Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney (A Retrospective)

** Post contains heavy spoilers for Apollo Justice **

Let’s say that Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney (AJ) worked like a traditional videogame. It only has to have a great gameplay for it to be good, and with features the previous 3 Phoenix Wright games don’t have (sans the DS-exclusive fifth chapter of the first game), AJ could easily be considered a superior game. With AJ, investigations are more involving, since evidences are no longer static objects and you had to view them in 3 dimensions, occasionally requiring that you use cool scientific implements to see traces of fingerprints, footprints or bloods, or to manipulate recording equipments to find telling signs of struggle. It’s also more streamlined, in that if you’ve picked up every evidence and spoke to every witness in a given location, the game will not permit you to stop by here again.

By the standards of a normal videogame, AJ bests Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney 1-3 (PW).

Of course, AJ being a text-heavy adventure game means that it should be judged differently, with its technical aspect playing only a side fiddle to its leading component, the story. Point and click adventure games were first conceptualized at a time when game designers wanted to offer players an interactive role within a complex narrative, but technologies limited the ways videogames can accomplish this. Enter Infocom’s Zorks, the Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker games, with their workarounds being that while you’re reading copious amounts of texts, you’re still “gaming” by typing the correct verbs and nouns to “win”. Then that kind of gaming evolved into what became the colorful Sierra and the LucasArts point-and-click-fests where you’re presented scenarios, then met with obstacles you’re, hopefully, creative enough to make sense of with the items that you’ve picked up along the way (how’s chicken on pulleys work for you?). Any game of the Ace Attorney series is the mix of the amount of reading from the Infocom era, plus the graphical presentation and puzzle-solving from the Sierra/LucasArts offerings. They all require that the gameplay be functional, but only in the sense that it should not get in the way of enjoying their stories and clever writings.

I was not prepared for AJ’s story to be as weak as it turned out to be. A post I wrote in January 2008 reflected the uncontainable hype I had for this game after having played the demo of its first chapter. It’s funny that I should be disappointed, because I knew and accepted right away that I’d play as another rookie lawyer Apollo Justice instead of the much beloved, my personal favorite Phoenix Wright. Phoenix Wright in this game has fallen from grace, with his attorney badge revoked and his whole career changed to that of a gambling lord moonlighting as pianist in a shoddy bar. I was genuinely interested to understand why all these happened, and more to the point, why the writers decided for someone like the eponymous Apollo Justice to replace Phoenix Wright as the leading guy.

Apollo Justice is awful. He and Phoenix Wright are not exactly fan-base dividing new-versus-old leads like Kirk and Picard, who each has his own personalities and quirks; everyone will prefer Phoenix over Apollo, the latter practically the former’s copycat. Both are bumbling lawyers who lack self-confidence, the only differences being that Phoenix is more passionate and more cognizant of events than most of the cast, while I never got the sense that Apollo cares to win his case. He’s so slow that people like his rival prosecutor Klavier Gavin and even his sidekick Trucy Wright have to spell out the logical context of the events for him. Those would’ve make Apollo Justice far less interesting than Phoenix, but to add insult to the injury, it has never been made clear why he became a lawyer in the first place. He has one thing going for him though, which is that he has a special ability to detect suspicious body movements; unfortunately he could only do that when witnesses are testifying in courtroom, making that feature under-utilized. What his motivation is for taking up his profession, no one knows, and after playing as him in one game I’m not sure I care to know anymore. He’s like what happens sometimes when I meet an acquaintance and in our brief interaction, I can’t say I know everything about him/her, but know enough to decide that I’m not interested in learning more about him/her.

Has Capcom learned nothing from Raiden of Metal Gear Solid 2? You don’t replace a popular lead with another guy who’s exactly like him and expect this to go over well with fans. Devil May Cry 4 is another game where Capcom has done this (and released on the same year, to boot!). What’s odd is that Capcom has effectively replaced the lead of one of its franchises before. While no one is ever going to mistake Megaman as a series known for quality storytelling, the way it made us accept Zero should’ve become a model of how to change leads. First let the audiences warm up to the new guy, such that by the time he takes over they’ll embrace him like they did in Megaman Zero.

Apollo Justice, though, isn’t the only guy holding the whole game back from achieving the wacked-out greatness of the previous titles. All the main characters pale in comparison to their PW’s counterparts. The sidekick, Trucy Wright, is exactly like Maya or young Ema Skye (from PW1’s case 5) except that she is a magician-in-training (as in, a prestidigitator) instead of spirit-medium or forensics scientist. The grown-up Ema Skye is not the lovable oaf that Dick Gumshoe was but rather a detective with so much attitude you’d think she was perpetually PMS-ing, making most of your interactions with her thoroughly unpleasant (she keeps throwing snack bits at you).

