This is maybe more of a review of the concept of 'dandori' than it is strictly a review of the game, Pikmin 4, a mere vessel for that ethos.

Sometimes there simply isn't a word for the type of work a work of art is. Attempting to take genre classification seriously leads to either the insufficiently academic and endlessly debatable, or mashing together words into meaningless ad-libs. Is Pikmin a puzzle-game? Is it a puzzle real-time strategy with survival game elements? Probably, but neither of these things say much about what the game is. There's no game it's particularly *-like either. We laughed when Hideo Kojima coined the 'strand-type' game, but sometimes, that's all you can do.

The word that the developers of Pikmin 4 decided to use to describe their game is 'dandori', and it's a word that the localizers of Pikmin 4 struggle to translate. Broadly speaking, it's left as is. They describe it in-game as "[organizing] tasks strategically and working effectively to execute plans", which is not inaccurate, but also isn't exactly helpful either. However, the brilliance of Pikmin, and of this game in particular, is that to understand dandori, you don't need words. Pikmin is a game built to teach it to you, the way that Mario teaches you timing and spatial analysis, the way XCOM teaches you to manage risk.

If I were to take a stab at explaining it, dandori is about time management in a workplace. In that workplace, you have tasks, and workers. Those workers take time to complete those tasks, which are varying in nature, and spread out across the workplace. How can you complete as much of what you need to get done as possible before the day is over? Well, you might consider;
- Avoiding idleness. Time spent not working is time wasted (fortunately, in Pikmin your workers do not have needs and never tire, so any ethical concerns with this are neatly sidestepped)
- Knowing your workers, and assigning them the tasks they are best suited for. (Pikmin are pleasingly color-coded, and as of Pikmin 4, have diverse and overlapping strengths. They are also, while error-prone, perfectly obedient)
- Prioritizing tasks that make future tasks easier (You start each day surrounded by a tempting bouquet of flowers, a quick method of bolstering your Pikmin count)
As you can see, the answer is not a number, or a silver bullet. It is a series of principles, applied to each new situation as necessary, taught directly through simply playing the game. The answer is dandori.

And dandori is good. Let's assume, for a moment, that there is an inherent joy in the efficient completion of tasks - or at least, that you're the kind of person who thinks so. Pikmin 4 is a wonderful game for getting a lot of stuff done. Your ultimate goals are very straight forward, but the means by which you achieve them involve many different obstacles, cleanly broken down into assignable, varying tasks. They sit there, waiting for you to come and untangle them, wrapped in an overall game structure that wields a gentle, but unwavering time pressure to urge you onwards without ever forcing you to take drastic, unplanned action. That inherent joy I mentioned is found here in spades, and presented to the player with the immediacy typical of Nintendo's flagship titles - aside from a few minor quibbles with controls and pacing.

(There is an awful lot of talking throughout the game, which is time spent not doing dandori. I also found that it was harder than I would've wanted to send more Pikmin to help with a task than were required, which was noticeable, because that is a something you consider doing any time you do literally anything)

These small things cannot keep Pikmin 4 from being an outstanding, enjoyable adventure, that's simple and intuitive to get started with. The Nintendo design philosophy of simplifying player actions and pushing the complexity out into the world works wonders here. Assigning tasks to workers in most any game is at least a couple of interactions. Here, you just mash one button to throw your lil guys at the thing you want until it starts happening. Feedback on the progress of tasks is immediate and clear. Outside of some of the more challenging instances of combat, thinking about something is as good as doing it.
There's next to no barriers between the player and their engagement with the organisational thinking that dandori benefits.

In truth, every Pikmin game has been about dandori, even if the term was freshly coined for the fourth. Every Pikmin game changes the things around that core concept - new tasks, new workers, varying degrees of co-operative gameplay - but dandori has always been there. In all three prior games, you are explicitly graded on how quickly you completed your tasks, which is a direct consequence of how well you managed your workforce, which can only be improved through the application of the principles of dandori. Though the consequences of working too inefficiently have perhaps become gentler in recent games, it is still the thing that drives the player forward.

