👨‍⚖️ The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles | PS4 | Review | 8/10 | "Elementary, my dear Ace Attorney" 👨‍⚖️

This is the first entry I have played in the Ace Attorney franchise; I've always been aware of them and always thought I would like them, but for some reason never played them.

This seemed like a good starting point as it’s set many years before the other games, which meant I was sure I could avoid spoilers and be able to grasp the story - as no prior knowledge would be needed. 

The game is set in the Meiji/ Victorian era and you play as Ryunosuke Naruhodo - an ancestor of Phoenix Wright - who gets caught up in a murder investigation and shows his prowess as an attorney, he then journeys with his friend Kazuma to England to study law.

The game has a wonderful cast of characters, which is vitally important in this style of game as it's so heavily dialogue-based, both the characters and dialogue need to be engaging or the game could easily become tiresome and uninteresting. Luckily, they are engaging, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with them. Ryunosuke is likeable and grows through the cases, he can be charming but also stern when the case calls for it and  Susato Mikotoba is a judicial assistant who plays a vital role in your cases, she is sensible but also a progressive dreamer. 

Now, one of the main characters is called Herlock Sholmes it won't take long for you to guess who he is based on. I adore Sherlock Holmes and so was very happy to see ‘Sholmes’ in the game, but I must admit - as the cases went on, he did start to grate on my nerves, his arrogance and showboating get tiresome, which was a bit of a shame. Obviously, Sholmes has a trusty sidekick, this time it’s a ten-year-old prodigy named Iris Wilson, who is very intelligent and inventive.

The witness, defendants and accused are all wonderfully eccentric, the first case alone has a man coughing blood, a soldier with a baby on his back, pulling his moustache and an English woman with a live swan on her hat. I've always loved how Japanese game makers really love embracing strange and quirky character designs. 

The gameplay is mostly analysing crime scenes and then presenting and arguing your case in court. At the crime scenes, you have options to investigate objects, interrogate witnesses and do all the typical things you would expect, with Sholmes aiding you. You also have the dance of deduction where Sholmes will deduce something but get the conclusion wrong, you will then have to re-examine his deductions and insert the right conclusions. This was a fun part of the game but at first, it did feel weird seeing Sholmes come to completely wrong assumptions. 

The courtroom scenes were the highlight of the game. Presenting your case and seeing the twists and turns was enthralling, as was presenting evidence that you thought would be the ‘gotcha’ moment only to see it dismantled, it’s both disheartening and thrilling. It isn't always completely obvious which evidence needs presenting; it didn’t happen in every case but a couple of times I was stumped. You have a certain amount of chances to submit evidence before you lose the case, if this occurs, you then re-start from an earlier part with lives restored, so it wasn’t too problematic.

One of the worst parts of this game was highlighted by having to review it. Usually, with this type of game I would do a couple of cases, take a break then come back and repeat - but having to go through the game without any breaks meant that things that were smaller negatives were heightened. For instance, the use of the same animations through every case becomes tedious seeing the same animations over and over again, Sholmes flicking his hat or banging the desk every courtroom scene is draining.

Also, the controls tutorial come up in every case to remind you of the basic functions, I imagine that this is due to one option being to play the cases in any order and this directly causes the problem. Finally, for some reason, every word that comes on screen has a noise accompanying it, which wouldn’t matter too much if, when you turned the noise off, it didn't turn off all other noises in the game… so it's either irritating noises or near silence as the music can really come and go.