We'll deal with your eating of Ace Attorney's creator later. Katharine: Err… HOLD IT! We're getting off topic. I knew it was a mistake to eat Shu Takumi. Side note: crikey, I was a skinny boy back then. Video Matthew: He seemed quite bemused to be hijacked while perusing a manga stand. Katharine: You're lucky he didn't arrest you! Video Matthew: But not so mysterious that I wasn’t able to stalk him around Comic-Con in 2010 and get a photo with him. Creator and writer Shu Takumi is a master of mystery.
Of course, you’d be mad to haphazardly skip through, because the writing is brilliant. As the cases get knottier you do find yourself picking over conversations for missed clues, so this is appreciated. You can tap to skip to the end of a line or hold a button to fast forward through longer chunks. Video Matthew: One of the benefits of this port is a few more options to speed up the text. For the most part, though, I like the build-up they give you to the main courtroom cases, and by the time they're over, you're itching to exercise those vocal chords and point some fingers. These sections get a bit convoluted once cases grow in size and complexity - in the third game, Trials And Tribulations, you're given an entire temple to explore at one point - and it sometimes feels like you're going round in circles trying to find the next MacGuffin to move the story along. There's a lot of tapping and clicking on dialogue boxes, and going backwards and forwards between different locations as you gather evidence and speak to witnesses. It adds a bit of spice, but doesn’t mask the fact that investigations are the verrrrry sloooooow lead-up to the main event. The second part of the trilogy, Justice For All, gives Wright a mystic doodad that reveals psychological blockages in other characters, meaning you have to present evidence or ask the right question to move these exploratory conversations forward. It’s exposition central: mooching around crime scenes, meeting all the players for the upcoming case and doing little in the way of shouting. Video Matthew: Despite being one of my all-time favourite series, I’ve never really been into the investigation portion. You get the thrill of being a detective and a cool lawyer defending the innocent from incompetent and corrupt prosecutors. But that's part of the joy of Ace Attorney - getting up in Detective Gumshoe's grill and seeking out key bits of evidence he missed or overlooked. There's no 'collecting evidence at the scene of the crime' in real life - that's left to the police and the people you're working with. Katharine: If real life lawyering was as fun as Ace Attorney lawyering, I'd still be desperately trying to be a lawyer. Katharine, you trained as a lawyer, how accurate is Ace Attorney’s depiction of the craft? The game is mostly about courtroom battles and finding contradictions in witness testimony, which you signal with a great big bellow of “OBJECTION!” On DS you could shout it into the mic (if you were a maniac), but it’s a much more reserved key-tap on PC. Video Matthew: Yes, for those who’ve somehow managed to miss the Ace Attorney series, this is Capcom’s lawyer-em-up which first appeared in the west on the DS in 2006. Katharine: Err… Sorry, I forgot I don't need to shout into my Nintendo DS's microphone any more. We both played them to death (never convicted) on DS, and have been revisiting them on PC.
I have gathered us - by which I mean, you, Katharine - to discuss Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy, an HD collection of the first three Ace Attorney games. There is a very good chance this RPS chat-o-verdict will end with some horrible ‘any objections?’ type thing. I think we’re legally obliged to cram in naff legal references when writing about the Ace Attorney series.