This is the sort of thing Nintendo has always done, for better or worse. Take some gameplay that's fun and approachable, put class-leading kid-friendly character design on it, and spend the next two or three decades examining it in new contexts, finding new ways to get at that core. Here, in Pikmin, that core is not movement, or combat, or even exploration.It's not any of the actions you perform in-game, though those haven't needed to change much over two decades. The core is the philosophy of dandori, how you think about the actions you're performing in that broader, more malleable context. And unlike previous Pikmin games, Pikmin 4 finds a way to demonstrate how it comes from outside the world of games, exists wherever work and organisation do.

See, Pikmin 4 is actually about half a dozen Pikmin games. Or, it's more like one really big Pikmin game, with a bunch of smaller auxiliary games in its orbit. Each game is presented to you piecemeal as you progress through the story, one level at a time, spread out through a larger story. Most of them are even optional, if you don't like what they're cooking. But all of them, again, rely on dandori. Whether it's a compressed, five-minute version of the base experience, or a survival horror wave defense, or messy competitive battles, you use the same core principles in each and every additional game. Where a game series might normally take entry after entry to explore its core conceit so thoroughly and from so many angles, Pikmin 4 leaps past its predecessors to do it in one. Not only does it teach you dandori - it universalizes it.

That's the wonder of Pikmin 4. It's not that there's so much of it, or that it's so lovingly rendered. It's that it really, truly wants to teach you how fun it can be to make and execute a plan. It wants you to learn dandori, and it will gently hold your hand and lead you directly to it, if you let it. It'll show you dandori from each of its distinct perspectives, whichever ones you find fun enough to dig into. If you're really taking to it, it won't hesitate to let you take the challenge as far as you want. 'How could you apply these concepts in your daily life?' Pikmin 4 asks, in one of many load screen tooltips. Once you've played the game, it might be hard not to look for answers to that question

The opening few hours of Inscryption are legitimately fantastic. I always liked a lot of what was going on in Slay the Spire but that game is dragged down so much by its incredibly bland aesthetic that just makes me think back to playing Flash games on Newgrounds as a teenager. Inscryption takes that deckbuilder core, adds a really cool, evocative spin on it with the sacrifice mechanic, but most importantly nestles this within a deeply unsettling, intense aesthetic that really sells the whole experience on its own. There are a couple moments that didn't land perfectly for me in these opening few hours, but overall I was very excited to see where the game would head.

I'm not going to spoil any actual story content from this point, but I will be talking about mid and late-game gameplay mechanics changes. I think there are people who will be suitably put off from the whole experience once they know the direction these mechanical changes head in and may value getting to read about these ahead of time, but if knowing anything about the direction the game's mechanics head in is going to upset you then stop reading now.

At the end of these first few hours of the game Inscryption's gameplay becomes markedly worse. It turns into a trading card game, as opposed to the first section's deck-builder nature, a genre that is just a lot harder to make actually work. A part of the problem is that the sheer elegance of the game's original mechanics is hurled to the wayside as it becomes bogged down under the weight of a bunch of new mechanics, whilst constantly tuning and retuning your deck from a vast pool of cards makes for an unbelievably worse gameplay loop than what came beforehand. Arguably an even bigger part of the problem is that the aesthetic is just so much less compelling in this second part too, and the aesthetic was so much of what sold the first part of the game. Taken outside of the context of existing inside a larger whole this second part of the game is something I would consider at absolute best mediocre, and would be upset to have spent money on had something like this been expanded into a full game.

Another major mechanical shift comes later on, and this third part of the game returns to something closer to where the game was originally at. It lacks much of the earlier tension and magic, and the aesthetic is much worse too, but it acts as a fine enough diversion and has a few genuinely very enjoyable moments.

So there's one outright great section, one just barely passable section, and one third that is decent enough. So why am I not higher on the game, does this first act being so impressive not justify the latter mediocrity? A part of the problem is how disappointing the whole affair ends up being, never fully living up to the promise it shows early on. A bigger part of the problem though is what I gather is very much Daniel Mullins' schtick.

