7 reviews liked by matteblack


This review contains spoilers

"You have died, and the Nexus has trapped your soul."

"You cannot escape the Nexus."

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CW: Brief discussion on the game's use of rape

In Elden Ring, you can never discover anything once. That was the thought that entered my head early in the experience and never quite left it. One of the most evocative parts of the game's genuinely stunning art direction is the walking cathedral, a strange and arresting colossus that stumbles across the Weeping Peninsula, each step ringing the bell that hangs beneath its torso. It was a sight of strange, beautiful magic, the kind of which these games have been good at in the past.

Except, to describe this creature in the singular would be inaccurate. Because Walking Cathedrals appear all over the world of Elden Ring, each one identical in appearance, each one performing an identical, express mechanical function for the player. This cannot be left alone as a strange, unique beast, it has to be reduced to a Type of Content a player can engage with over and over again for a characterless transaction of pure mechanics. It is the excitement of coming across something esoteric that the Souls games have made a core part of their identity, utterly commodified and made into the exact same arc that applied to Assassin's Creed the moment climbing a tower to survey the environment and taking a leap of faith into a haystack below shifted from an exciting and evocative moment into a rote and tiresome mechanical interaction.

Because, that's right everyone, Dark Souls Is Now Open World. Not an open world in the same way that Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, or Dark Souls II were, where you could freely venture down different paths to different bosses and take things in an order outside of the game's expected leveling curve. No, this is an Open World as we understand it today: an enormous ocean of discrete repeated Activities dotted with islands of meaningful bespoke design. There's plenty of stuff to do in this world, but it's all of a specific type - in a catacomb you will navigate stone gargoyles and chalice dungeon designs to a lever that will open a door near the entrance that will contain a boss that you've likely found elsewhere in the world, and will be filled with stone gargoyles. Mines will be filled with mining rock-people and upgrade materials. Towers will have you find three spectral creatures around them in order to open them up and obtain a new Memory Slot. Camps will contain a patrolling enemy type and some loot. Even genuinely enchanting vistas and environments get their space to be repeated in slight variations. Boss battles too will be repeated endlessly, time and time again, with delightful designs like the Watchdog tragically becoming something I sighed and was annoyed to see crop up half-a-dozen times over the course of the adventure, and I was truly, deeply annoyed at fighting no less than about ten or twelve Erdtree Avatars and Dragons, with whom the moves never change and the fight plays out the exact same way every single time.

The first time I discovered these things, I was surprised, delighted even, but by even the second time, the truth that these are copied-and-pasted across the entirety of the Lands Between in order to pad it out became readily apparent, and eventually worn away even the enthusiasm of that first encounter. When I look back on my genuine enjoyment of the first battle with the Erdtree Avatar, I can only feel like an idiot for not realizing that this fight would be repeated verbatim over and over and become less fun every single time. When you've seen one, you've really seen all of them, and this means that by the time you leave Limgrave, you've already seen everything the Open World has to offer.

This is, of course, to be expected. Open world games simply have to do this. They are an enormous effort to bring into life, and the realities of game production mean that unless you're willing to spend decades on one game, you're going to have to be thrifty with how you produce content. I expect this, I understand this. Fallout: New Vegas is probably my favorite Open World game, but its world is also filled with this template design. But what's to be gained from this in a Dark Souls game? Unlike contemporaries like Breath of the Wild, your verbs of interaction in these games are frighteningly limited, with almost all of the experience boiling down to fighting enemies, and without a variety of interactions, the lack of variety in the huge amounts of content stands out all the more. Does fighting the same boss over and over and traversing the same cave over and over make Souls better? Even if you choose to just ignore all of these parts of the Open World (which is far easier said than done, as due to a very harsh leveling curve and the scarcity of crucial weapon upgrade materials outside of The Mines, the game's design absolutely pushes towards you engaging in these repetitious activities), the Legacy Dungeons that comprise the game's bespoke content are functionally completely separate from the Open World, with not even your Horse permitted to enter. This is no Burnout: Paradise or Xenoblade Chronicles X, which retooled the core gameplay loop to one where the open world was absolutely core to the design: this is a series of middling Dark Souls levels scattered among an open world no different from games like Far Cry or Horizon: Zero Dawn that many Souls fans have historically looked down on, and the game is only worse for it.

NPC storylines in particular suffer massively, as the chances of you stumbling upon these characters, already often quite annoying in past games, are so low as to practically require a wiki if you want to see the end of multiple questlines. However, that assumes that you will want to see the end of these stories and that you are invested in this world, and I decidedly Was Not. Souls games have always had suspect things in them that have gone largely uninterrogated but Elden Ring really brings that ugliness to the surface, with rape being an annoyingly present aspect of the backstories of many characters, and even having multiple characters threaten to rape you, none of which is deployed in a way that is meaningful and is just insufferable edgelord fantasy writing, and the same could be said of the grimdark incest-laden backstory, the deeply suspect trans panic writing surrounding one of the characters, and the enthusiastic use of Fantasy Racism tropes in the form of the Demi-Humans. I remain convinced that George RR Martin's involvement in this game was little more than a cynical publicity stunt, but certainly the game's writing indulges in many of that man's worst excesses, whilst having almost none of his strengths.

None of this is to say that Elden Ring is devoid of enjoyment. While the fact that it did hit just in time for a manic-depressive mood that made me perfectly suited to play a game I could just mindlessly play for a couple of weeks, I did see it through to the end in that time, even if I did rush to the end after a certain point. From Software's artists remain some of the best in the industry, with some incredible environments and boss designs that deserve Olympic gold medals for how much heavy-lifting they're doing to keep the experience afloat. I loved being kidnapped by chests into other parts of the world, and I wish it happened more than a couple of front-loaded times. But the enjoyment I had in it never felt like stemmed from the open world, and even its highest points don't hang with the best bits of the prior installments. Stormveil is probably the level design highlight of the game but it already fades from my mind in comparison to the likes of Central Yharnam or the Undead Burg or the Dragon Shrine. Indeed, the fact that they exist as islands in an ocean of vacuous space between them precludes the so-called "Legacy Dungeons" of this game from having the satisfying loops and interconnections that are often the design highlights of prior entries. The bosses are a seriously uneven mixed bag as well; even setting aside the repetition, as the nasty trend of overturned bosses that started in Dark Souls III rears its unfortunate head again. The superboss Melania is an interesting design utterly ruined by her obscene damage output, and my personal highlight of the game, Starscourge Radagon, who is the only boss fight that felt like it played to the things that Elden Ring brought to the table, and is a moment among the series that the game can truly claim as it's very own...but the tuning of the fight prevented it from being the triumphant coming-together moment that it is clearly attempting for many of my friends, who left the fight feeling that it was just annoying and tedious. Modern From Software could never make a fight like Maiden Astrea again because they'd insist on making her really hard in a way that actively detracts from the emotional experience in the fight. Boss fights can be about more than just providing a challenge, and I think From has forgotten that.

Taken as a series of its legacy dungeons, of its finest moments, I think Elden Ring would only be a middling one of these games. The additions to the formula feel anemic and unbalanced, the multiplayer implementation is honestly a quite considerable step back from prior games (the decision to have the majority of invasions only occur during co-operation feels like an attempt to weed out trolls picking on weaker players but in reality what it does is make equal fights are next-to-impossible and put Seal-Clubbers in a place where they are the only players who can effectively invade, a completely baffling decision), but it's really the open world I keep coming back to as the reason this game doesn't work. Not only does it add nothing that wasn't already present in better ways in prior games, but it actively detracts from the experience. The promise of the Open World is one of discovery, of setting off in uncharted directions and finding something new, but do Open Worlds actually facilitate this any better than more linear games? I don't know if they do. I felt a sense of discovery and finding something in so many of these games, even the most linear ones, and felt it stronger because the game was able to use careful, meticulous level design to bring out those emotions. Walking out of a cave and seeing Irithyll of the Boreal Valley, or Dead Man's Wharf stretch out before me, were moments of genuine discovery, and they would not be improved if I found six more Dead Man's Wharfs throughout the game. Contrary to their promise, in my experience, the open world, rather than create a sense of discovery, undermine it due to the compromises necessary to create these worlds. All the openness does for your discoveries is let you approach them from a slightly different angle as everyone else.

That is, if you can even claim to have discovered anything in the first place. To call Elden Ring derivative of prior games in this milieu would be a gross understatement. I am far from the first person to note that the game's much-hyped worldbuilding is largely content to regurgitate Souls Tropes with the Proper Nouns replaced with much worse ones, but it goes beyond that - entire questlines, plot beats, character arcs, dungeon designs, enemies, and bosses are lifted wholesale from prior games practically verbatim. More often than not Elden Ring feels closer to a Greatest Hits album than a coherent piece in and of itself, a soulless and cynical repackaging of prior Souls Classics, irrevocably damaged by being torn from the original context from which they belonged. I'm not a fan of Dark Souls III, in part because it too is also a game that leans on repetition of prior games, but at the very least the game was about those repetitions, where yes, old areas and characters would be repeated, but at least it was thematically resonant with what the game was doing. Elden Ring can't even claim that. Whatever this shallow mess of a narrative, easily the worst of the franchise thus far by my reckoning, is going for, it is done no favors by being this stitched-together Frankenstein of Souls.

I was particularly shocked by the sheer ferocity with which the game steals from the fan-favorite Bloodborne. Quick, tell me if you've heard this one before: you encounter a hunched, bestial foe, who fights you with their fists, but once you get their health halfway down, the battle stops, a cutscene plays, where they speak coherently, summon a blade from their past, and stand with their former dignity restored, the music changes, and their name is revealed to be "X the Y Blade". Or what about a hub area, separated in its own liminal space from the rest of the map, that can be discovered in its True Form in the material world? What about when that hub area is wreathed in spectral flame and begins to burn as the final hours of the game is nigh? These are far from the only examples, as there are multiple enemies and ideas throughout the game that are shamelessly lifted from my personal favorite From Software effort, but these stand out as the most noxious of all, as they simply repeat beats that were effective in the game they originated from because the game was able to build to them and have them resonate with the rest of the experience. You cannot just graft things whole cloth from prior work onto a new one and expect it to work as a coherent piece, the very prospect is ridiculous.

When Elden Ring did all this, my jaw about hit the floor from the sheer unmitigated gall. When it chose to conclude itself with a straight-faced Moon Presence reference, complete with an arena that directly evokes the Hunter's Dream, I just had to laugh. The final statement the game made on itself, the bullet point it chose to put on the experience, was "Remember Bloodborne? That was good, wasn't it?" Because in many ways, that really was a perfect conclusion to this game.

While it would be a mistake to claim, as people seem increasingly eager to, that Souls emerged entirely out of the magical ocean that is Hidetaka Miyazaki's unparalleled genius or whatever, as these games have always drawn heavy inspiration from properties like Berserk, Book of the New Sun, and The Legend of Zelda, and were built on top of a framework clearly established by past Fromsoft series King's Field, the reason I think that myself and many others were initially enthralled by the promise of Demon's Souls or Dark Souls was because they were decidedly different. Their esoterica, willingness to buck modern design conventions and hugely evocative online elements were why these games set imaginations alight so strongly, and proved enormously influential for the past decade of game design.

Demon's Souls felt like something new. And while successive games in this series have felt far less fresh, none of them have felt as utterly exhausted as Elden Ring: a final statement from the designers and writers at From Software that they have officially Ran Out of Ideas, that the well has long gone dry, that all they can do is to hastily staple on the modern design trends they once rejected onto a formula that does not gel with them, and that they are wandering without life through a never-ending cycle of their own creation, branded by the Darksign. Perhaps it's no surprise that their least inventive, least consistent, and least creative game since Demon's Souls is also by far their most successful. Once From Software defied conventions and trends, and now, they are consumed by them.

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"You have died, and the Nexus has trapped your soul."

"You cannot escape the Nexus."

HOLY PEAKAMOLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This game is fantastical, and it's finally the best it can be on current hardware, in 60fps and 4,000k. Modern graphics do the original justice and its music and all other wonderful facets of the original game times 9001 (Reference.) MUST PLAY.

seemingly simple on the surface, Risk of Rain Returns presents a philosophical proposal—should one continue to reject modern times and live out their nostalgia for the past, or leave that behind and accept the ever-changing future?

