Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy

While I do recommend these games to anyone that liked the original triolgy purely for the sake of having played the games and completed the series, this trilogy is deeply flawed. The characters are more cartoonish and often come off as being imitations of the origina cast, instead of being their own geniune product. The relationships between the characters feel cheap as well, often being one-dimensional or non-existant. This is present among the main cast to a degree, but it's especially bad among the side characters, who are just obnoxious; there are few witnesses or one-ofs that are actually endearing or relatable in any way, and they seem to be formulaically tropey at times. They feel like cardboard cutouts glued to the floor that you slap until you can move on, rather than actual humans that you interact with in any sort of genuine fashion. This is largely prevalent in the first two games (as those games are simply weaker than SoJ on the whole); I don't think there were more than 2 or 3 side characters I actually liked seeing on-screen in those games. In terms of the main cast, boy oh boy do these characters take a year and a half to get out of bed — Apollo and Athena are mediocre enough stand-ins, but it's just offensive that their respective arcs only really get started until some of the penultimate cases of these games. Up until then, you control this flesh bag that says the funny objection line every once in a while, but mostly remains static until the final case, where their entire life story is explained and promptly resolved, as if the entire game leading up to that just didn't happen. In terms of the overarching story of each respective game (w/o spoilers), the less said the better. Most cases end up feeling like filler, as they do little to either develop the characters or challenge the player's assumptions about them, and they almost never contribute to the forwards momentum of the general premise, which itself is often both too vague and repeated too often to hold any meaning. The issue of the discontinuity between AJ and PW:AA and the absolute black hole that many of the original characters and plot threads seem to fall into is just too great in scope for a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ review like this, so I won't discuss that. The games themselves are also much slower than the original trilogy; all sorts of minigames are thrown into the mix in order to add flavour to the trials, which are filled with pretentious expository dialogue and the endless shenanagins of unlikable nobodies you're just forced to sit through. Of course, these minigames are also a total ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sham, and either have poor controls due to the sloppiness of this PC port, are overly simplistic, or require absolutely no thinking whatsoever. It's often the case that all three things are happening to you at the same time, making for triple the fun. The logic in these games is also just so piss poor; more than ever you rely on miracle deus ex machinas, and the MCs will just openly admit that they have no clue what they're doing, but that "they have to object because justice", as if that makes the partial abscence of logic puzzles in a game designed around logic puzzles acceptable. Pheonix didn't always know what he was doing in the original trilogy, and he needed to have his ass saved a whole lot, but he just as frequently seemed to have reached conclusions that the player didn't, granting a real sense of legitimacy to his character. Tangent aside, the only gameplay improvement made is the ability to move to any location without having to go through all 50 other locations in the level first, which speeds up investigation sections if you happen to miss something or get confused. On the art style and music, it's all personal preference at the end of the day, but the 3D models in DD and SoJ, and the few 3D sequences in AJ can often look undeniably cheap. Like, there is no shot that someone in an office that was getting paid a salary saw these things and went "yes this is acceptable we should share this with the world". Most infamously, you have to watch this one horribly rendered 3D cutscene of a concert like 4 times in 5 minutes in one trial, and it's just simply sickening. My biggest disappointment is that if you go into the museum, they have the 2D concept art for basically every character, and they look really good — comparable or exceeding the quality of many sprites from the original trilogy. Obviously, what probably happened is that they made these drawings and then Capcom said "no its the 2010s lets make 3D stuff because thats popular right now this is a good idea" and so ♥♥♥♥ fell through and now we have this .... which is not that great to be frank. The music is a mixed bag; some songs are pretty great, but some are just loud or overly peppy for no reason, or straight up unappealing to the ear. The only thing in the original trilogy that came close to irritating me as much as some of these tracks was Meekins' stupid air horn, but even that was fairly limited; you cannot escape from some of these theme songs, and it gets pretty obnoxious. For all the complaining posted above, these games aren't horrible perse, but feel like products with massive resevoirs of lost potential, which is blatant from the times that these games do actually work, especially in SoJ; (almost) every non-introductory trial in the game is actually pretty good, and the story is generally cohesive in a satisfying way, despite being fairly pretentious and a little long for my taste. In the other two games however, all that's to be said is that anything good to be found is likely a watered down, adapted version of something that came from the original, and most new content/characters/plot threads are likely to look and feel sloppy. Because it is sloppy, at least in comparaison to the original. As said in the beginning though, if you understand that this product isn't going to measure up to the original trilogy in any meaningful way until it's basically already over, it's not the worst idea to pick this up on sale for the sake of it.