Inscryption has a lot of meta content that takes an increasingly larger presence on the game's stage. I knew this going in, as I'm sure anyone familiar with Mullins' name would be, and was curious to see it all in action. Whilst there are certainly some cute, enjoyable moments to it, especially early on in the game, so much of the meta content in this game is just shocking and weird for the sake of being shocking and weird, rather than having any actual substance to it. The whole experience just felt very hollow to me, and at its very worst the game can feel anywhere from scattered and unfocused to actually just downright childish.

It's just so frustrating because there's something wonderful in that early part of the game, and then it goes and turns into this.

The first 2-3 hours of inscryption are wonderful. A creepy, thoroughly atmospheric dive in this weird, creepy card game, played in a small little cabin against some weird guy who pantomines the parts of the bosses and kills you with a camera at the end. There's so many little touches in this part, and coming off the table and solving all the little puzzles of the cabin with an aim to escape/win, its awesome. There's a great occult, macabre vibe to it all, and then it all comes together for a neat resolution as you and your talking cards hatch a plan.

Its sad for me to say that whilst it would have been dissapointing in it's own right, the game would have been better stopping right there. It would have left me wanting way, way more and the game would come out at about an hour and a half long, but that's a better world than the one we live in.

Because Inscryption really just could not help itself from going down the creepypasta meta rabbit hole for the latter two thirds of it's runtime. It's not as bad as the dev's previous game Pony Island and is presented pretty well, but is ultimately just way less endearing and interesting than the first act.

Sadly the game also gets less mechanically interesting. Part of this is definetly a psychological element - i'm less interested in getting into the minutae of the mechanics when its obvious the game's now committed to throwing the baby out with the bathwater every 20 minutes, but I also think there's an elegance to the creature sacrifice emphasis of the first act that nothing that comes after comes close to matching.

I understand there is meant to be a point to this, at least somewhat, as the soulful roleplay-driven gameplay gives way to more mechanically deep or whatever gameplay, but I do think it just falls flat and the non-card gameplay of the latter sections are particularly weak in comparison.

And the story? It's thankfully told with fantastic production values and editing and is pretty well paced, and pulls those good old 4th wall meta game tricks which honestly im a bit tired of by now even if they're very cute in this one. But it's just really not interesting and there's not really much more to it than Sonic.exe at the end of the day. It's well told and the presentation is outright incredible throughout, but on a personal level it's really just where I wish the story didn't go after such an incredible opening.

It also really drags near the end. The final section prior to the ending is way too fucking long and not much even happens in the story. If it didn't so blatantly feel like a "final act" I probably would have dropped it about halfway through.

So yeah, if I stopped playing the game after 2 hours the score here would probably be a 4.5/5, maybe even a 5 if i was feeling particularly generous. And it's not like the rest of the game is offensively bad or anything, it's just profoundly dissapointing, especially in the light of what's clearly a mountain of effort and attention to detail that's gone into it that feels in service of completely the wrong way for the game to go.

Inscryption truly took me down the rabbit hole. I wish it didn't bother.

Playing this game again when I was a game design student and learning how to program made me realize how artful every small aspect of this game is; its journey, its dialogue, the battles, the world design, and graphics, everything just clicks in favor of a singular vision and message.
While I couldn't appreciate it until years after I loved its sequel, the prequel still managed to be a formative experience for me.
I love that magicant becomes a place you visit multiple times as a home world in the pink clouds of fantasy creatures, cloud swimming cats, and just strange people, living beneath a sad queen. The armor shops in this place have multiple tiers and variations of equipment that can be useful all game, and the tons of stuff in the treasury in the queens castle combined with the limited inventory makes it so you have incentive to come back and return to this place, to relax from the real world of physical objects and people that might want to harm you while you search for the eight things that will sing you a portion of a melody to save the world.
I won't forget the dance sequence, the singing cactus, driving a tank, taking the train across the world and through the most dangerous tunnel, running from giant creatures and machines in the endgame, teaming up with a gangster that became bedridden from injury he took by helping me, having to deal with asthma, catching a cold from an npc, the list goes on.
This game might live in the shadow of its superior sequel, but it's a totally different and fantastic experience on its own, despite sharing a lot of similar flavors and ideas.
Also, after playing other rpg's from this era, the crit SMAAASH system in this game adds so much needed unpredictability to battles that it keeps them from getting stale. You can always crit an enemy for a ton of damage, or they can crit you and you have to make do with the turn-around. Having to deal with unexpected situations are what rpg's are all about.