Risk of Rain Returns is a renaissance of the game that got Hopoo Games started in 2013. for context I didn't get into the original Risk of Rain (RoR1) until the holiday season of 2015. a good friend told me about it back when I was a NEET and it was my first roguelike whatsoever. I loved it! once it had ran its course over a good 100+ hours and I realized that it was abandoned by the devs I moved on from it. then I found out a 3D sequel was in the works and my hype was off the charts. Risk of Rain 2 released in early access right when I got my first job, funny enough. I was there for the whole development cycle—from the days of pre-release Tumblr dev blogs, all the way to its first expansion—and here I am now with ~1450 hours in it. that's my background with this series.

after RoR2's tumultuous development cycle, time constraints and all, it seems like Hopoo kinda just.. gave up on it and handed the rights over to Gearbox. that's completely understandable given the fact that their core dev team used to be just three people getting help from Gearbox. the co-founders themselves had no experience with 3D game development nor the Unity engine. rather than pushing themselves through something they didn't enjoy anymore they decided to move on to other projects, with the first being a return to what got us all here in the first place.

I'm not here to dissect every little gameplay change/addition or whether or not it has """held up well""" a decade later or anything of the sort. the bottom line is that it's a classic that holds personal weight and sees nothing but improvements. what's important to me is the fact that it convinced me to critically reassess my thoughts on Risk of Rain 2, particularly its status as a favorite of mine that I put a ton of time into as my "time sink" game, and the series as a whole. RoR2 used to be one of my favorite games and one that I considered to be a direct upgrade over RoR1. why play 1 when 2 exists? while Returns might seem like more of a remaster of a game from 2013, in my eyes it is the best that the series has to offer. it's a culmination of Hopoo's best efforts after their dabble into 3D development and the expansion of their development team which has more than doubled in size, as well as additional help from some of the most prominent RoR1 modders.

the two new features that I find worth mentioning are the catch-up mechanic and the alternate game mode, Providence Trials. firstly, when you die in co-op you live out a second life as a measly gunner drone for the remainder of the stage. you can't interact with anything, but you can pick up items and fly wherever you like while drawing aggro off your friends. it's funny, it's fair and a very welcomed inclusion. as for Providence Trials I find them to be entertaining minigames that are a breath of fresh air as the main gameplay loop of runs can get rather stale after all these years. I don't see them as gimmicky, frustrating events that you have to force yourself through to unlock alternate skills. in fact I spent some number of hours getting gold ranks in every trial and never grew tired of it, not even the hardest wildly imbalanced ones. I'd argue that although many aren't applicable to regular gameplay, some do teach you lessons and build up habits or provide knowledge that can be utilized in your runs.

my only real complaints which are still pretty negligible would be balance concerns that'll probably be addressed in future patches, and the fact that so many item unlocks are gated behind hyper-specific challenges. the issue is that a handful of them are much more difficult and/or conditional than the rest. reach the third teleporter as Commando without getting hit, reach level 10 as Miner without getting hit more than once, kill x enemies simultaneously with a certain skill/equipment... these are all very tedious to unlock without using artifacts or the intensity sliders. yeah it's good that there's a variety of challenges here but they most likely won't happen naturally, so they felt like things I had to go out of my way to complete rather than just enjoying playing the game normally. that's on me for being so insistent on doing them the hard way, but it's annoying that I have to unlock more items to diversify the item pools.

aside from those minor concerns I'm enamored by this release.... or at least I would be if I wasn't so burnt out on Action Roguelites. it's a bittersweet feeling, but at least I'm not tempted to dump hundreds of hours into it until it overstays its welcome. every single change—from improving the flow of combat by allowing each survivor to attack and move at the same time, to the remastered tracks giving more detail and texture to an already incredible OST—seems well thought out and done for the better. I can't say the same for its sequel. simply put, it's basically the Remaster vs. Remake argument all over again. the original has its own charm that its sequel is sorely lacking, whereas this "remaster" keeps it intact and even amplifies it. I'm sure you know where I'm going with this so it doesn't need further explanation, Soul vs. Soulless and all that, but I have been steadily creating a list of all of my gripes with RoR2. you can find them in my other review for it if you'd like to divulge in its handful of flaws for more context.

