Definitely the best Tekken game out of the PS1 Era. Great roster, good final boss with Ogre (Not Shrek!) and the gameplay gets a lot more 3D which is epic.

Don't understand that Gon character though. Who is he again? lol

Yeah this game is a timeless classic. So freaking good I love it! This is when Tekken really started to pick up with it's 3D elements. Mad respect!

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I heard for years that the unlocalized sequel to Ace Attorney Investigations, which I regard as one of the worst games in the series, is against all odds one of debeste- er, the best. I didn't believe them! Why would I?

Turns out I was wrong! There's a first time for everything. Investigations 2 is a fantastic game that stands toe-to-toe with some of the best games in the series. I'll try to keep as much of this review on this game as I can but I gotta get this off my chest. It's my personal opinion that if you haven't played either Investigations games and are looking to start: Do not pass go, skip directly to Investigations 2. You are free to ignore this advice and I won't judge you for it, but I truly believe just about every character in that game is better for just pretending the first game didn't happen.

Moving on, Investigations 2 proved to me that Ace Attorney can live on without Shu Takumi at the helm. Of course I'd love for him to be, but they did just fine on their own here. It has most of the sauce that separates the Turnabout Academies from the Rise from the Ashes. You of course have your "case from [x] years ago" and the internal struggle that the protagonist goes through as a result of their morals and personal connections to events unfolding, except unlike the first game they're actually worth a damn here. Sorry, I know I promised. All of the arcs that the characters go through here are compelling and the resolutions feel earned. Edgeworth, especially. With Edgeworth's character already being pretty well defined by the arc he goes through over the course of the main trilogy, it's a tall order to then put him in the protagonist's seat of a new set of games and expect anything they come up with to approach that same level of impact. To my surprise they actually do a good job!

The newcomers to this game are all extremely fun and likeable, too. Raymond Shields is a great level-headed mentor figure to Edgeworth, which the game cleverly contrasts by showing him in his early years as Gregory Edgeworth's weird little girl/ assistant. Justine Courtney is a stoic, formidable foe who manages to maintain her status as an intimidating figure for as long as she stands opposed to Edgeworth's actions and ethics. Sebastian Debeste is a character that I really did not expect to like at all when he was first introduced, but he quickly grew to be my favorite.

I have a couple of nitpicks though. Firstly, good LORD those cases are long. For transparency's sake, there were multiple instances of me taking several month-long breaks during cases, but by the 4th case I was playing it quite regularly and even still it felt incredibly long. There's good reason for it, as that game has a lot of ground to cover for that story to move, but at the same time I'm sure the amount of extra time spent actually having to move the characters around in cutscenes and walk around the environments adds some time that wouldn't be there in the more visual novel-esque main series. If a third entry in the series were to do away with this mode of play I would certainly not complain, but I'm sure this is marketed as a key defining feature of the spin-offs so I doubt it would.

My last gripe lies with the reveal in the finale case. I won't spoil it here, if you know you know, but the more I think about it the more I really don't know if I find any of that earned. The angle they were setting up was quite interesting, and from an overall story perspective I think was written well, but like... them? I dunno. Plus that last set of cross-examinations -rebuttals, whatever- really were dragging on by the end. It didn't feel like making holes in impenetrable armor but rather arguing in circles for so long you sanded the soles off your shoes. A weird misstep in momentum but otherwise not one that dampened my enjoyment that much.

Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth - Prosecutor's Path is a ray of light that shines in my personal darkness that is "Almost Every Ace Attorney After 4." I'm glad that I got to play it, and doubly so that I enjoyed it. I would honestly love to see some of these characters show up in a mainline or """official""" Ace Attorney game, but then I would have to deal with the concept of anything in Investigations 1 actually taking place and not being anything more than a fever dream. So, sorry Kay, Tyrell, Sebastian, Raymond, and Courtney. Back in your hole you go, forevermore.

While the gameplay is very enjoyable, being a more balanced take on 4 alongside the introduction of demons having stats that make moves better/worse depending on whether they're compatible (AKA don't give the ice demon fire skills ya dingus) which I have mixed feelings on. On one hand, it makes demons more unique but skills as a whole got more expensive to compensate. The minimap also isn't terrible anymore, so yay!
But the main reason you'll see people criticize this game is the story, and I have to agree. Without acknowledging the very concept of making a direct sequel to a game built on multiple endings, the new take just isn't great. It feels like it tries to combine the gritty darkness of SMT with the Shounen-esque power of friendship of Persona. All of the characters not from the original feel like stock shounen character templates with not much to add to them. (also this game has a love triangle. WHY!?) The game also misses out on the multiple choices the series is built around even if options like teaming up with the divine powers would have been a great decision, because the ending choices feel token and boil down to 'Be a dick' or 'Don't be a dick'
So while I enjoyed it, it's the worst of the mainline SMT games I played.

