Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

"Tedious gameplay? Less-than-brilliant graphics? Limited sound? Why then do I love Phoenix Wright so much?"

After playing through Phoenix Wright, I can't help but ask myself a question. Why do I love this game so much? Quite simply, I can't remember the last time I enjoyed a game as much as I did Phoenix Wright. In fact, I don't think I've ever enjoyed a game as much as I did Phoenix Wright. And yet, it features no great feats in gameplay, no jaw-dropping graphics, no innovative use of the DS's features. (Though the concept of the game isn't exactly conventional.) So, what exactly makes the game such a treasure to play?

The basic concept is simple enough. You're a defence attorney. Your job is to defend those accused in a court of law and get them the ‘Not Guilty' verdict. The game has little variety in what sorts of crimes you are defending people against. Actually, it has no variety. Right off from the bat you're defending one of Phoenix's old friends in a murder trial. The trial part of the game is fairly straight-forward. The prosecution – the person who tries to get your client convicted – presents evidence, and then calls a witness. The witness will give their testimony, and you'll then have to cross-examine them. You can either press them for more information on their current statement (i.e. what's currently displayed in the text box on the screen) or present evidence which shows that they're in fact lying. To be honest, I think the sheer orgasmic pleasure I feel whenever I hear Phoenix shout ‘Objection' is enough to make me love this game. You're given five ‘lives' so to speak, and if you present evidence and get it wrong, you lose a life. A lot of testimonies are very hard to find flaws in, and, considering that you only get so many chances before the judge decides he's heard enough, you really have to think hard for some of them.

There are five cases in total. Four are part of the ‘main story' and the last is just an extra case, which includes some of the characters from the main story. The cases are... long to say the least. The first chapter will take you much less than half an hour to do, but the rest will you take a while. The fifth case took me around eight hours to complete, if not much longer. The game is short, but not too bad. A couple of more cases were needed, but in terms of length, Phoenix Wright doesn't do at all badly.

Visuals are fairly... meh. Characters and backdrops – the game uses 3D visuals in just one place, a cel-shaded scene – are colourful, clear and pretty, and all suit the location or character wonderfully. Merely using backdrops for locations was well-done, as making them in 3D would have been fairly pointless and ruined the detective work. Character models would have done better had they been produced using cel-shading in the third dimension, if only to make them look better overall. (Though I can't help but wonder whether or not 3D characters in a 2D world would just look strange and outlandish.) The graphics on Phoenix Wright aren't at all bad, and suit the game well. I can't help but feel that it's lacking visually though.

Gameplay, as I've mentioned, is fun, but repetitive. Despite only having the job of an attorney, Phoenix Wright seems to love playing detective as well, which –along with being in court – makes up half of the game. While out investigating, you're given two options constantly – Examine and Move -, and another two if someone's present whom you can talk to, Talk and Present. Examine allows you to look around the area using the stylus, Move lets you go to a different location, Talk allows you to talk to the present person about things, and Present is the way to ask people about evidence that you've found. All of these options are done well. Examine gives you an on-screen cursor (and helpfully shifts anyone in the way up to the top screen so that nothing is obscuring your view), which you move around the screen (against the 2D backdrops, which is why 3D environments might not work as well) to try and find clues. The word ‘Examine' will appear in the lower-right corner of the screen if there's anything that can be commented on, and if anyone is present, they might comment on it themselves. If what you're examining seems relevant to the case, it'll be added to the ‘Court Record', a menu showing all evidence that you've thus far collected. Examining is easy and well-done, though the cursor's size makes it imprecise and you'll sometimes find yourself missing things because of this. Move is easy enough. Anywhere where you can move to from your current location will be displayed, and you can choose at your own will. Thankfully, the locations are displayed in a clear list, and not a map, as I often find myself forgetting where places are on maps. The Talk option is simple enough, but frustratingly limited. Anything that you can talk to someone about will be displayed in a list, and you just choose. Once you've talked about it to the person, it'll be ticked in the list. I often found that there weren't enough options to talk about though, and the fact that you can't ask questions about the things they've just said makes things exasperating. Present allows you to choose a piece of evidence from the Court Record, and ask the present individual about it. They might just give you some random and/or irrelevant information, some useful information related to the case, a new piece of evidence, or something new to talk about. There's nothing flawed about the present option, and it was useful and impressive.