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and so I loop back to that initial question: will you continue to reject the present and live out your nostalgia for the past... or will you leave that behind, escape this planet, and accept the ever-changing future?

there is no answer to that. neither, a mixture of both, it's all open to interpretation. in my case I found RoR1 during my not-so-fond NEET years and RoR2 dropped right as I got my first job. I put many, many hours into RoR2 and enjoyed it in the moment, but the more time that passes after breaking my obsession with it, the more its appeal wears off and the harder it gets to be willfully ignorant towards its flaws. I've finally realized that getting tons of playtime out of something doesn't automatically make it better or more valuable. RoR2 generally feels like a product of its time for me as I've lost that passion for roguelikes, which is rather ironic considering that one of the other games in this discussion is from 2013. the problem is that RoR2 feels like an overload of sensory stimulation that I just don't even want to go back to. in my eyes it tried way too hard to lean into being Fun for the player that it lost its identity in the process, possibly as a result of its explosive popularity and the intent of responding to player feedback. I used to consider it one of my favorite games and gaming experiences overall, but that's changed. and that's a good thing, personal growth is necessary to be able to discover and articulate my preferences. I'm sure RoR2 will be fine in Gearbox's hands too, but who knows. I'm mainly looking forward to whatever Hopoo Games will create next now that they're done with this roguelike series. as its final sendoff, Returns has been a blast. play it by yourself, with your friends, with or without artifacts, whatever. it's a great game!

while Risk of Rain 2 may have missed its mark and became its own thing entirely, I'm just glad we got this.. remaster? re-release? something like that. Risk of Rain Returns is a slight re-imagining of an influential title, a game that's important to me, and it's one of the best of its kind. it may not be some masterfully crafted experience (besides the community memes) but I love it all the same. it's one of my favorite roguelites for good reason; one that lets me turn a blind eye to the typical shortcomings that plague this subgenre and the fatigue that comes with it. it's an exception to the rule. I'll take a compact, essential experience above an oversaturated time waster any day.

...and so she left, her soul still remaining on the planet.

Bro I have never felt happier to get a WarioWare in my LIFE. Smooth Moves is by far my favorite entry in the series and one of my favorite Nintendo games of all time, so the fact we got a direct sequel had me excited, and they thankfully delivered.

I believe WarioWare has always been best when it had a central gimmick. Even though I really liked Get it Together, it felt a bit lacking without it utilizing the Switch's gimmicks. Thankfully that's what this game does and it is amazing. Unfortunately since the Joycons aren't nearly as intuitive as the Wiimote, some microgames can feel a bit finicky, but those few are outshined by a plethora that uses the motion controls to its absolute best. This game has one of the best selection of microgames in the series as not only it replicates Smooth Moves' style, it innovates on that style.

The only gimmick that doesn't particularly work well is the IR camera, but not many microgames utilize it so it's not a big deal. The new forms introduced with the NARRATOR returning are extremely fun and it brought back the spark this series didn't have for 17 years. Not saying the new games are bad but it didn't have a certain style that made me fall in love with this series.

Overall, this a fantastic return to one of my favorite gaming series and I'm hopeful they can keep innovating with whatever Nintendo's next console gimmick will be. I feel so happy to be a WarioWare fan.

"Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know -- that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives; and my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.

You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall -- you need me on that wall."


- Colonel Nathan R. Jessup, A Few Good Men (1992)

The allure of any good mystery is the twist and turns of the deductive process. Many people like an easy answer, but what good piece of mystery fiction would trade the bombast and spectacle for a quick solution? This is something The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles understands. Shu Takumi has fully embraced the theatrics of Arthur Conan Doyle's Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. In doing so, he has taken the Ace Attorney franchise to heights that could previously only be dreamed of. Through its period piece setting, wonderfully developed characters and elegant treatment of its criminal drama, The Great Ace Attorney duology firmly sits above its predecessors and sets a new standard for the series.

Taking place primarily in Victorian-era London, the devil is truly in the details for Great Ace Attorney. Beautiful background set pieces strongly accentuate Kazuya Nuri's character designs, which are in top form in this game. They incorporate the sleek design of the game's previous protagonists with tasteful period-appropriate attire, which allows for that crucial sense of normalcy when juxtaposed against the wilder character designs we have come to associate with Ace Attorney. Notably, you can see the incorporation of steampunk elements to highlight the fantastical nature of science at the turn of the 20th century. The curiosity of the time period underlines many of the characters' chief motivations. This embrace of the "weird" and the "strange" makes Great Ace Attorney a absolute joy to play.

