Ace Attorney Investigations is a game that I heard was mediocre, and expected to be mediocre, and indeed was mediocre. At its best it’s fun with good character moments. At its worst it’s a slog with nonsensical logic puzzles and entirely out of character moments, all held together by a really just not well made narrative told through almost entirely flashbacks, which aren’t utilized well at all and are probably one of the biggest detriments to this game as a whole. While playing this I couldn’t help but feel like this was a rough draft of a good game, so many things in this game happen just to happen and I think every single twist is something you can figure out hours before it happens, and not in a good way. I-2 and I-3 would be the worst back to back cases in this series, if Dual Destinies didn’t have 5-2 and 5-3. The Kidnapped Turnabout had me asking why so much, and is the main reason this game took me four weeks to beat as I took breaks between the chapter breaks because I was not enjoying it whatsoever.

As anyone can tell you, the fourth case of this game is its best, but even then I kept feeling like the entire case hinged on the fact that for some reason this courthouse didn’t have any security cameras, despite a piece of evidence in this same case being video from a security camera. If that wasn’t a piece of evidence I don’t think I would have noticed, but again overall a good case, yet I don’t think I-4 is up there with a lot of the better cases in the series, and maybe closer to like 1-2 or 2-2 to me.

Sadly, I think this is one of the worst told and most boring stories in an Ace Attorney game outside of Dual Destinies, despite the idea being incredibly fascinating and something that should work. I just feel like the way it’s told is bad, and Edgeworth taking on an entire criminal underground in a week feels absurd. All this culminating in a fifth case which is long, drawn out, and feels entirely unearned by the end, which is extremely fitting for this game. A lot of the things in this case, and previous cases, all feel really contrived as well. I know everyone who has beaten this game complains about how long this last case drags on, and they’re right to do so, but at a certain point to me it stopped being annoying and started being funny. So I think that made it better for me comparatively.

All in all, very tedious game in one of my favorite series that I still think is fine but definitely towards the bottom in my rankings of the series. The soundtrack is great, and when it has good moments it has very good moments, but when it has bad moments (and it sure does have bad moments) it has REALLY bad moments that make you realize why Capcom decided to not localize the sequel. I also cannot stress this enough, this game has a point where you are like three flashbacks deep, and I don’t know how no one brings this up at the forefront when they talk about this game, but literally every case in this game has a flashback or is in a flashback, it literally made me feel like I was going mad. This came out after Apollo Justice, and yet I think the investigating portions in that game are better put together, using forensic science and the 3D evidence just fits the Ace Attorney formula, they retain the 3D evidence but you only use it three times, and forensic science is just gone, despite it making perfect sense to use here. I still enjoyed my time largely with it, but for anyone who isn’t a big fan of Ace Attorney, it’s a game not worth your time.

Man. I love fish, I love animals, I love taking pictures of both of these, and I loved Endless Ocean on the Wii. This game is not like the originals. I started this game with a higher opinion of this than I think a lot of people, it was fun, kind of clunky mechanically, but the core was strong enough to be a good time. The more I played though, the more baffling decisions I encountered. There’s so many axed modes and features from the Wii game that this feels like if you ported the idea to an iPhone game more than a third entry of the Endless Ocean series, which sucks. I got my money’s worth out of it, and overall it’s fine, the features cut are things I could overlook if the game was as good as the originals and it’s just not. Not to mention, I have encountered so many glitches that halt progression, and even gotten softlocked out of the ending from what I can tell because one of the items I need to complete the 99 tasks you have to do to pad the game out to hell and back just didn’t spawn in the already rare randomly generated formation, all of this just makes me wonder how this game was okayed in the state it’s in, missing any of the typical “shine” from a Nintendo published title, with things that scream a lack of QA testing.
Overall the lack of an aquarium mode the change to randomly generated maps from set maps, making exploration a lot more tedious to get what you want, and just lack of good QOL features… makes the game all in all very disappointing.