More Portal can't really ever be a bad thing. Portal: Revolution is pretty good. Even if none of the puzzles felt very difficult, the general puzzle design was honestly pretty good, especially with the new mechanics. However, towards the end of the game, I started to realize that a couple of puzzle concepts were very overused throughout the various areas of the game.
The voice acting and writing weren't terrible, but it did occasionally make me wish I had some way of muting the voices. The story was oftentimes a beat-for-beat rehashing of Portal 2's story, which kinda detracted from the whole thing.

Overall, not a bad game, and more than anything it proves the enduring appeal and satisfaction of thinking with portals.

I will start by saying that I enjoyed this one a bit more OVERALL than the previous game in the series, Dual Destinies. Spirit of Justice successfully provided a more complete Ace Attorney package than Dual Destinies had. Despite this, it still comes nowhere near the quality and intrigue of the first four games in the series.

The story in Kurain is a lot more intriguing than the strange story that was all over the place in Dual Destinies. However, a lot of Spirit of Justice, especially as it pertains to Apollo, seems like it was just shoehorned in to move the plot along. The final case is fine, but in my opinion the weakest of any of the mainline games. Perhaps playing this series for six games now has made me numb to the twists and turns that the team loves to employ, but every final case so far has without fail made me gasp audibly at some of the twists, until this one. Spirit of Justice is solid in execution, but fails to bring any phenomenal ideas to the mix. Even the Divination Seance, which I loved, failed to make the game any more interesting than a four-star rating.

I knew I was going to be conflicted on this game from the get go, seeing as it is a pretty drastic departure from the originals. Having just recently begun my Ace Attorney marathon on the 3DS, I had up to this point been absolutely loving the series. The first and second games did an excellent job at hooking me, and Trials and Tribulations was a phenomenal wrap up of the first trilogy, and has entered into my list of my top ten favorite games ever. I kept my expectations low for Apollo Justice, as I wasn’t sure how it would be going into a new trilogy, but I was quite pleasantly surprised by the new systems and characters that were introduced. Dual Destinies doesn’t really move in a direction I expected (or enjoyed too much).

The first case immediately caught my attention with a fantastic opening scene and I was hopeful for what was to come. That was, until the animated cutscenes were over and I saw the frankly ugly 3D models of Phoenix and Apollo. I was shocked by how quickly Phoenix was brought back into the game, and how bad at lawyering he was considering his role in Apollo Justice. I get that this was the tutorial case and they needed some way to reintroduce lawyering to the player, but why does he keep that persona for the entire game? Him and all of the other main characters act more helpless than any protagonist of the previous games, complaining and giving up almost immediately at the first sight of trouble. And to what end? Well these grinding personalities of the main cast lead directly into my second big complaint about the game.

While the other Ace Attorney games maintained quite a good balance of difficulty in deductions the games required you to make, Dual Destinies feels like it removes that balance and sticks a funnel in its place, directly leading you into the answer. The game takes away every opportunity for you to feel smart. Firstly, it removes the ability to examine an area for clues until you’re explicitly told to do so. Gone are the past abilities to stumble upon important clues by accident and feel like a genius for doing so. The game feels incredibly linear compared to past entries, because they try to forcefully move you into the next room or tell you exactly where to go every single step of the game. And the deductions the game requires you to make are little to nothing. Frequently I’ll make a realization and deduction on my own about a case, and get very excited to present the evidence, only for Phoenix to come in like an idiot and say nearly exactly what I’ve deduced out loud, and then presenting me with the frustratingly simple choice to pick a conclusion that matches exactly what he just said. And it doesn’t help that the steps in the case feel obtuse even for Ace Attorney standards. The characters tiptoe right up to the solution, mere millimeters away from the answer, and then they look right at you and ask for your opinion, like it's not incredibly obvious.

It might seem strange for me to say after all of that that I don’t even hate this game. I found some of the cases (particularly Academy) pretty enjoyable, (a lot of people raved about the DLC case, but I didn’t find it too interesting) and some of the characters (particularly the main villain) weren’t terrible either. The last case was quite good, being almost solely responsible for my four star rating of the game, with some actually shocking and interesting twists thrown into the mix. Many of the quality of life changes that are introduced into the formula feel great as well. Athena’s methods of deduction with Widget fit in quite nicely as well. At its core it is still a pretty good Ace Attorney game, but I was always wishing there was something more. I wished that there would be an interesting case with twists and turns for me to figure out myself, but nothing ever came. After researching this game further, discovering that the development team was completely changed from the original one for Dual Destinies made a lot of sense, considering the drop in quality from previous entries. I have a tendency not to stick with games I don’t like, but I did stick with and complete this one, and I will be playing Spirit of Justice as well, so I obviously did enjoy the game at various parts, enough to give the game four stars. But unless you’re a die-hard Ace Attorney fan, I can’t really recommend this one for all of its frustrating aspects.