Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

"And people say that gaming no longer sees innovation or fresh ideas. Hah. HAH, I say!"

Through nothing more than sheer internet word of mouth, Phoenix Wright has become a name so popular among message board gamers that on those rare occasions when you see Capcom getting off their lazy asses and shipping new copies of the game stateside, they're off the shelf within minutes. For most of the people reading this, they've already experienced said internet word of mouth firsthand. The fads, the mildly famous "Objection!" site, the ASCII.... for those of you that haven't given in to peer pressure and bought the game yet (assuming you can even find it; Capcom has made it rather difficult), haven't you yet stopped to wonder why people constantly talk about Phoenix Wright?

Like the subtitle Ace Attorney implies, Phoenix Wright is an attorney simulator. More specifically, it's a text-based adventure game that takes place with a lawyerly setting -- that is, Phoenix Wright isn't purely an attorney sim. It's feel is more a detective game than anything else, because you'll end up having Phoenix do all of his own investigating on cases. This isn't like real life where the police will find mounds of evidence for you. Save the autopsy reports and other scarce examples, you will have to find pretty much all of the case-cracking clues on your own, but then again Phoenix Wright's design was never meant to be courtroom canon.

Phoenix will take on five cases throughout the course of the game. The first case is a mere tutorial of how the game works, and the following four are cases in ascending difficulty in which you'll have to get seemingly guilty clients off the hook. Given the massive amount of evidence each client will have against him, this is no easy task. To paraphrase a question asked of Phoenix by a partner of his, "Does every case of yours make you feel like you're about to drown, and you can never quite reach the surface?"

Yeah, pretty much. In all of the cases Phoenix Wright takes on, his clients are on the verge of being declared guilty virtually the entire way through. All but one case in the game is named "Turnabout" because of how often it looks like Phoenix is going to lose. The question then becomes what role the game's player takes in all of this.

The entire game can be broken down into three phases: storyline, out of court investigation, and the trials themselves. In the beginning of every case, the case is set up by a well-told story. Phoenix will inevitably end up defending the client. From there, you'll take on the role of detective and attorney wrapped into one. Defense of your client entails going into all of the necessary areas, talking to everyone you encounter and examining every area for clues that will assist in your defense of the client. Once Phoenix feels he has enough clues to put up a decent fight in court, the scene shifts to the trial.

This is where the true fun begins. The courtroom sections of Phoenix Wright are easily the highlight of the game, and they're far easier to navigate than the oft tedious investigation phases between court dates. This is where Phoenix puts together what he has found in an effort to formulate a defense, though this is far easier to do than it sounds. The bare bones model of doing such is to rip apart every witness's testimony until you get the full truth out of them, which is for the most part only done by finding contradictions in said testimonies and presenting evidence in court to back up your claims. From there the game's storyline takes care of itself. After enough investigation-court cycles, you'll inevitably get your client off the hook.

Gameplay-wise, most of this is very easy to accomplish. The entire game save for one tidbit at the very end can be played by using the touch screen, and everything you'll need to do is easily mapped out for you. The only part of the game in which the DS's higher functions are used is the fifth case, which was added to the American version of Phoenix Wright to show off what the DS can do. But for those of you who don't feel like yelling at a handheld in public, don't worry. You're only required to do so once in the entire game. The other facet of the game that uses the mic, fingerprinting, requires little to no noise. Phoenix Wright is about as easy a game to play as you'll ever find, and it's designed more to challenge your perceptive ability than it is button-pressing skill. The only way you can "lose" is if you screw up in court enough times to run out of exclamation points. You'll start with five on each court day, and every time you present wrong evidence or make a wrong choice you're penalized. If you hit zero, your client is declared guilty. For the most part, only the final case should put you in any real danger of seeing this.

However, the awesomeness factor of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney goes far beyond gameplay. As a text-based adventure, the text and characters are the most important part, and in this aspect Phoenix Wright delivers. In fact Phoenix Wright does this better than just about any other game out there. Few other games have characters as dynamic as this, with such well-defined character relationships. Even more impressive is that all of this happens in a 10-15 hour game; most 40 hour RPGs can't create characters half as good as Phoenix Wright, which is kind of sad. The characters all work very well separately and together, and the text drives the game so well that the gameplay takes a back seat to story and succeeds anyway.

Few other games are able to go from perfect allegorical humor (which mostly takes place in character names, such as Lotta Heart, Jack Hammer, Will Powers, Dick Gumshoe, Redd White, and even Phoenix Wright himself just to name a few) to a dead serious dialogue back and forth so fluently, but Phoenix Wright pulls this off seamlessly. Some of the courtroom scenes are so hilarious and dramatic at the same time that there will be periods where you wish you could just watch the game and not actually plat it. This right here... the dialogue, the character relationships, the humor, and how it's all tied together perfectly, is what draws near everyone that plays the game into loving it. Everything else, wonderful as it is, serves as a bonus.

Speaking of which, the graphics and soundtrack of the game shouldn't go unnoticed. For a DS title, both are quite good, especially the soundtrack. There's a very dramatic flair to most of it (listen to the song "Cornered" if you want proof), and the graphics are clean and crisp. The font is very easy to read, which is the most important graphical factor in a text-based adventure title.

The only real flaw that the game has is the same issue present in virtually every adventure title. There will be times when you miss something, and the game will turn into you meticulously looking through every area one by one just to find that magical pixel or two that you missed the first time around. But other than that, Phoenix Wright is golden. You've sorely missed out if you haven't played it by now, but good luck finding a copy.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 10/23/06, Updated 08/03/09

Game Release: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (US, 10/12/05)