But, by far, the biggest wastes of great storytelling opportunity are the Gavin brothers - defense attorney Kristoph and prosecutor Klavier. Kristoph is Apollo’s mentor, who turned out to be the true culprit of the first case (and tried to frame Phoenix for it). Later it is shown that his heart is full of darkness, hiding secrets so wicked that not even Phoenix’s truth-seeking gem (Magatama) could unlock them. I don’t know why he turned this evil, and if you presumed that his outlook has any relation to his younger brother Klavier you’ll be dead wrong. Nothing about Gavin’s brotherhood mattered – I wouldn’t know they’re brothers if they didn’t share the same surname and hairdo. Consequently, Kristoph is an interesting character who ultimately lacks depth because of writer’s neglect.

Klavier infuriated me the most. Here is a new prosecutor designed with every pop star appeal that women squee over – he’s good looking, he’s part of a rock band, he has swagger. He’s clinically made to rock, and yet he failed big time at that. Unlike most prosecutors Phoenix encounters, who stake their reputation to defeat Phoenix, Klavier couldn’t care less that he loses cases as long as he’s on the right. The whole “white knight fighting for justice routine” that made Superman and Captain America iconic yet boring, except that Klavier is not iconic because he looks like a rejected design of Devil May Cry’s Dante – who’d definitely be a better prosecutor than Klavier. Am I against a story having a goody-two-shoesy guy? No, but that guy needs to resemble a flesh and blood human being rather than a cardboard cut-out placeholder of justice. His non-reaction from seeing his brother (in cases 1 and 4) and his band-mate, who also happens to be his best friend (case 3), getting convicted of murder is so inhumanly and emotionless, Rick Deckard from Blade Runner should’ve suspected him of being a Replicant.

By the time I finish the game (which didn’t take long) my indifference to the game’s story bothered me enough that I started a minor discussion over at some forum saying I wasn’t feeling any of the game’s characters. One guy told me that AJ’s brilliance is that if one would sit back and think about it one would observe that all its key characters deliberately reversed the roles of their counterparts in PW. The mentor is evil unlike PW’s Mia. The sidekick can take care of herself unlike PW’s Maya. The prosecutor is nice and isn’t antagonistic like Miles Edgeworth. The detective, unlike Dick Gumshoe, is smart yet hates her job. Cool if you’ve noticed all that, and I would agree, but I’m not exactly asking for role reversal. All I wanted was fresh story, and genuinely engaging characters. Besides, in the process of reversing everything about what made PW’s characters likable, you get aloofness as opposed to passionate, and you get boring instead of engaging. No one in AJ is developed well, and they don’t seem to care that you don’t know them either. So why should I bother?

I didn’t want nor expect AJ to leave aside Phoenix from the story, but boy does it feel like everyone else is a bit player to his personal drama. Apollo, Trucy, Ema and Klavier pretty much are fencesitters throughout the game, observing their clients and Phoenix’s lives with nary a care. What’s most damning is AJ’s very own Phoenix Wright, an unrecognizably aloof, lazy-eyed, indifferent, overbearing hobo figure, a ghost of the awkward excitable guy everyone loved in PW1-3. The game goes at great length to explain why he’s changed. In case 4, he is revealed to have inadvertently submitted fake evidence on court, where he got penalized by a ban from practicing law. I don’t buy this, and here’s why:

1.) In PW1-3, Phoenix wouldn’t take this sitting down; here there’s no desperate plea to set his record straight.

2.) AJ betrays its world’s logic because there has never been an issue with Edgeworth and both of von Karmas when they submitted fake evidences.

3.) The many lives Phoenix saved and the reputations of the court of justice he helped preserved, and he gets severely punished for the one folly he did not intentionally do?

By case 4, we’re presented a supercomputer by which all the remaining events of the game – the courtroom and the investigation – will be viewed, while Phoenix Wright travel back and forth from 7 years ago to present, unraveling the mystery that led to his loss of lawyer stint. The game screws up logic square in the face, requiring that you present evidences you acquire in the future to people of the past. Then once the game is near completion, the game flat out asks you if you would like to see the good or the bad ending (and since the credits don’t roll in the bad one, everyone can be secure in the knowledge that this won’t be the canonical end). Sci fi and AA blend about as clumsily as a plumber critiquing the art exhibit of Salvador Dali, but if anyone has to do the time traveling, the writers have to do it. Please go back to the drawing board and may I have your attention: will the real Ace Attorney please stand up?