In defense of the Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, the presentation is fabulous. The steampunk character designs are snazzy, the animations are full of personality and life, the soundtrack is exhilarating, and there is plenty of the signature Ace Attorney goofball charm on display. As a cherry on top, one of the main characters is a broody gay Castlevania villain who alludes with suggestive frequency to his “hallowed chalice” and probably does nothing but listen to Wagnerian opera and file his nails in his free time. (Also, Susato and her little book <3)

Unfortunately it’s also possible to build a strong case against GAAC. Because I’m a killjoy, and because these games seem to get a free pass from most people, let’s look at some evidence. In this massive and lovingly rendered cast, there are, by my count, roughly forty named male characters, of every shape and size and age, two-thirds of whom are canonically older than thirty. (Of those over thirty, six play prominent recurring roles.) If you are beginning to suspect there might be fewer women in the game, congrats, you would be right! There are, in contrast, fifteen named women, four of whom are over thirty; of those four, only one is a semi-important character (the bad one, naturally).

Luckily, with such delightful character designs, I’m sure there will be plenty of variety in how the women look, right? Heck yeah—as a matter of fact there are two (2) female characters who are not conventionally attractive! (Both characters are simply fat—hardly the kind of inventive caricature we find in the male designs.) For further diversity, we have a Cute Judicial Assistant, Sexy Victorian Assassin, Cute Prima Ballerina, Cute Cockney Ragamuffin, Cute Girl Genius/Newspaper Serial Author, Cute Newlywed, Cute Yuri Bait, Sexy Witch, Sexy Housewife, Sexy Coroner, Spooky-Cute Goth Daughter, and uh Feisty-Cute Firecracker Salesgirl.

I know this might seem like outrageous nitpicking, and yes I know video game characters are designed to be appealing, and yes some of the men are hot. I’m not anti-hot-people. But in a game with so much care put into the art style, the disparity is bleak. If you can come up with forty different faces for dudes, you can probably come up with more than three faces for women. Jesus.

One could raise the old familiar argument: “Something historical blah blah but it was like that back then!” To which I would say: Holograms. Also this is a game in which a top-secret case highly sensitive to British national security is handled by a visiting student and a mysterious amnesiac. Absolutely nothing in GAAC makes any goddamn historical sense whatsoever. If the creators cared about history, color photography would not exist, and the queen would be aghast at all the foreigners running rampant in her courtroom.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to the story itself, which inhabits an awkward limbo between wacky cartoon and social commentary. Takumi seems to want to say something about racism, imperialism, the justice system, and government corruption, but he is significantly hampered by not understanding any of these things. Racism in the Takumi-verse is the result of a Japanese guy murdering your family. Corruption is the result of bad apples. Crime is the result of “letting the darkness consume you,” rather than, say, not having food. And so on. Worst of all, his critique of empire is one-directional. There is no attempt to draw any parallel between the British Empire and Imperial Japan. In fact, the narrative goes to some length to exonerate Japanese characters (except a tiny few) of wrongdoing; none of them have the racist misconceptions that the European characters are shown to have.

Lastly, holy moly, this game is looong, and I don’t think the fact that it was originally two games is much of an excuse. Way too much of GAAC—a solid 40% in my estimate—is artificial and unnecessary padding. You would not BELIEVE the mind-boggling number of gavel thwacks and podium pounds you will endure before end credits. It is at least four billion. The jury system is a pointless contrivance that only serves to draw out trials to agonizing lengths, and there is so much mind-numbing repetition of witness testimony and Herlock hijinks. Considering there is really just one big story being told here, there was no reason (except ¥¥¥) to release it as two games in the first place.

There is, however, a neat tap-dancing bit near the end that is almost worth the slog.

VERDICT: Guilty!! (of making me spend more than 60 hours on a game—using a guide no less, yikes)