Dual Destinies by itself is not a terrible game, however as a follow up to Apollo Justice it falls completely flat onto its face. Several of the returning characters in this entry have been butchered and flanderized (Phoenix being the prime example), and characters that could've been expanded on better were left in the dust (Apollo and Trucy). The game tries to be deep and philosophical about how broken the universe's law system is, but due to the overall childishness of the game, it leaves no effect and once again fails when compared to AJ. Some of the newer characters are fun, such as Athena and Blackquill, however these two are never expanded upon in the next entry.
In terms of general case quality, this game is pretty decent all things considered. The first 2 cases are kinda lame if I were to be honest, but the last 3 cases and the DLC chapter are all good and classic Ace Attorney fun, 5-3 and 5-5 being my favorites. So, if anything, the game itself is still a good time if you take away comparisons to it's predecessor.
The general gameplay feels much more limited here, as now certain areas cannot be examined for extra dialogue to read, and in general the game will just automatically take you places instead of letting you do it yourself, which is annoying. The new added gameplay feature, "Mood Matrix", is fine. Compared to the mechanics introduced in JFA and AJ however it's kinda weak.
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney − Dual Destinies is not a bad game, nor is it the least quality entry in the franchise. While it nails a few aspects, alot of things about the game have a very rushed feel to it, as if the development team wasn't given enough time. Especially when the game's writer Takeshi Yamazaki, had JUST came off of writing Gyakuten Kenji 2 (A very solid entry in the franchise in my opinion). Taking the big flaws away, I still had a decent time. 3.5/5

I've been thinking about this game a bit recently and while this won't be a fully fledged review of the game as a whole, I can't help but continue pondering how Dual Destinies was not only dealt a bad hand, but also used it in the worst way possible. Of course, the game follows Phoenix Wright, which is the biggest problem of this game.

After the events of Apollo Justice, you would expect an entire trilogy dedicated to Apollo. While he is the center of attention a lot of the time, a good chunk of that time is also spent on other characters. A character like Phoenix Wright absolutely does not need any of this time dedicated to him. Especially considering how, in the last game, he was a barred attorney and considered a hobo by the fanbase.

What I think a lot of people misunderstand about Phoenix in AJ:AA is that he didn't actually change much in terms of character. For the first three cases of the game, it may seem that way, but that's because this is only the second time in the series that we interact with Phoenix from someone else's point of view (and the first time was when he was barely an adult).

Everything changes when we actually play as him in the fourth case. You get to see that he hasn't changed all that much, he just chooses to put a different face out there for the public. After years of playing poker, he became so good at bluffing, he uses it to play a part that may seem different, but is inherently the same. It seems Dual Destinies saw that he was a poker player who bluffed and said "that must be his entire character." Phoenix is an attorney again, which very much undermines his hobo persona in the grand scheme of things. To clarify, Phoenix was a great character when he went from attorney to hobo, but when he went from hobo to attorney, everything fell apart.

For some reason, everyone thinks he's a bluffing master and nothing else. So much, in fact, that they even address this in one of the game's trailers. Phoenix is downright incompetent most of the time, and that's because a lot of the time, he actually DOES bluff. Even if the answer is right in front of him, even if he's hardly backed into a corner at all, he chooses to bluff instead of thinking things through.

I would like to remind everyone that the amount of times Phoenix ever absolutely RELIED on bluffing in the games prior is TWICE. Only two times did Phoenix need to bluff to get out of his current situation. The first time was when he was thinking out loud in Turnabout Goodbyes (1-4) about where the bullet could've gone, and that was in part due to Mia's guidance. The second time, Phoenix simply needed to stall for time in Farewell, My Turnabout (2-4) so Gumshoe could find Maya and Shelly de Killer. He already knew who the killer was, so it wasn't like he was trying to solve the mystery, he just needed to buy time.