"A story is a series of memories. Memories are remembered with other memories, and in turn become memories themselves. If you don't take care to preserve your memories, you'll forget them. So, please tell us frogs your memories of everything so far... That is what people refer to as 'saving'."

This isn't really a review, more of just some...thoughts on this game and my relationship to it. Fair warning, it's pretty navel-gazey and self-indulgent. You may not really get on with this one.

One of the all-time best Hard Drive headlines remains "Huge Earthbound Fan Excited To Play It For The First Time". It's a good gag, an playfully teasing dig that is funny because it's true, and could only come from a place of understanding of the EarthBound/Mother fandom. I know, because once upon a time, I was a Huge Mother 3 Fan Excited To Play It For The First Time.

It's hard to emphasize how much of a fetish object Mother 3 was for the western EarthBound fandom, even for the wider JRPG fandom. I became aware of EarthBound through Smash Bros, as I am sure most people my age did, and was immediately taken in by how out-of-a-piece it was with the rest of Nintendo's stable, and my interest only skyrocketed when I searched the internet and found out that EarthBound was super fucked up and weird and scary in a way only slightly off-beat Nintendo games hyped up by 14-year olds who don't really know anything else could be.

(See also: Majora's Mask, and endless features in Official Nintendo Magazine UK swearing that the ReDeads in Ocarina of Time were the scariest shit in the fucking world man you'd fuckin shit and piss your pants)

And then, of course, there was the sequel on the Game Boy Advance, that never left Japan and never would, implicitly because it would emotionally scar anyone who played it and was even more messed up than it's fuckin twisted predecessor. EarthBound has a habit of being slightly spoken over by many of its most ardent fans, certainly, those I was privy to in my days lurking on noted Haven for Absolute Unhinged Freaks Starmen.net, but Mother 3 was on a whole other level. Everything about this game was spoken of in terms of absurd religiosity, which was only heightened by its relative inaccessibility. Speaking about the game in hyperbolic terms practically became a core tenant of the EarthBound fandom, as if an official translation could be physically evoked out of the ether if enough people were enthusiastic enough for it. Entire swathes of the game were freely discussed, both before and after the (also given a kind of quasi-religious status by the fandom) fan translation were released, spoiling every single conceivable thing in the game in order to entice someone, anyone to give it a go and join the chorus, never quite seeming to realize that, mostly, they were was just talking to each other, and to impressionable 13-year-olds like me.

I swallowed all of this. It was hard not to. I remember one day, on what was probably at the time the most exciting website ever devised, the Smash Bros. Dojo, which contained daily updates for the sure-to-be greatest Smash Bros. ever made when Lucas and New Pork City were announced. To say I lost my shit was an understatement. I freaked out to just about any of my friends who would care to listen, performing the same role of Eulogist that all the people I saw online do for Mother 3, giving away every possible twist and reveal and plot point to people who, maybe might have actually played EarthBound on their own one day and liked it well enough. To say that I was a fan of Mother 3 at this point would be incorrect: I was a religious convert, a cultist, a Happy-Happyist passing down the teachings that I had taken in from sermons of the mount like "Blues Brothers Symbolism in EarthBound". Blue, blue.

I did play EarthBound, and really loved it, mostly because like 80% of the conversation around the game, when I was getting into it, was about how totally fucked up the final boss battle with Giygas is, and the remaining 20% was endless relitigating about why a game so impossibly magical and amazing didn't sell well enough, which carried the implicit conversation with the unreleased status of Mother 3. Because of this, I found so many surprises and things I found personally resonant, things that I had nothing to bring to other than myself. I didn't even have this feeling with the even-more over-discussed Final Fantasy VII because the things culture remembers of that game are bafflingly at odds with what it actually is and what I took away from it when I came to it.