Thematically, the game plays on the very same concepts that were central to the Sherlock Holmes canon- the political intrigue of the time period and the onset of scientific development that promised to shake the very foundations of our understanding of the world. The game tackles changing social and economic mores in a manner that the previous Ace Attorneys could not, owing to the central focus on corruption within the British judiciary. Throughout the duology, the game places a retributive concept of justice under the microscope, allowing the player to examine the ways in which we think about crime, its sources and how we must combat it. Its criticism of the legal system's tendency towards bias and personal convictions (shown through the summation examination sequences) is especially welcome- as it does not dismiss the need for jury trials out of hand, but offers a measured criticism that highlights boths its strength and weaknesses. It similarly refuses to avert its eyes from the structural implications that class, gender and race have within society.

The Herlock Sholmes of Ace Attorney is an eccentric loose cannon, a gamesman who reflects Shu Takumi's understanding of Doyle and detective fiction in general. Sholmes "Dances of Deduction" serve to highlight the theatrical nature in which Doyle approached solving mysteries. In understanding the importance of spectacle, the game adroitly turns mundane observations into thrilling endeavours. As spotlights shine on the characters, as if they are in a stage play, we understand that Sholmes relishes just logic and deduction, but the art of showmanship as well. Perfectly scored by Yasumasa Kitagawa and Hiromitsu Maeba, the games understanding of what makes detective stories "tick" serves to elevate the game itself in the very same way. Thanks to this emphasis on the detective throughline, the cases themselves are fantastic in much the same way, with some of the greatest red herrings I have ever seen in the series, and some ridiculously clever uses of evidence that go much further than simply being obscure stretches of logic.

Chronicles defies precedent in many ways, but what most strongly comes to mind is in how Takumi treats continuity between the two games. As a long time fan of the series, I have always cherished the Ace Attorney games as individual experiences. Every game has offered tightly constructed crime dramas with satisfying payoffs. The games' episodic format draws liberally from the "mystery of the week" of detective fiction. While this lends to well-paced and impactful storytelling, it has overall hurt the series' capacity for developing its characters in a way that shows meaningful growth. Phoenix Wright is clearly developed as a lawyer throughout the original trilogy of games, but by Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Trials and Tribulations (2004) it was apparent that Phoenix's personal genesis was concerned with his confidence and resolve as a lawyer and little else. In allowing for the mystery of the week, the games repeatedly ignore things that would entail more long-term character development: his relationships, the impact of specific trials, and most notably the passage of time.

The latter trilogy of Ace Attorney games- running from Apollo Justice through Spirit of Justice multiplies this problem exponentially. By this point in the series lifespan, the target audience wanted Phoenix Wright as the protagonist; so promising series newcomers Apollo Justice and Athena Cykes were given much less development as a result. Apollo's backstory was retconned multiple times to suit the current game's plotline, and Athena was all but completely sidelined with absolutely zero character growth after her most important story arc. This makes the games feel much stronger as individual entries than part of an overall continuity. By contrast; The Great Ace Attorney instead takes the opposite approach. Each case introduces important elements that pay off in the duology's climax; and Ryunosuke, Susato, Sholmes and Iris' development as characters during each case isn't only maintained through each case, but each game as well. Fans of the series will note this was something sorely lacking for Apollo Justice, for whom the most formative moments of his backstory were summarily ignored with each new sequel.

Naruhodo progressively unravels the web of conspiracy underpinning the British judicial system, each revelation shocking but also deeply personal to both himself and the people surrounding him. These revelations, however, are not kept in a vacuum to only inform the current case. They continually affect the characters and their perceptions through each subsequent case, building upon one another in a rich tapestry of interpersonal dynamics between the cast. Outside of the defense and prosecution, reccuring characters in the Ace Attorney series are normally minimally developed- serving singular purposes with perhaps the chance of a central focus in one or two cases. Great Ace Attorney bucks this trend by giving these characters skin in the game with regards to the overarching plot. Where they would traditionally return to simply give a clue or testimony for another case, they instead have significant ties with the long-term narrative and are given satisfying character arcs and resolutions. Every major character in this game proves to be consistently amazing.

This also creates a dynamic to the two Great Ace Attorney games that was never present for the first six titles. Whereas one can play any of the original Ace Attorney games in any order, Adventures and Resolve are meant to be played in order. They present as a "ten-case game" or a "70-hour Ace Attorney" where a understanding of the first game's events is crucial to the second's. This approach offers the coherency the series really needed after Apollo Justice While you technically do not need knowledge of the first game to play through the second, it is impossible to fully appreciate it. While this may be imposing to many, it is worth the heavy time investment. The payoffs are huge, worthy of the various pedigrees upon which this game built its foundation.

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