Phoenix is presented as an incompetent dumbass and I will never forgive this game for that. He's a bit better in SOJ, but not by much. Capcom has a huge issue with giving up the spotlight for other characters. Ryu has been their Street Fighter poster boy until very recently where it seems they're trying to get Luke to fill that role, but Ryu is still there of course. Chris has been the main protagonist of the most recent Resident Evil games and he's been around since the very first ones. Dead Rising got new protagonists with the second and third games, but the director's cut of DR2 put Frank back as the protagonist and so did DR4, which completely butchered his character.

I'm thankful we have DGS and DGS2 which are completely detached from the events of every other AA game. We get to see these characters grow independently in tightly woven experiences. What happened to Phoenix is a travesty, and I don't think the character could ever recover from this kind of assassination. Visual novels require characters to be consistent, and Phoenix made one huge leap backwards with the 3D era, and unfortunately, I'm not sure if he can jump back forward.

In the back room of an apartment, I am cut loose from the city. It watches me pass with sharp neon eyes. The sun has gone down with practiced bravado, twilight crawled across the sky and laden with foreboding. The night has gilded the monitor in silver. Every pixel is covered with light. The image of one mean sonnuvabitch called “Max “Payne”, is repeated over and over. The Drug. The red and yellow of a beretta’s muzzle flashes fiercely on the white screen’s snow.

Something goes clank in the night, and the sound is close enough to remind me I’m playing Max Payne on a PlayStation 2 with a broken controller. Wanted to give the boys at Backloggd something to joke about.

Except no one’s laughing now.

The poindexters at IGN explained it to me:

“Remedy ported this PC code to the PS2 pretty quickly, and simply chopped up the levels into smaller bits in order to work around the 32 MBs of PS2 RAM.”

“The result is smaller levels, with more loading, slightly rearranged AI placement, but even worse is the heavy disruption to the flow and tension of the story, which tries desperately to feel like a movie, but instead feels like a TV show with hundreds of commercials shunt into it. It nearly ruins the experience.”

Thirty-two megabytes of RAM.

Poor kid never stood a chance.

Neither did I.

A couple of days ago it had all come crashing down. The bad PS2 games arrived like a winter storm: Monster Hunter 2. Devil May Cry 2. Sonic Heroes. The Bouncer. I’d been pushed over the edge by a cabal of games junkies who were ready to explode in random acts of senseless posting at any minute.

I found myself in the cold no-man's land between kamige and kusoge, no road signs on a crash course to a 3D Realms rush job with nothing to lose. I’d died to jank before. I could die to jank again.

A gunshot. My last meeting with Alex before Max found out what his old friend’s brains looked like splattered across a wall. I’d been writing a review in the style Max Payne’s dialogue while the loading bar crawled across the screen for mercy. Now I was awake, brought to my senses by the rapid fire of an AK alarm clock.

Buckshot pierces through me like a wind of rusted razor blades. I’m dead. Again. Two more minutes of dead-eyed disc-reading before I see Alex’s brains. Again. A console port purgatory I wouldn’t wish on my own worst enemy.

Drawing from my vape pen like Bogart, I enter the big house once more with the odds stacked against me. Third-person aiming in an early PlayStation 2 game was nigh-on impossible, and the gamepad’s joystick had been busted for a decade or more.

I could relate.

Game like this would’ve been a pixellated piece of cake in my younger years, a fresh-faced gamer on the sixteen-bit beat. But the strain of sleepless night after sleepless night spent on the graveyard shift with a chain gang of falling tetrominoes had shot my dexterity all the way to Hell. I was no pro gamer now.

My thirteenth gunfight of the night. Unlucky for some, and the way this one started didn't promise anything better than the last dozen. Bullets and bastards coming at my face, an army of dead men with only a few brain cells of artificial intelligence between them holding one-way tickets to the river Styx. I was trying to look for the answers, but every gunshot created a hole with more technical issues leaking out. A spreading labyrinth of questions and QA tickets spreading like a pool of blood on the snow at six frames a second.

Somewhere in the background of the game-goon banter and stock explosion sound effects, I heard the end howling after me. Polygonal hatchet men sped by on fast forward, rooftop water towers disappearing in 240p darkness, a dead forest of antennas and chimneys, all a blur beyond the draw distance. Another level come to a merciful end.

They were all dead. The final gunshot was an exclamation mark to everything that had led to this point. I released my finger from the plastic trigger, and then it was over.