzzle in this game makes you feel like you won an IQ competition and every solution is well within reach with a little bit of thought. It's also really fun to think about the solutions with friends while playing Co-Op mode.

Beyond the gameplay, we have the dialogue and story. Most of the dialogue is given by the robot GLaDoS who offers witty dialogue and dark humor that always seems to land exactly perfect. We also have other performances by actors like Stephen Merchant and J.K. Simmons which add onto the atmosphere the game builds. All of these performances lend themselves to an excellent story with one of the smartest video game endings I have ever seen.

Overall, this is a perfect game. It costs almost nothing now and still offers one of the most entertaining and fun experiences in a video game ever. There's no reason not to pick it up.