Let's Talk About The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles

One of the hardest parts of being a fan of any series is having installments you can never experience in an official capacity. Sometimes this can be because it remains locked behind an old format with no re-releases, in gaming this happens a lot with games from older console generations. But often it’s simply because it was never released in your specific region to begin with.

This isn’t so much a problem now since most games tend to get brought over, but back in the day there were dozens of games that never got officially brought for one reason or another. Which makes it all the sweeter when the games do get an official release in territories they never appeared in before. Sure, fan translations exist, but it isn’t quite the same thing as having an official release you can put on your shelf or digital library.

Which brings me to The Great Ace Attorney. I have been a big fan of Ace Attorney ever since I played the original Phoenix Wright game on DS. The game had such a unique premise and presentation that immediately drew me in, and the gameplay was unlike anything I'd played up to that point. Keep in mind that this was when Visual Novels where a relatively unknown genre in the west. So Ace Attorney stood out at the time.

I loved the shit out of the first Ace Attorney, and its sequels only got better and better. That original trilogy is pretty much perfect in every way, even the much-maligned Apollo Justice has its moments. It’s one of my favourite game series of all times. Dare I say it might be my number one favourite.

I’ve played every game in the series, except for 3 that never got brought over. To be fair, there were good reasons as to why we didn’t get them. Investigations 2 was a late life DS game and by the time it would have been fully translated the 3DS would have been in full swing by then. I can see why Capcom wouldn’t want to release that.

Then there are the 2 I'm talking about today, The Great Ace Attorney games. The fact we didn’t get these games hurt me because they had such a cool premise. An Ace Attorney game set in Victorian England? Yes please!

It also helped that the games were developed by the original series creator, Shu Takumi, whose presence was sorely missed in the most recent entries in the mainline series. Unfortunately, they never got translated mainly due to the difficulties involved in the process.

See, when the Ace Attorney games were translated into English the translators changed the setting from Japan to America. Granted this decision made less and less sense as the series progressed and they introduced more Japanese elements, but I can see the logic in it. Makes it easier to understand for westerners if it’s set in a western country. Thing is, you can’t really do that here.

The Great Ace Attorney games are deeply engrained in Japanese history and culture. The backdrop of the game is set during the Mesei period, which was a time of social reform where Japan opened itself up to the rest of the world. The plot is about a Japanese Student visiting Victorian era England to learn about its legal system in hopes he can change Japan’s system which was in the process of becoming more modernized.

You need to keep the characters Japanese otherwise the story doesn’t work. This makes the game significantly harder to translate since they need to explain certain parts of Japanese culture in a way that makes it easy to understand to a western audience. Combine that with licensing issues involving one of the main characters and story elements, and you can imagine the difficulties in bringing this game to the west.

It also didn’t help that these games came out when Capcom was going through a rough patch. This was the around the time of the disastrous Street Fighter V launch and Keiji Inafune leaving the company. Capcom was not in good shape and didn’t want to waste resources translating a difficult game to translate for a devoted, but still niche, western market.

Until now! Yes, we finally got both games in the form of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, a collection of the 2 games, Great Ace Attorney Adventures and Great Ace Attorney 2 Resolve, along with their DLC. You also get a bunch of extra stuff like galleries, a music player and achievements. I'll say right away that, as a collection, Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is good value for money. Both games will take a while to beat, and the extra stuff just adds even more content.

Normally with collections I like to look at the games individually. However, because these games are so similar with only minor differences between them, it didn’t feel right to do that here. Plus, because these games were meant to be a duology with one long story, it makes sense to look at them together as one package.

The story across both games follows the journey of Ryunosuke Naruhodo and his assistant Susato Mikotoba. The games chronicle, heh, Naruhodo’s journey to England where he learns to become a defence attorney. That's about as far as I can go with the plot without going into spoilers. Because of how story driven these games are its imperative that you go into these as blind as possible.

