This game is genuinely so close to being perfect, just absolutely amazing. Easiest recommend ever for anybody that likes story-driven puzzle games that are campy, cute, and a bit morbid.
Meticulously crafted story, phenomenal writing and localization. Go into this with no knowledge of the story for the best experience, it truly is a fun ride.
Amazing characters with that signature campy capcom/ ace attorney goofiness. They all have a schtick and stick to it, but the main characters in particularly are pretty fleshed out beyond that too. Peak character design too, even for random background characters like that one bartender who has hair shaped like a martini glass. Like thats iconic.
Not a particularly stand-out ost, but still the music fits the game really well, and is quite fun to listen to.
Now the ART DIRECTION FOR THIS GAME??? So beyond sick, I wish more games had this sort of punky and sharp art style. However, very noticeable with this remaster, I do think that the lil in-game models look a bit blah in comparison to the stunning 2D art of the character portraits, but it works for what it is. The characters themselves really sell it.
On that note, I do want to compare this game to the original, which I played back when it was released. I truly do think this game lost some of its flavour artistically with the upgrade to HD, like the pixels and poor quality really added to the ghosty + murder mystery experience of playing this game on the DS. The 2D art holds up insanely well, it's the 3D assets in particular that suffer. The crust added to the experience! Other than that, I do think they did a decent enough job of making a two-screen experience fit onto one screen.
Now that I got all the compliments out of the way, I want to elaborate on this games flaws. First and most prevalent, is that this game is way too hand-holdy. I think offering players help with the puzzles is important if they need it, that's not what I mean. I needed help sometimes! I'm talking about the unskippable repetitive dialogue and instructions that plagued the entire experience, but esp at the start of every "trick time" section. It got very annoying I cannot lie, and it just kept happening lol. Mashing "a" to try and skip the dialogue we had JUST heard got tiring. I will also say that when you make mistakes, it takes a very long time to get back to where you were. You can speed through dialogue but not through any actions, which is interesting bc VNs are usually good abt having skip options. So overall the gameplay can feel sluggish, esp when you're stuck and restarting a lot.
Final thoughts are really just that playing this game as a baby on the ds changed me as a person, was fundamental to my development, to my tastes in art and music and media in general. I genuinely believe that. This game has influenced my entire life. And the remake holds up! I would say its better in some ways, but the og also holds up imo.
Play this game, I beg of thee.......
Meticulously crafted story, phenomenal writing and localization. Go into this with no knowledge of the story for the best experience, it truly is a fun ride.
Amazing characters with that signature campy capcom/ ace attorney goofiness. They all have a schtick and stick to it, but the main characters in particularly are pretty fleshed out beyond that too. Peak character design too, even for random background characters like that one bartender who has hair shaped like a martini glass. Like thats iconic.
Not a particularly stand-out ost, but still the music fits the game really well, and is quite fun to listen to.
Now the ART DIRECTION FOR THIS GAME??? So beyond sick, I wish more games had this sort of punky and sharp art style. However, very noticeable with this remaster, I do think that the lil in-game models look a bit blah in comparison to the stunning 2D art of the character portraits, but it works for what it is. The characters themselves really sell it.
On that note, I do want to compare this game to the original, which I played back when it was released. I truly do think this game lost some of its flavour artistically with the upgrade to HD, like the pixels and poor quality really added to the ghosty + murder mystery experience of playing this game on the DS. The 2D art holds up insanely well, it's the 3D assets in particular that suffer. The crust added to the experience! Other than that, I do think they did a decent enough job of making a two-screen experience fit onto one screen.
Now that I got all the compliments out of the way, I want to elaborate on this games flaws. First and most prevalent, is that this game is way too hand-holdy. I think offering players help with the puzzles is important if they need it, that's not what I mean. I needed help sometimes! I'm talking about the unskippable repetitive dialogue and instructions that plagued the entire experience, but esp at the start of every "trick time" section. It got very annoying I cannot lie, and it just kept happening lol. Mashing "a" to try and skip the dialogue we had JUST heard got tiring. I will also say that when you make mistakes, it takes a very long time to get back to where you were. You can speed through dialogue but not through any actions, which is interesting bc VNs are usually good abt having skip options. So overall the gameplay can feel sluggish, esp when you're stuck and restarting a lot.
Final thoughts are really just that playing this game as a baby on the ds changed me as a person, was fundamental to my development, to my tastes in art and music and media in general. I genuinely believe that. This game has influenced my entire life. And the remake holds up! I would say its better in some ways, but the og also holds up imo.
Play this game, I beg of thee.......