But with Mother 3? I can't say the same thing. It's partly because it's a much shorter, more focused game than it's predecessor, it's partially because it stands alongside Far Cry 2 and Dark Souls as one of the most over-analyzed games in existence. But mostly, I think it's because the fandom conversation around this game warped my perception of it and turned every step on the Nowhere Islands into charted territory, where everyone had left their mark, and I had no space to make mine, no space to find myself beneath everyone else.

There are a huge amount of things that I love about Mother 3, so many things that I appreciate, and so many things that make me smile. But I've never been able to feel like my experiences of it were entirely mine. I've never been able to find the unique resonances with my own life or experiences that characterize all of my favorite games. Everywhere I look, every corner I turn on the Nowhere Islands, I see the words of others, the perspectives of others. I look at little elements like the doorknob, and instead of being able to turn it over in my head, and place it within the wider whole, all I can hear is a cacophony of voices echoing throughout the years, the interpretations of posters on Starmen.net, Itoi and Brownie Brown's own comments on the subject, drowning out any thoughts I might have.

Yes, I could definitely discuss my thoughts on the fact that the village of Tazmily was in some way doomed to it's fate from the very beginning because of it's pursuit of an idealized vision of a specifically American past draped in western imagery that conveniently ignores the great darkness of that time in material history...but even this thought echoes with perspectives I've read countless times before. Wess' abuse, the Magypsies as a deeply clumsy but earnest attempt to explore gender non-conformity as it relates to the social and "nature", the way forgetting haunts the entire game world, as if everyone else on the Islands knows what a terrible mistake has been made by choosing to move backwards rather than forwards and desperately wishes to avoid it by enshrining themselves in your memory...it's possible you've read stuff here and thought "oh, that's interesting!" But every time I go to speak, every time I open my mouth on these things the words of others spill out, so ingrained and intertwined that I don't know which thoughts are mine and which thoughts are creeping in from forum threads long, long ago. Playing this game is like playing with a director's commentary track inside my head that I cannot switch off, commenting on the meaning or intent behind every single pixel on the screen, and it's heartbreaking because I truly believe this kind of voracious all-consuming analysis is completely antithetical to why these games are good.

Mother/Earthbound games are free-wheeling, lackadaisical, and rarely concerned with all-consuming arcs and statements. Those things are there, but the real pleasure of playing one of these games is just meeting the weird and wonderful people of this odd and beautiful world. You can see it in the battle system, in how it is playfully carefree with it's rules and rhythms, with many boss battles being beaten after you have technically been dealt lethal damage, but the game is kinda taking it easy until it gets to you. You can see it in the, frankly, absolutely astonishing soundtrack that freely mixes and matches genres and tones and instruments all processed through the woeful GBA speakers. You can see it in how the MacGuffin that dominates the first half of the game's plot is basically forgotten about and never mentioned again afterwards, in the lack of interest in connecting the dots between EarthBound and this game, in how the same reverence that the fandom spaces I hung out in hold this game and EarthBound are viewed with huge scepticism via Porky's Museum of EarthBound ephemera.

Mother 3 is not a religious object of absurd fervour, it's not a mythical Dark Dragon waiting to be unleashed. It's a video game, one that is laid back, at ease and confident in itself. And I wish I could be the same with it, but I can't help but play this game with the same awkward, nervous, stammering energy that comes with meeting an internet acquaintance in person. I wish I could be normal here, I really could! But my brain is too filled with EarthBound fansite trivia, I'm so sorry. Did you know there's an unused sprite that depicts the creation of the Masked Man, but that it was never used because it's probably just too fucked up and scary f-

Boney attacks!

...yeah, ok, I deserved that.

I've read a lot on games I love, and games I don't, but never do I really feel like those perspectives take me over, leave me unable to see the game beneath them. Certainly, my perspective has been altered by the perspectives of others, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill but with no other game do I feel so wholly unable to find myself in, no other game has this opaque wall around it made of What Other People Thought About It. Not even EarthBound has this for me. And it makes me really sad. Mother 3 is a special game. A really great one. And I think I do love it but...it's a love with a lower-case L. Despite it's reputation as a merciless feels machine, my appreciation of Mother 3 is extremely emotionally detached in a way I find kind of upsetting. There are definitely things about it that I feel strongly about, things about it that provoke profound emotion in me, but I wish I had been able to find those things for myself, instead of my love for the game sold to me by overzealous fans.