The writing in general is very good. You can tell this is a Shu Takumi game because the overall story is so much better than any of the games in the series after the original trilogy. Both are split between 5 cases each, with the individual cases acting as their own self-contained stories with the threads of a much larger narrative in each.

The individual cases vary in quality. Most are pretty good, but there are a few that are on the weaker side. The overarching story though is great, one of the best in the entire series. It helps that it’s built up across both games. One of my biggest issue with the most recent mainline games is they’re too self-contained with no real progression of the plot.

One of the things that made the original trilogy so great was that it was one continuing story. The tale of Phoenix Wright and his quest to become a great attorney was an endearing one and it was great to see how his story progressed across each game. It was that character progression across all 3 games that made Phoenix such a loveable character.

But then you’ve got the sequels which doesn’t seem to know what to do with its characters, resulting in them re-writing Apollo’s backstory in every frigging game resulting in one of the most frustrating endings for a character arc I've ever seen. Fuck Spirit of Justice, seriously.

That doesn’t happen here. Ryunosuke has a very well-developed arc across both games. I like Ryunosuke as a character, he has a similar personality and sense of humour to Phoenix without being a carbon copy of him. He has a different backstory from Phoenix and his journey from a fledging defence attorney to a competent ace is a satisfying one to see play out.

I also really liked Susato as a sidekick. Not only is she an actual judicial assistant, meaning she can help in court without relying on mystical bullshit, but she also never gets kidnapped or put on trial once throughout either game. In fact, she actually takes the bench herself during one case. I love Maya Fey, but I think Susato might have topped her as best sidekick in the series.

The Ace Attorney games are known for having casts of colourful and wacky characters, and Great Ace Attorney is no different. You'll run into some very eccentric people in these games. Some are one-shot characters while others will appear across multiple cases. I won’t go over every supporting character, because I'd be here all day if we did and I don’t want to spoil much, but I will go over the most important ones.

Every Ace Attorney game needs a rival prosecutor, and the Great Ace Attorney games have Barok Van Zieks to fill that role. While not one of my favourite prosecutors in the series, he is an interesting character in his own right and I like the vampire theme they went with for his design.

And then there’s Herlock Sholmes, and before you ask, yes, he is exactly who you think he is. In fact, in the original Japanese release he was the actual Sherlock Holmes. This was that licensing issue I mentioned earlier. Not only is Holmes a character in this, but a lot of cases are based on some of his adventures. Which means some of you will probably guess some of the twists coming if you’ve ever read them. It happened to me despite having only read 1 of the 56 Sherlock Holmes stories in my life.

Anyway, Herlock is a more comedic version on the famous detective. He's a lot more eccentric and scatterbrained than the Holmes we’re used to, but not to the extent that he’s a bumbling idiot. He's a fun take on the character and I liked him a lot, especially near the end where he showed just how brilliant a detective he is.

But what is Holmes without his Watson, or in this case what is Sholmes without his Wilson. Iris Wilson in this case, a 9-year-old child genius with pink hair. Have I mentioned yet that this series can get very Anime? Because it can get very Anime.

Now before some of you get mad at this, no Iris is not a gender/age swap of Holmes famous sidekick. She's more of an original character that acts as this games version of Pearl Fey. I like Iris just fine though I think they went a bit far with the child genius thing during her introduction, comes off as a bit of a Mary Sue at first. Luckily that isn’t the cand and she ends up being a cute little sidekick character.

I do have a few complaints with the writing. While the overarching story is one of the best in the series, it does take a while to really take off. This is mainly an issue with Adventures because it’s mostly there as set-up. The story is a bit of a slow burn but stick with it and you won’t be disappointed.

Another problem is that the main villain is way too obvious. If you can’t tell who the big bad is the moment you see him, I can’t help you. I still thought they were a good villain, but I saw the twist coming from miles away. Not a good thing to have in a mystery game.

But my biggest complaint is the sheer amount of plot conveniences there are. It's so ridiculous even the characters point it out. It's especially obvious when it comes to the jury. You'll run into the same jury members in multiple cases, some members will have a connection to either the case or one of the witnesses, you’ll even run into some of them outside the court in completely unrelated circumstances.

