It's kind of funny that people have been making fun of the fact that this game has a hot tub scene within the first hour of the story because when you really think about it the hot tub scene is genuinely one of the most subtle yet still brilliant subversions of that anime trope in any JRPG. It's literally put in the game to demonstrate how the characters are literally asexual and consequently have no modesty about their own bodies, which makes the whole joke of the scene the exact opposite of every other hot tub/sauna scene ever done ever

I first played this game when I was 13. I didn't like it. It felt a bit too sluggish and all over the place. So I never actually finished it. Part of that was my own fault, though, because I would put the game down for weeks at a time which, when you do that with an Ace Attorney game, it essentially makes the current case impossible to finish without just doing it off of a guide. So I just eventually quit playing it somewhere in the last case, and that's how it was for almost 7 years.

I decided to replay it a couple weeks ago. From the start. And it's better than I remembered. I still think it's one of the weaker Ace Attorney games, but there still is a lot of good here. And it's nice to have finally finished it. Because not having finished it and thus not being able to really play its sequel have haunted me as a supposed "Ace Attorney fan" for years.

I always seem to misremember how much fun Ace Attorney is. A lot of the time, or at least when I was a kid, I liked the games, but found them tedious a lot of the time. Now that I'm older, and have been replaying the trilogy, it really struck me how wrong I remembered these games being. They're not boring, they're not tedious, they're some of the best-written mystery visual novels of all time. I was playing the final case the day I was writing this and I was honestly at a loss for words at the end. The final case isn't as good as I remembered it being. It's better. It's so, so much better.

"In my world, the color red doesn't exist. These must be... my tears."