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.