Nina Aquila: Legal Eagle, Season One

It's only three cases, but they are well made cases. (I don't like the answer to case 2 because it's so out of left field I honestly couldn't believe it, but I will accept it.) It may not have the best music or visuals, but both are good enough if you care about story and gameplay the most. If I have to say what makes this game work above all us, it's the main character. Nina is written in such a way that she really comes off as a lawyer who went to law school. That might sound weird, but there are times when she talks to her clients that it feels like she is trying to help them beyond just getting them free of all charges. It doesn't last long, but it makes her feel more self-aware of what she can do. Would recommend and I hope the next game comes soon.

Going into this as a fan of the Ace Attorney series, I wasn't sure how well it would convert to an RPGMaker format... I was left genuinely surprised by just how charming this game was. Despite the game having only three cases with the first one acting as a tutorial, I had a ton of fun with all three. I can't wait to get into the fourth chapter and recently announced fifth when it releases.

This is a review for the entire series so far (Chapters 1-4) Nina Aquila does a great job at capturing the spirit of Ace-Attorney-like games, ranging from its extremly silly humor over the colorful characters all the way to the core of its case-solving. An especially charming touch is the fact that each chapter (barring the first one, which is a brief tutorial) is inpired by and pokes fun at a specific genre of anime/manga and blends that with the detective and attorney work. One thing I prefer over the AA titles is that you generally have way more evidence than you need to solve the cases/respond to the testimonies. While in AA there often is a sense of "ah, guess it's finally time to use THAT piece of evidence" by process of elimination, in Nina Aquila you gotta think a bit about what is useful and what is superfluous evidence (Although the amount of evidence reversly makes it sometimes a bit annoying to scroll through all of it). I am also intrigued by the games' overarching plot that is being revealed piece by piece and will hopefully be brought to its conclusion soon. I want to mention some things I didn't like so we go into mild spoiler territory from now on: - Every chapter has a gameplay gimmick tied to the genre the respective chapter is dealing with, i.e. there's a turn-based card battling minigame, a rock-paper-scissors car-racing mini-game and a final-fight-esque beat-em-up minigame. While they are competently implemented and a neat little distraction on paper, they were sadly neither fun nor challenging to me, but I appreciate the effort. There's a "Challenge" and a "Story" option for these, and since there are no achievements linked to these minigames, I personally recommend going with the Story option (or try it out and find out for yourself of course) - as with all fiction, you have to suspend your disbelief at certain points to some extend; in chapter 4 there are two particularly egregious examples where I was a bit flabbergasted (again, mild spoilers) and I can imagine that they can ruin the enjoyment of that case in particular a bit for some people; 1. one is the fact that the victim is allegedly 100% incinerated by some special device, as in, there are absolutely no remains whatsoever; and even if you buy that, nobody mentions anything about the horrid smell that (I personally assume) must be created by such an action; but not only does nobody in the game think that burning up a human person whole-sale would create a horrid smell, there's an entirely separate piece of smell-related evidence that makes it even weirder, that nobody is confused by the lack of burned of flesh and hair smell; 2. The other I cannot go into detail really, because even naming the piece of evidence and the fact that there is something obviously weird with it, will spoil the reveal which comes pretty late into the chapter; suffice it to say, you find a piece of evidence that the game tells you is one thing, and I IMMEDIATELY though "oh, hopefully this [ITEM] is not revealed to be a [DIFFERENT BUT SIMILAR ITEM], because that's NOT what a [DIFFERENT BUT SIMILAR ITEMS] looks like" and yeah, one of the big reveals at the end is just that, which felt kind of me ANYWAY: I still highly recommend these games to anyone who likes Ace Attorney. Looking forward to Chapter 5

Really fun. If you like Phoenix Wright style games, you'll likely enjoy this game. I didn't love the racing mini game in game 3, but the game allows it to autoplay which is great to have the option. Even though the full game took me 10 hours, it felt longer (in a good way). I think it's well worth the $9, and I'm excited for the next chapter.

Dopo anni il gioco usa ancora troppi sprite e musiche stock (addirittura ha solo 3 cg). Il secondo caso ha una risoluzione parecchio insoddisfacente.

[h1] A fun, lightweight legal sim with a bit of a minigame problem. [/h1] Set in an alternate United States where catgirls are real, where everyone uses proper British English spelling in their dialogue*, and where the courts have adopted the leading brand's three-day-trial system, the titular Nina Aquila is a fledgling lawyer suddenly thrown out of the proverbial nest, forced to brave anime conventions, children's card games, Eurobeat-heavy street racing, and recycled RPG Maker NPCs in her pursuit of justice for a cast of quirky and presumably-innocent clients. It's decidedly less grounded than the already-absurd leading competition, and at 8-12 hours long (depending on your reading speed and your penchant for poking around) it's an entertaining way to kill a weekend or two without eating up all of your free time. *[i]This mostly refers to spelling things with 'ou' rather than 'o' and other such differences, not any overtly British slang or turns of phrase; the dev is UK-based, and Nina at least has the excuse of being Canadian, even if the rest of the cast doesn't.[/i] While RPG Maker might seem like an unusual engine for a lawyering game, it actually works pretty well in practice, and gameplay consists of pretty much everything you'd expect of the genre. Outside of court, you visit the crime scene, detention center, and other places of interest, looking for clues and interviewing persons of interest, although there are also some minigames to play during each case's investigations - more on that later. During the trial, you'll be listening to witness testimony, occasionally interjecting to press for more details or present contradictory evidence - and yes, the requisite voice lines are included, even though the game lacks voice acting for anything else. Trial sequences are very short in this game compared to the competition, with most days in court only having a few sets of testimony to deal with, and with most of your evidence being for your own review rather than for presentation in court. Players looking for a meatier trial experience may be disappointed, but on the other hand I can think of a couple of AA cases that got way too bogged down in their own details to the point where you just wanted to present the obvious bit of evidence and move on - that's not really an issue here. The only thing I'd really add is fast-travel to avoid running around the city map to known locations, but while such a thing is generally easy enough to add in RPG Maker, it'd probably take some work here to do without accidentally breaking the script. The characters and writing are also charming, if not without flaws. