Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies

I've calmed down on this game since I wrote this review, but I'll leave it up.
Plot spoilers for both this game and Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney follow.

After the release of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, the fanbase was split between those who wanted Apollo gone and for the games to be about Phoenix and Maya again, and those who claimed Phoenix's story was over, and wanted the games to focus on Apollo and his story. There were moderates, of course, but these two sides were definitely the most vocal.
Trying to make both sides happy would be difficult, but with smart writing and a chance to show how Phoenix and Apollo get along and work together as attorneys, they could at least get people to accept the character they didn't want to return.

They didn't even try to do this. Instead of splitting screentime in half for these two characters, some absolute genius decided the best thing to do would be to introduce a third playable attorney.
Naturally, she has a gimmick of her own that the gameplay and story revolves around, so she has to be present for each and every case. This means that we barely get to see Phoenix and Apollo interact with eachother, and the other important character from AJ, Trucy, is left behind and reduced to a one-note character (her personality in this game is entirely "MAGIC PANTIES").

Most of the rest of the returning cast was distorted or changed entirely, as well.
Klavier Gavin returns, after learning that his brother, whom he looked up to, was a psychopathic murderer. In this game, the woman who taught him to be a prosecutor is also killed. He does not care about any of this in the slightest. Just another day at the office, it seems.
Phoenix Wright gets his attorney badge back and reverts completely to his AA1 self. He's panicky and doesn't seem to know what's going on, which is a complete 180 from his hobo mastermind persona from the last game. His favourite thing to do in this game is to misquote his former mentor. When you're not playing as Phoenix, he seems more confident, of course. The way to avoid this problem would be to have him project confidence outwardly, and be calmer on the inside. If the player doesn't know what to do in a situation, he should blurt out wrong answers with the confidence of a veteran attorney.
Apollo Justice's character is completely different. They based his entire personality on a one-off line he said in the last game ("I'm fine!"), and made his new personality smothering. He went from a "bland" character to the kind of character who butts in and accuses the new protagonist of murder just to test their friendship. I'm paraphrasing, but it's still absolutely ridiculous.


In addition to all this poor characterisation, the development team decided that these games had too much gameplay, so they "streamlined" the investigation segments. By this, I mean that they only let you examine one room per case, when the vast majority of the memorable character-building dialogue in past games was hidden in objects you could examine.

In the court segments, you're able to "press" a witness to get more information out of them. Sometimes, the contradiction you're meant to find is blindingly obvious, but pressing the witness rewards the player with more character-building dialogue.
If you do this in this game, however, the game assumes you're an idiot and basically tells you what to do.

Blackquill is my favorite prosecutor behind Edgeworth so this gets a 3 despite the multitude of problems with the game. Also my first Ace Attorney game.

Writing about this game in too much detail would spoil the story, so I'll be brief. This is the fifth main game in the Ace Attorney series, and if you've played the first four and enjoyed them, you should check it out. One of the neater aspects of this game is that you control three different lawyers: Phoenix Wright, Apollo Justice, and newcomer Athena Cykes. Cykes has the ability to read emotions, which meshes well with Phoenix's ability to tell people are hiding things and Apollo's more physical lie detection. Of course, the gameplay elements don't matter nearly as much as the story in these games. All five of the cases are good, though not quite on the level of Ace Attorney 3, and the writers did a great job improving on Apollo Justice's character so it's easy to look past some of the bumpy territory from the previous game. The game now uses 3D characters instead of the traditional sprites, and they look magnificent. Phoenix & co. still have their classic poses and everything feels more vibrant and fluid than it did before. The music, while not on the level of the first game, is pleasant enough and has a good mixture of old and new songs. Ace Attorney 5 stands up well with the previous games even though things have changed in the game's world, and I highly recommend it, but if you haven't played the other games you should start from the beginning.

Of course, this is not to say the game is without weaknesses. While the stories of the cases are solid (e.g. the "how" of the murders), I do feel like the writers are focusing way more on making an interesting case than they are developing the characters. I didn't understand the motivation behind several of the murders in the game, and while it was a lot of fun putting all the pieces together (and I was always way ahead of the game characters, sadly) I do wish there were more interesting villains that could be seen as sympathetic or at least motivated by something other than greed like in previous games. Also, the series seems to be bringing back old characters just as token appearances now, and while it did make me smile to see some familiar faces, there are still some I either wish showed up (Gumshoe, seriously!) or thought felt superfluous. (Pearl over Gumshoe? Really?) In all honesty, though, these are nitpicky complaints that didn't affect my enjoyment of the story too badly. The only truly crippling flaws with the gameplay are the poorer localization (tons of spelling errors) and incredibly slow text speed.

I'm looking forward to Ace Attorney 6 at the time of writing this, but I could also have seen the series ending here without too much harm being done. Some would argue the series has already been run in to the ground, and I can see their point. However, I'm happy to have what exists in this series, and at this point I'm so attached to the classic characters that I'd be willing to see whatever story comes next for them. Ace Attorney 5 just adds more fun stuff to the table.