I know conveniences have always been a part of this series, but this is just stupid. I know why they did it, it’s so they can reuse character models, but come on! Still, I did enjoy the writing overall despite these issues. It's a well written story with likable and memorable characters. It's also nice that the story has a good sense of finality to it, by the end everything is wrapped up in a very satisfying way.

But it wasn’t the writing that initially drew me into this series, how could it, I would have had to play it first. No, it was the series unique presentation that first caught my eye. I remember my first exposure to the series was a trailer for the second game I had on an old mini-DVD, and I remember being blown away by how impressive the sprites were.

The Ace Attorney series is well known for it’s impressive sprite work. Each character is so well detailed and expressive, even today I still think it’s some of the best sprite work in any game. The Great Ace Attorney series keeps the same general idea of the presentation but with one major difference, now the characters using 3D models.

Now personally I prefer the sprite work of the original trilogy, but that’s because of my personal bias for hand drawn sprites. The 3D models here are just as expressive as the sprites from previous games and in some ways are an objective improvement.

The animations are a lot smoother for one thing and can also get way more elaborate than the sprites allowed. This is especially obvious in the breakdown sequences which are among the most over the top animations yet seen in this series. And the 3D models allow them to do a lot more with the camera than they ever could with the 2D sprites. Whenever a big moment happens and the camera sweeps around Naruhodo for the big point, it just makes it so much more epic.

Another improvement is that now we can have multiple characters in a scene at any given time. Before they could only do one character at a time, now several of them can appear which makes the conversations a little more natural. It also allows them to have characters in the backgrounds. They don’t just appear randomly now.

Speaking of the backgrounds, while some of them are done in 3D, a lot of them are 2D drawings. Regardless, they look very nice and have a lot of detail. They're some of the nicer looking backgrounds in the series. It also helps that it’s based on Victorian England, I've always liked the aesthetic of that period.

The visual presentation is just as good as it’s ever been, in some cases it’s better. Both games are pretty much equal when it comes to visual presentation with the only major difference being how the cutscenes are done. In Adventures the cutscenes are done with 2D Anime, while in Resolve they’re done using the in-game models. I like both just fine, I don’t really have a preference for one or the other.

And since we have proper cutscenes now, that means we have full on voice acting. It's not great voice acting, but it’s also not the worst I've ever heard. It's perfectably servicable, and there isn’t that much of it in the first place so it’s not worth getting mad about.

I will give them this in regard to the voice acting, they got actual Japanese actors to voice the Japanese characters. Since one of the themes of the story is about students visiting a brand-new country, having them speak with a Japanese accent makes it feel more authentic. Credit where it’s due, that was a good idea.

Alright, let’s talk music. The soundtrack here is damn good, which isn’t surprising given the quality of previous games soundtracks. Now I don’t think it’s as good as the music from the original trilogy, but it’s still great stuff. It's also fully orchestrated unlike the original trilogies MIDI music, so while the tracks aren’t as memorable the sound is higher quality.

The presentation is solid across the board. Outside of the voice acting it pretty much nails every aspect of presentation. And considering this is essentially a Visual Novel, that’s an important aspect to get right. It's not like visual novels have strong gameplay to fall back on.

Well Ace Attorney isn’t exactly like your traditional Visual Novel. It's a unique hybrid of a Visual Novel, Murder Mystery and a Point and Click Adventure game. This isn’t just reading a story and making choices like most other Visual Novels, there’s more to the gameplay as you investigate cases and try to solve the mystery in each.

The gameplay is split between two different parts, investigations and trials. Investigations are where you’ll examine crime scenes and talk to people to gather information. Occasionally you’ll have to present evidence to progress, but there isn’t much here in terms of gameplay.

The investigations are very dry in this game and there isn’t anything like the psyche-locks or perceive mechanics to spice things up. There is, however, one new mechanic introduced in the form of the dance of deduction that does help liven things up.

This is where Herlock comes into play. During the dance of deduction, Herlock will make an observational deduction that’s, well, wrong. It's mostly right, it’s just a little off base in certain areas. Your job is to then correct the deduction by correcting key words by analyzing the crime scene and discovering what actually happened.

The dance of deduction is, ok I guess. The big problem is that it’s way too easy, there’s only so many things to pick from per correction and it’s often way to obvious what the answer is. It doesn’t feel like I'm logically solving a conundrum so much as answering a multiple-choice question. I also don’t like that you have to sit through the deduction once and then you correct it after because it means you sit through the same deduction twice.

The investigations are lacking something in The Great Ace Attorney. There's not even that much presenting evidence which can make it feel like the game is playing itself a bit. They aren’t bad, they’re just a tad dull this time around.

The trials, thankfully, are just as strong as ever. These have always been where most of the excitement is anyway. The main gameplay of the trials is cross examining witnesses to try to find contradictions. Sometimes you’ll have to press them on certain statements to get more information, but once you find an inconsistency, just present the relevant evidence to the right statement and let them have.

It's super satisfying finding inconsistencies and getting a big “Objection!” out. It's a shame we can’t actually yell it into a microphone now though, always loved doing that. One of the reasons it’s so satisfying is that the game does not put the pieces together for you. It'll give you some hints, but it’s up to you to look at the evidence and try to find the contradiction. It creates these brilliant eureka moments when you finally figure it out.

This was something I always loved about this series. It felt like I, the player, was solving the mysteries. I wasn’t just watching other people solve it, I was checking the evidence and piecing together the mystery with every new piece of information. It was always satisfying calling something before any of the characters figured it out.

This is a game you must not play with a walkthrough. It sucks all the fun out of it. If you’re doing that you might as well just play the mode where it skips the gameplay and focuses on the story, I call it games journalist mode. In all seriousness, this is a good option for those who just want to get to the story, but I feel like you’re doing a major disservice to yourself if you choose to experience it like that.

Finding contradictions isn’t all you do in the Trials. You'll also have to explain theories you make by presenting the right evidence, pointing something out within a piece of evidence or by picking an answer from a list of responses. Make a mistake you will receive a penalty, make 5 penalties and the game is over and you’ll have to start from your last save. Though considering you can save whenever you want it’s not a huge deal. I always saved before doing anything, it’s the only way to play it really.

The penalty system has regressed to what it was like in the original Ace Attorney. You don’t have the health bar from Justice for All or it’s sequels, it’s back to 5 mistakes and you're out. This does make sense since the health bar was introduced to coincide with the Psyche Locks, which aren’t here anymore. I can see why they would go back to the penalty system. It makes more sense here than it did in Spirit of Justice anyway.

Great Ace Attorney does introduce some new mechanics to the series. Well, I say that, but they’re actually based on ideas from the Professor Layton crossover. They are new to the series proper though so, fuck it, they count as new additions here. Those new mechanics are pursuing and the jury.

Pursuing is essentially an evolution of pressing. You won’t just be cross examining one witness at a time, you’ll often be questioning several at once. During which, pressing certain witness statements will cause another witness to react to what was just said. When this happens you can pursue what that witness thinks and try to get more information out of it.

Far more interesting is the Jury system. Unlike regular trials, in The Great Ace Attorney you’re able to question the Jury to see if they’re reasoning is sound in a summation examination. There is no way that would fly in real life, but hey that’s video games for ya.

To be honest, summation examination isn’t all that different from regular cross examination. You'll press and pursue jurors just like you would the witnesses. The biggest difference is that, rather than present evidence to point out a contradiction, you’ll pit two jurors against each other whose statements contradict each other.

The jury and pursuing are both nice inclusions to the series. They aren’t that fundamentally different from the core mechanics of the series but do feel like natural additions to the formula. That being said, like a lot of new Mechanics introduced to the series post the original trilogy, there’s not much challenge in either of them.

