Wright’s childhood friend and present rival Miles Edgeworth makes for a great character foil, and his arc over the course of these games is arguably the most compelling part of their stories. Their banter is some of the best in gaming, up there with Nico Collard and George Stobbart. He’s assisted by Maya Fey, an eccentric spirit medium in training with a predilection for Samurai Sentai shows and a bottomless stomach. Unlike the protagonists of many visual novels, Phoenix Wright has personality to spare – he’s cynical but kind, he always believes in his clients, and while he can be impressively confident he’s far from immune to bouts of nervousness.
These disparate events are tied together with a thread of light but compelling character drama that gives the games their heart. The games are broken up into five episodes apiece, each one a more-or-less self-contained mystery. While that satirical bent is an important part of the series, Takumi never lets it get in the way of telling a good story. Over a decade since that game’s release, with high-profile failures in western legal systems cropping up year after year, Takumi’s tales of dangerously inept cops and corrupt governments are as relevant as they ever were. Shu Takumi created the first game as a biting satire of the Japanese Legal System in which the only way a defense attorney can hope to win an acquittal is by identifying the true culprit and proving THEM guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt. Despite how out-there the setting (Las Angeles circa 2016 in the localized version) seems, the problems it presents are very grounded in reality. This craziness makes the series’ cases immensely entertaining, but I think it resonates on a deeper level than simple madcap fun.
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As a result Wright’s legal battles are fast-paced, pulse-pounding affairs full of colorful characters and insane twists. Preliminary trials in this world last only three days and almost always end in a guilty verdict – a little distressing given the police force’s tendency to arrest the first suspicious person they see at a crime scene.
Phoenix Wright lives in a world gone mad, where phantom thieves and spirit mediums are commonplace and “dew process” refers exclusively to how water clings to grass in the early morning. In a market full of knights, space marines, and super fighting robots, it seems ludicrous to release a game about a lawyer, but this isn’t some mundane Law& Order style procedural. This isn’t a huge problem, but it is distracting, and it crops up often as you need to visit the detention center at least once per case. The 3D effect usually works well, creating the impression of a popup book, except in the detention center’s visiting room where the developers didn’t bother (or were possibly unable) to put the window frame on a separate layer. The redrawn anime-style assets look gorgeous, and on a more compact screen they don’t have the same problem as they did on iPad – namely looking sluggish due to the low frame count of their animations. It brings the games from DS to 3DS with redrawn HD sprites and backgrounds taken from the games’ iPad port and layered with some simple stereoscopic trickery. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy, as the title suggests, is a remastered compilation of the first three entries in Capcom’s acclaimed visual novel series.
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If you’re looking to replay the original games, or if you jumped into the series with Apollo Justice or Dual Destinies and need to catch up, then Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy offers a near-ideal way to enjoy the classics. The Ace Attorney games released on DS are ports of now decade-old GBA carts, though, and despite being well-optimized, they’re starting to show their age. You know all the beats – sometimes by heart – but the dialogue is as charming and entertaining as it ever was, and there are new details you pick up a second or even third time through that enrich the tale. Replaying Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is a lot like re-reading a good book.
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