No, that's wrong. It's not the fan's fault. Well, not entirely. I do think that a lot of the conversation with these games is kind of fundamentally opposed to what they actually are in a way that speaks to the relative immaturity of a lot (not all) of the people talking about them at the point in time where their critical reception was still cooling. But ultimately, It's not the fault of people just talking enthusiastically about a game they loved, or at least, wanted to love. Mother 3 is just...as a result of my interactions with it, how long its shadow is cast across my mind as a child...trying to find personal meaning in Mother 3 that relates personally to myself is like trying to find something new in Citizen Kane. When something is that storied, that discussed...what hope do I have?

When people who were there talk about their first interactions with EarthBound, it's so often framed as this unfolding flower of a work, that grew beyond whatever humble thoughts they may have derived from the game's legendarily misguided marketing campaign. They weren't expecting to find one of the best games of all time inside it, but they did. It's the same I feel about when I played my favourite game for the first time. I wasn't prepared for the things it would do and show me. This is not to say that novelty is an inherent facet of a game I love. But at the same time...I don't know how fully I can love something that falls into a dutiful checklist of the things I already expect to find there.

I think Mother 3 is a great game. But I think people should be allowed to find that for themselves, or not if that's how it goes. It is, ultimately, A Video Game, after all, a children's video game at that, the video equivalent of a Ghibli or Pixar film, and not a holy missive from on high. Because I don't know if I feel, in my heart, that Mother 3 is a great game, and I think that's terrible. I think fandom and conversation can be really special, and I hope this doesn't come off as a condemnation of the western Mother/EarthBound fandom. But I think sometimes, Fandom can do terrible things to work, warp it to fit their enthusiasm. I see it in games like Persona 5, Xenoblade, Dark Souls, games that become disseminated by voices that come to dictate the scope of their meaning.

Maybe you would find Mother 3 weird, funny, or heartrending. Maybe you would think of it as super fucked up and nasty and scary. Maybe it will be the saddest thing in the world for you. But I think, as with any game, you owe it to yourself to find out for yourself, rather than have some ageing boomer online tell you what it should be.

It's like the frog. You can dissect it forever, but nothing you learn or examine or analyse will change the fundamental fact that the frog is dead. Wouldn't you much rather meet it for the first time when it's still alive, while it can still save your game?

SPOILERS FOR CASE 3 OF ACE ATTORNEY 2

Coming right off of my Ace Attorney 1 replay and just loving that game to death, I admittedly had some preconceived thoughts about Justice for All. I was under the impression that it was merely a subpar follow-up to the original game whose only notable addition to the series was the revered Farewell, My Turnabout case. Having heard these thoughts repeated ad infinitum, I was genuinely not looking forward to getting into this game. I even dropped it just under a year ago after getting less than halfway through the second case because my ass was just not feeling it. I will say, dropping the game was probably the best choice I could've made for maximizing my enjoyment of it, because I was in a much more receptive, accepting mindset towards it this time around. I stopped being a sheep and just played the game hoping I'd at least be entertained. And coming out of it, I can say that I was more than just entertained.

With all that setup in mind, how does the game actually stack up? Well, in many places, this game has both the best and worst shit I've seen in the series up until this point. A game of highs and lows, if you will. And frankly, no case in the entire game exemplifies this idea to such an extreme extent and my experience with JFA as a whole, better than the notorious Turnabout Big Top case, which is why I want to focus in on it specifically, as opposed to going in chronological order of each case.

