The Perfect Prosecutor who never gets to prosecute
When I played the first Phoenix Wright/Ace Attorney/Gyakuten Saiban game, it can be said that Miles Edgeworth made an impression to me. The gray hair. The purple coat. The wag of his finger. The cocky and condescending way he holds out his hands and shakes his head when poor Phoenix has gotten something wrong. But by the end of the game it became clear that his actions weren't malicious, he wasn't a villain, merely the antagonist for those first few cases. He was an ally, if not a friend.
So I was excited when I heard about Gyakuten Kenji, which some fans were calling it (at the time), "Miles Edgeworth: Perfect Prosecutor." It seemed like such a "perfect" name at the time, except that it doesn't brand the game very well, and as I've learned from playing the game, you don't do very much prosecuting.
Hence the English title, Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth. Edgeworth isn't an attorney, and I suppose they thought it would be odd to have a game where your objective was to lock people up instead of setting them free, so instead we have a game where all the action takes place outside a courtroom. So Edgeworth is still a prosecutor, yet the game can still maintain the series core tenet of defending the innocent from the injustices of the legal system. He becomes some sort of Jessica Fletcher here, where dead bodies are just popping up wherever he goes and he finds himself involved, either as a suspect or some other type of collateral damage (for example, the first murder takes place in his office and also involves a robbery). The man just can't take a vacation.
The key difference between the gameplay in the main series and this spinoff is that instead of switching between screens and selecting items with the stylus, in Investigations you do a lot of actual walking around, either using the d-pad or the stylus. It makes each area less of an illustration and more an actual place that you inhabit. Certain items will zoom in for you, presenting you with the traditional illustration-type screen that you can then examine further.
It's a nice change, when you consider that the vast majority of the gameplay is pretty much the same as the main series. You look around for clues to add to your inventory, you talk to witnesses to gather more information, and at certain times you enter a courtroom mode where you basically get to interrogate a person and "press" further on their statements and "present" evidence to contradict them, losing life on a power bar if you make a mistake. If all you and I wanted was just another entry in the core series, this isn't too far off the mark.
The other main addition is the "Logic" system, where questions are compiled on a separate screen, which can then he linked to make deductions. When examining crime scenes, you can then "deduce" contradictions using the items in your inventory. I found this actually quite enjoyable, except that I often found myself jumping ahead two or three steps, knowing where certain lines of questioning and examination were going long before the evidence or witnesses were available. It's not as if the Ace Attorney games were ever unpredictable, but designing gameplay out of your ability to make these intuitive leaps and then not letting you do anything about it until the game scenario decides it's plot-appropriate is frustrating.
While this is a new feature, it's also old in that it's really not that different from the magatama in the Phoenix Wright games (starting with the second) or what Apollo Justice did with his bracelet. It's a way to endow a special talent onto the main character and spice up the gameplay.
With such little differences between this spinoff and the main series, questions about the main series start to arise. Where is Phoenix? What's he up to (according to the timeline, he hasn't been disbarred yet)? Where's Maya? Where's Pearl? Doesn't anyone have an actual job to do rather than standing around looking at dead bodies and grandfather clocks all day?
The more I thought about the main series of Ace Attorney the more the objective of the Investigations series started to seem a bit... silly. Each case involves Edgeworth desperate to prove a suspect's innocence so that they aren't carted off to jail for trial. As in, the trials that are the centerpiece of gameplay for the main series. It really takes the edge off when you realize that should you fail in proving their innocence, all it means is that they hire an ace attorney who tries to prove their innocence in three days by gathering evidence and pointing out contradictions in a court of law... in short, they get to play an Ace Attorney game, and you do not.
Basically, it's lovely to visit old friends, the in-jokes a references to past installments are a treat, and the plot is... typical Ace Attorney fare, where a series of loosely connected cases present a bigger picture that comes to a head in the final case. But in the end, I'm really glad they announced Gyakuten Saiban 5, because spinoffs can't and shouldn't move the series forward.
So I was excited when I heard about Gyakuten Kenji, which some fans were calling it (at the time), "Miles Edgeworth: Perfect Prosecutor." It seemed like such a "perfect" name at the time, except that it doesn't brand the game very well, and as I've learned from playing the game, you don't do very much prosecuting.
Hence the English title, Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth. Edgeworth isn't an attorney, and I suppose they thought it would be odd to have a game where your objective was to lock people up instead of setting them free, so instead we have a game where all the action takes place outside a courtroom. So Edgeworth is still a prosecutor, yet the game can still maintain the series core tenet of defending the innocent from the injustices of the legal system. He becomes some sort of Jessica Fletcher here, where dead bodies are just popping up wherever he goes and he finds himself involved, either as a suspect or some other type of collateral damage (for example, the first murder takes place in his office and also involves a robbery). The man just can't take a vacation.
The key difference between the gameplay in the main series and this spinoff is that instead of switching between screens and selecting items with the stylus, in Investigations you do a lot of actual walking around, either using the d-pad or the stylus. It makes each area less of an illustration and more an actual place that you inhabit. Certain items will zoom in for you, presenting you with the traditional illustration-type screen that you can then examine further.
It's a nice change, when you consider that the vast majority of the gameplay is pretty much the same as the main series. You look around for clues to add to your inventory, you talk to witnesses to gather more information, and at certain times you enter a courtroom mode where you basically get to interrogate a person and "press" further on their statements and "present" evidence to contradict them, losing life on a power bar if you make a mistake. If all you and I wanted was just another entry in the core series, this isn't too far off the mark.
The other main addition is the "Logic" system, where questions are compiled on a separate screen, which can then he linked to make deductions. When examining crime scenes, you can then "deduce" contradictions using the items in your inventory. I found this actually quite enjoyable, except that I often found myself jumping ahead two or three steps, knowing where certain lines of questioning and examination were going long before the evidence or witnesses were available. It's not as if the Ace Attorney games were ever unpredictable, but designing gameplay out of your ability to make these intuitive leaps and then not letting you do anything about it until the game scenario decides it's plot-appropriate is frustrating.
While this is a new feature, it's also old in that it's really not that different from the magatama in the Phoenix Wright games (starting with the second) or what Apollo Justice did with his bracelet. It's a way to endow a special talent onto the main character and spice up the gameplay.
With such little differences between this spinoff and the main series, questions about the main series start to arise. Where is Phoenix? What's he up to (according to the timeline, he hasn't been disbarred yet)? Where's Maya? Where's Pearl? Doesn't anyone have an actual job to do rather than standing around looking at dead bodies and grandfather clocks all day?
The more I thought about the main series of Ace Attorney the more the objective of the Investigations series started to seem a bit... silly. Each case involves Edgeworth desperate to prove a suspect's innocence so that they aren't carted off to jail for trial. As in, the trials that are the centerpiece of gameplay for the main series. It really takes the edge off when you realize that should you fail in proving their innocence, all it means is that they hire an ace attorney who tries to prove their innocence in three days by gathering evidence and pointing out contradictions in a court of law... in short, they get to play an Ace Attorney game, and you do not.
Basically, it's lovely to visit old friends, the in-jokes a references to past installments are a treat, and the plot is... typical Ace Attorney fare, where a series of loosely connected cases present a bigger picture that comes to a head in the final case. But in the end, I'm really glad they announced Gyakuten Saiban 5, because spinoffs can't and shouldn't move the series forward.