Once you've gathered a suitable amount of information and evidence, you'll be given the chance to save – disappointingly, there's only one slot available for you to use – your game. After that, it's onto the trial. I've already talked about the testimony and cross-examination system, but I'll go into that in more detail now. The people who give testimonies will always be either someone you've already spoken to while investigating, or the defendant, excluding in the first chapter, as you don't do investigating there. You have to look for contradictions in their testimonies, and then present evidence from the Court Record to prove this. As mentioned before, finding contradictions can be very challenging, but once you do, the music (which is awesome by the way, but I'll go into that later on) ceases, an earth-shaking (well, not quite, but it's very momentous and dominant, believe me) Objection! sounds – complimented by the greatest image you might ever see, stating that Phoenix Wright, in fact objects to that statement as if the booming scream wasn't enough – Phoenix slams his hands down on his table and he's ready to drown the witness in a pool of their own contradiction. After that, you'll normally find that your brain gets going, and you find contradictions more easily as you start to piece things together. You start to build up steam now, and momentum carries you forward to the edge of your seat as you get drawn in to the mind-blowing story that Capcom created in Phoenix Wright. (Which I'll go into in more detail later.) The energy and excitement created by this sort of thing testaments (You see what I did there? No? Oh well.) how enjoyable a game Phoenix Wright and how involved you can easily become. One thing that I must say though is that it's not up to you to decide how evidence contradicts the statement, but Phoenix. Because of this, objecting to things doesn't always work in the way that you want it to, and this causes you to lose lives. For example, without giving much away, a witness said that a victim was stabbed in the chest, but the autopsy report claimed that they were stabbed in the back. The game didn't recognise this though, and I lost a life because of it. It can be extremely frustrating when this happens, but it doesn't occur often, and for the most part the game spots the contradiction for you when you present evidence. When you've gone through enough of the trial that the judge decides more evidence needs to be collected, you'll go back to your detective work, and so forth. This repeats until you've proven your client innocent. The game is presented well, and the trials are generally brilliant and fun. Detective work can get very repetitive and boring, but doesn't take a whole lot away from the game. It's bearable at any rate.

All of the sound in this game is brilliant. Anytime anyone shouts ‘Objection!' (apart from the first prosecutor, who I swear actually tried to stab me in the ears while I winced in disgust), the impact'll fill you with joy. ‘Hold it!' causes your eyebrows to shoot upwards, as you wonder just what's going to happen next in the whirlwind of a story. The music is incredible, and you'll find yourself whistling along to the compositions once you know them, and they do a lot to add to the game, particularly in the trials. That being said, the sound is limited. The only voice acting is “Objection!” “Hold it!” and “Take that!”, and I think I could count the number of songs on one hand. Despite that, that that is there is fantastic, and if only there was more sound to boast, it wouldn't be flawable in this department.

The story is... phenomenal. Really, screw any RPGs that you might have played, I don't care about whatever book you might have read, THIS is the best story you will hear in your life-time. The basic jist of things is that you're Phoenix Wright, a 24 year old rookie lawyer in the year 2016, who's just starting out. The real storyline though lies in the cases. Your brain will be racked trying to figure out just what's been going on, and when you finally do, something comes along and changes everything, and as your conclusion is knocked out from underneath you, you can't help but just stare at the screen, thinking to yourself “Whaaaaaaat!?” The frequent plot-twists are brilliant and seldom predictable. A twist might happen, and when you've finally figured that out, you're given a metaphorical slap in the fact, and are informed that that was in fact a load of bull****, and now you need to figure out something else. The storyline is by far the best part of Phoenix Wright, and you won't find a plot this century which can match it in awesomeness.

The game has a certain degree of replayability to it, complimented by the storyline. You might want to go through all of the cases again – you're able to just select any case that you've already completed, which Capcom did well to include – and be able to look at everything from a different perspective now that you know what actually happened. Besides that though, there's little reason to play through Phoenix Wright again.

Phew, that was much longer that I expected it to be. In closing, I'll answer my own question that I asked at the start of this review. Why do I love Phoenix Wright? Why am I considering referring to it as my favourite game of all time from now own? Because despite not being massively over on some of the more technical issues such as graphics, sound or even gameplay, Phoenix Wright is fun to the core, and I couldn't recommend a game anymore. The excitement and drama created by it is hard to beat, and it's crazily difficult to put down.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 10/24/06, Updated 10/30/06