I had heard so much bad stuff about this case before starting it that I was honestly a little nervous that this would be another point where I might consider dropping the game for almost a year again. I had thoroughly enjoyed the previous case and was hoping I wouldn’t share the complaints I had heard other people have for this next one. And for the first half of the case? Most of the complaints I had heard rang absolutely true and THEN SOME. Turnabout Big Top starts off with an unbearably long low point that lasts all the way throughout the first trial day. Now, Ace Attorney is known for having wacky, zany, over-the-top characters, and I’ve always considered that to be one of its strengths that makes it infinitely charming to me. However, this case officially takes it all much too far. The client for this case, Maximillion Galactica has a neat design, but good God, after more than a few minutes of interacting with him, I just wanted him to shut up. He attempts to feel “flashy”, but all of that flash just burned my eyes out in frustration at how flat of a character he actually was. You could replace him with a stock image of a lamppost and I genuinely think the case would greatly benefit from it. And don’t even get me started with how he (and one other character) is lusting after an actual SIXTEEN-YEAR OLD. Like holy shit, how was I expected to want this guy to be anywhere other than prison? Need an alternate ending where Phoenix, after finding this out, purposefully helps put him in jail where he belongs tbh!!!!!!

Anyways, Max is ass but the next character I want to focus on is Ben the Ventriloquist. He is an equally worthless character who tries too hard to have some charming gimmick with his puppet and ends up being yet another uncomfortable personality in how he’s a grown-ass, 31 year old MAN trying to marry a fucking 16 year old girl. And honestly, I generally try to look past shit like this in stories if there’s at least decent writing behind it, but the whole love triangle between him, Max, and Regina feels so out of left field, unnecessary, and crammed in your face that it’s impossible for me not to ignore. His whole puppet schtick was extremely unbearable as well. I never found him funny or entertaining in the slightest. These two characters are possibly my least favorite in the series by a wide margin. They’re an attempt at charming, wacky characters, but they both fall flat on their faces by being so genuinely unlikable and irritating.

Those two are at the core of most of my issues with this case because the entirety of the plot surrounding them was inherently brought down by their mere association. The actual mystery at this point in the story wasn’t doing me any favors either as most of the first day dragged its feet, feeling less like a mystery and more like a washed up, unfunny circus routine (which I suppose is fitting).
My enjoyment of the series had never been lower, and I even considered skimming through dialogue just to get past this tedious, unbearable case.
But then something really strange happened.

Turnabout Big Top

Got good.

The difference in quality between the first and second days cannot be understated. For the most part, the terrible characters I mentioned before have very, very little screentime. And the characters that actually DO get focus are not only compelling, but genuinely emotionally gripping, incredibly charming, and actually likable. Moe the Clown, a character that initially caused me the same level of irritation as Max and Ben due to his eye-burning design and unfunny gimmick, became a surprisingly touching character when all he wanted was to help Regina come to terms with her father’s death, rather than allow her to stay in blissful ignorance. It was a turn for his character that I didn’t expect at all, but it helped elevate my emotional engagement with the case and him as a character, so I’m all for it. And speaking of Regina, she was pretty much the only character introduced in the first day of the case that I actually liked. She was a bit of a brat, yeah, but I could tell that she meant well and she was absolutely adorable. It was abundantly clear that she lived a spoiled, sheltered life, but I couldn’t help but feel for the poor girl in spite of that. Her father had just been killed, but she hardly seemed to really comprehend the gravity of that fact. While she was undoubtedly a very “cute” character, it’s the juxtaposition of that and this undercurrent of somberness that was prevalent in most of her scenes that really helped me connect with her. And finally, we have Acro the Acrobat.

What a phenomenal killer.

Like no other killer before or after him, Acro stands tall as possibly THE MOST tragic and sympathetic character in the series up until this point. In contrast to the previously over-the-top characters, Acro instantly stands out from the moment we first meet him. He’s not some loudmouthed, unfunny CLOD like most of the others, he’s gentle and soft-spoken, with birds sitting with him on his wheelchair highlighting the tranquil, calming energy that his personality gives off. Despite this, there’s this general feeling of sadness that pervades all of his scenes, much like Regina. This gives the two of them a sort of connective tissue, as their role in the story would become more pronounced as it reached its climax.