When you need to pursue is made way to obvious, unless you’re skipping through the dialogue it’s impossible to miss, and why would you even skip the dialogue in a game like this anyway. The jury system has it a little better, but it’s still not too difficult to find the two contradictory statements.

But my biggest issue with the two is how overused they are, at least in Adventures. I’ve been talking about The Great Ace Attorney in a more general sense since there isn’t much of a difference between the games mechanically, but that does not mean the 2 are created equal.

Great Ace Attorney Adventures is, rough around the edges. It's biggest issues coming down to pacing and overall lack of player engagement. Let’s talk about how the cases in Ace Attorney are structured. Baring the opening cases, which are always shorter affairs designed to be a tutorial, most cases go investigation, trial, investigation, trial.

Adventures does it like this, a 3-part investigation followed by 3-part trial. This presents a bit of a problem. The investigations exist so that the player can uncover new truths or dig up more information on a case. This is why there are always at least 2 investigation sequences, so you can follow up on information or leads uncovered during a trial.

But because the investigations are all done at the beginning of a case, it feels like they purely exist to set-up the current case while the trials are where all the big revelations are. It's always been like this to be fair, but the investigations of previous games still had moments of you discovering a shocking truth or uncovering a new lead or mystery. Here the cases feel too bottom heavy, it makes the investigations feel less important.

The result are cases that don't flow very well. The pacing just never feels right which can make the cases a bit of a chore to get through. The early cases are also among the weakest in the series. The tutorial case is just way too long, and the second case is nothing but a long Investigation which wouldn’t be so bad but considering how dry they are in this game it just doesn’t work.

It isn’t until case 4 where the game starts to feel like a proper Ace Attorney game, and by that point the game is very nearly finished anyway. I know Ace Attorney games are often slow to start out with to reacclimate players to the world and character, but Adventures is too slow for its own good.

But the worst aspect of the game is the complete lack of player engagement. Remember when I said the game can feel like the game is playing itself in the investigations, well in Adventures the whole game feels like this. While I enjoy the pursuing and jury mechanics, Adventures overuses them to the point where you’re barely pointing out any contradictions.

It's so distracted by these other mechanics it forgets to keep the focus on the main one holding everything together. And because you don’t spend a lot of time pointing contradictions it really isn’t all that engaging to play. It never feels like I'm actually solving the mysteries, so it feels like the game is just pulling you along.

Now fortunately, Great Ace Attorney 2 Resolve fixes basically every problem I just went over. The pursuit and jury mechanics are toned down with far more focus put on pointing out contradictions, the pacing goes back to how it was in the older titles so cases flow a lot better, and the cases in general are better than the ones from the first game.

Honestly, Resolve is one of the best games in the series. I'd put it just under first game and slightly above Justice for All. Adventures though is kind of in the middle for me. It is far from the worst game in the series, the strong writing helps with that, but It's still on the lower end of the series totem pole in my opinion.

So, can I recommend Great Ace Attorney Chronicles? Absolutely. While I have my issues with the first game it’s still worth playing once, and the second is one of the best in the series. If you’re an Ace Attorney fan this is worth picking up, but that goes without saying. Hell most Ace Attorney fans probably picked this up day one.

The real question is, can I recommend this to newcomers to the series? Yes and no. You can absolutely jump into this without any prior knowledge of the previous games, and with how much content is here it’s more than worth it’s price point.

However, I do not think this is the best jumping on point. For me that would be the very first game due to how brisk the cases are. Great Ace Attorney is slow to start off which may put some people off. I'd say start with the original trilogy if you want to get started with this series, but if you want to give this game a shot there’s no harm in starting here either.

Regardless, I'm just finally got this. It's great seeing games that were previously inaccessible be made easily available. It's why I always try to support re-releases whenever I can. I hope we see more games that were once Japanese exclusives finally get brought over. I suppose what I'm trying to say is, bring Investigations 2 to the west already Capcom!