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Review of Gyakuten Saiban 4

SubjectGyakuten Saiban 4
ByHelpfulness: 3
Vote: 4
scipe on 2020-11-27
ReviewAh, Apollo Justice Ace Attorney. The beautiful failure.

There's a lot to admire about this game from the get-go. We live in a society(tm) full of series and franchises that just don't seem to know when to die, milking their fans for all they're worth. This isn't some cynical cashgrab, though. You can tell from the outset that Takumi didn't want to make "another Ace Attorney game"; he wanted to make something *new*. Phoenix's story is over; he's not in the games title or boxart anymore. Meet the new guy for a new game: Apollo Justice himself.

But the problems with this game are kind of foreshadowed by its title character. Because, while they've certainly shifted the paradigm and given us a new lawyer to control... why? What is unique about Apollo that makes the experience of playing him different? I honestly couldn't tell you.

AJ, for all I could (and will) say about it, had ambition. It wanted to be a darker game, set far later than the previous installments, when our former protagonist had fallen from grace. A world where the law is in a shaky place. It feels like a passion project, which is why it pains me to say that I don't think this passion was poured into something very good.

Apollo Justice contains the fundamentals of what makes up an Ace Attorney game. You present evidence, solve mysteries, talk to quirky characters. But there's very little I can praise beyond this skeleton.

Those quirky characters don't feel nearly as quirky, for one. AJ is probably the game in the series with which I find the least to laugh at. It's probably attributable in part to the tone the game is going for: it's a bleak world. No room for the Wendy Oldbags of the past. If I were to list the characters I thought were intended to be funny, almost all of them would come from the second case, where they seemingly tried to cram a whole games worth of wackiness into to make up for the rest of the game.

But this is the tradeoff the game chose, I suppose. The exchange was for a darker tone. So was this worth it? I don't really think so.

Now, to be fair, this game isn't without its merits. I like the more muted aesthetic, in terms of both visuals and music, that the game goes for. I like the new take on Phoenix, as a man past his prime. There's something really cool about seeing such an iconic old character in a completely different context, as a scruffy shady gambler and adoptive father. Ema Skye, similarly, is fantastic in this reappearance, and maybe even the best in the game, using the lengthy timeskip to a greater effect than anything else. And there are some individual minor characters I find fun, like the Kitaki clan or Vera Misham. But the game reaches for the stars with grand ambitions about Saying Something About The Law, and crashes straight into the ground.

The legal system is broken. That's the point AJ is trying to sell us on, for the payoff and conclusion to this fact in the climax. But the only thing that seems to hint at this is that Phoenix keeps telling us it is.

Part of the problem is that the legal system has *always* been broken. AA1 already shows that the system is ridiculously biased towards the prosecution, and the other two games show the problems within the law in their own ways. Apollo Justice stepping in and going "it's seven years later and the law is IN SHAMBLES" doesn't really work when they add very little beyond these established facts.

And especially when they walk back on these facts.

Klavier Gavin is the main prosecutor of this game, and his existence is just such a stupid idea. The game is about how grim things are and how we're in a new world where there's no more righteous Phoenix around. So why they thought it was a good idea *now* to introduce a "nice guy" prosecutor who literally does nothing shady or immoral, and doesn't even seem invested in succeeding, is beyond me. Even beyond the tonal dissonance, it's just not a particularly fun time to have your main rival be someone who barely opposes you. I wouldn't enjoy a platformer where the enemies all ran away. Klavier is a static character who is primarily defined as being a Good Guy, rather than the corrupt foes of the past. But in a baffling move, the game randomly tries to pretend he isn't static. Klavier has moments like the one where, when going up against his brother, he expresses doubt and conflict, only to reassure us two seconds later that he actually wasn't conflicted and he doesn't truly have any depth. To avoid the risk of turning this into a tedious rant on Klavier Gavin, I guess I'll move on.

The other way that the game walks back on what was established is by seemingly providing the opposite message. In Ace Attorney, you play as a defense attorney because that makes you the underdog in this world. It always feels like your clients are just one slip-up away from being pronounced guilty, and the system seems to be way too triggerhappy with false convictions. And yet, in the climax of Apollo Justice, the message conveyed seems to be "Man, doesn't it just SUCK that it's so HARD to convict people for crimes?". Phoenix invents an entirely new type of trial specifically to get over that pesky fact where you need evidence to convict someone of a crime.

Even ignoring the blatant contradiction of the first three games, AJ itself doesn't do a very good job proving that this is necessary. All of the killers are caught just fine. The third case appears to be the place where they were trying to set this up, but the third case is also an incoherent mess where the killer is taken down by incredibly mundane means that don't expose any sort of problem in the legal system at all.

Perhaps the best man to exemplify Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney as a whole is Kristoph Gavin. Kristoph starts out strong, with a major plot twist already happening in the first case and a fun personality to go up against. His only real issue is that he's mostly taken down by Phoenix, with the protagonist having very little agency. You'd think this would be to show that Apollo is still a rookie, but the final case involves just as much of your mentor doing almost all of the work. Kristoph's role in the final cases trial is to show up, claim he's not guilty, and then be told that the entire system has been constructed such that he'll be found guilty. Then scream. It's a pitiful final confrontation that doesn't compare in the slightest to the heights of the series, and the other confrontations aren't even much better.

Apollo Justice wanted to be different from what came before. But in what feels like an accident, it ended up losing a lot of what made the series great. Its experiments were... hit or miss. It's a game that tried so hard, and got so far, but in the end, it didn't even matter.

There's other things I could complain about, like the endless list of plotholes, the magician plotline that has so much time spent on it yet ultimately leads nowhere, the fact that the final villain is literally already waiting on a death sentence, making the need to take him down feel pretty non-urgent, or Trucy Wright, who, despite being a main character, I have gone over the entire game without mentioning her once, which probably says enough on its own.

I'm glad Takumi wasn't bogged down too much by the editors or studio higher-ups and was able to make the unique game he wanted. But unfortunately, I didn't like that game.
3 points