Acro brings a lot of emotional depth to this case that I haven’t really felt with other killers in this series, even the best ones. He’s possibly the most unique killer the series has seen yet, thanks to his heartbreaking circumstances and understandable motives. He’s just a broken man who lost everything because of one girl’s naïveté, but he understandably cannot bring himself to forgive her for it, despite knowing deep down that what he wants to do is wrong, without doubt. It is a very mature idea for this series to tackle and I think it’s an incredibly “human” concept.

Even if it’s not on the scale of outright murder, there do come times where someone wrongs us in ways that we simply cannot reconcile with, even if it was unintentional on their part. Sometimes we’re hurt so profoundly by someone that it can make us someone we’re not, we lose the ability to understand, to empathize. Blinded by hatred, Acro ended up accidentally killing the man that meant the most to him. The man that gave him and his, now comatose, brother a chance when everyone had abandoned him before. He not only hurt himself in doing this, but wrongfully took the father of an innocent young girl who could barely even comprehend what had happened.

And when it’s finally time to corner him in the trial, and Phoenix exposes his crimes, there’s no twist “unmasking” where he reveals that he was actually crazy the whole time and laughs maniacally while cursing Phoenix for foiling his plan.

All we get are tears.

A sea of tears from a broken man who couldn’t let go of his hatred and heartbreak. Tears from a broken man who couldn’t find it in himself to understand the person who hurt him so much. And in his sadness and newfound self-hatred, he’s taken away, forced to think about what he did for the foreseeable future, with the audience never knowing for sure if he’ll find peace.

What a special, special character.

THAT is how you write a compelling, layered, and emotionally-investing antagonist. He has a sympathetic, sufficiently-explored backstory that informs his motive, and we may not agree with what he does, but we can certainly understand his actions as a result. These certainly aren’t the only way to effectively write an antagonist, but I cannot sing Acro’s praises enough, he almost single-handedly flipped my view on this case.

After the dust settles, Regina, after watching all of this unfold, is unable to continue with the blissful ignorance that had defined her character at the beginning of this case. She weeps, she shouts, she blames herself for what happened, and still has trouble wrapping her head around it, but she can finally begin to accept what happened to her father. And with that, the process of healing can begin, and she can grow as a person as she plans to right her wrong, and this most intriguing case can finally end on a hopeful note.

When all is said and done, Turnabout Big Top ended up being the biggest surprise in the game by far. A difficult case to truly explain my thoughts on. One I vehemently hate and undeniably love in equal regards. It truly had some abysmal lows that I absolutely cannot forgive. The characters in the first half, the mystery being nonsensical for the most part throughout (even in the second half), and don’t even get me started on the annoying ass cross-exam where you lose health JUST FOR PRESSING MOE. I can 100% understand why someone would look at this shit and say this is the worst case in the whole trilogy.

But at the same time. I respect and appreciate so much of what that second half manages to accomplish that I can’t, in good faith, agree with the majority of people here.

And that’s kind of how I feel about this game as a whole (just to a much less extreme extent). There were times during some of the cases early on that felt a bit padded or aimless. The music of the game is a noticeable downgrade from Ace Attorney 1’s soundtrack, I feel. But similarly to how I feel about TBT, I really do believe that the highs of this game are more than enough to make up for its unfortunate missteps.

Franziska might not have the complexity that Edgeworth did in the first game, but she’s still a damn entertaining prosecutor with a great design that I thoroughly enjoyed arguing against. Speaking of Edgeworth, his return in this game was everything I could’ve hoped it would be. Picking up right from where he left off in the first game, it truly felt like he’s grown and matured as a person, cultivating an ideology that shakes Phoenix to his core. And how could I forget that last case that everyone RIGHTFULLY hypes up so much? It is quite confidently one of the finest stories this series has produced yet. Boasting a deliciously devilish villain that caused my jaw to hit the floor on multiple occasions, the most urgency, tension and suspense in an AA case so far with how it was a constant race against time, and an unbelievably satisfying finale that had me out of my seat and on the brink of tears at every step (while also giving Franziska some much-appreciated development).

So all in all, I left Justice for All incredibly satisfied and impressed, thankful to have stuck with it through to the end. Because I don’t care what anybody says, this is a good ass game and a worthy sequel to the first.