Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice

Spirit of Justice switches up the Ace Attorney formula by placing its main action in an authoritarian foreign country where defense attorneys have, hilariously, been outlawed and prosecutors rule the land. There are shades of Myanmar and Tibet, but in true Phoenix Wright fashion the game eschews any real political commentary in favor of ridiculous puns.

I have played all the Ace Attorney games that have made it stateside. They are formative games for me. I was a late adopter on the 3DS, so have slowly been catching up the latest generation of Ace Attorney games for the last couple of years. The thing about the 3DS games is the developers' perhaps justifiable pride in their 3D character models and animation. In that sense, Spirit of Justice totally builds on what Dual Destinies did before, moving to elaborate 3D models and multiplane visual effects from the 2D sprites in the DS releases. This type of model work is fairly uncommon for the visual novel genre to which the Ace Attorney games have always (sort of uncomfortably) belonged. As a result, every minor character here has some sort of elaborate movement sequence that is impossible to skip. The more over-the-top these become, the more languid the game feels. Specifically, there is a dance performed by a character that is central to how this game unfolds. It is very impressively animated for this hardware, but the game's designers use it so often it becomes annoying. The same animation is used twice in one episode and three times (!) in another.

What makes Spirit of Justice more ambitious than previous entries is that it splits time between Phoenix, Apollo and Athena (the most cartoon-like protagonist, introduced in Dual Destinies). At first these episodes feel only loosely connected but they come together in a mostly effective way by the end, and put a button on Apollo Justice's arc. I have always found Apollo a little less appealing than the characters that populate the first three Ace Attorney games, but here he finally gets a chance to shine.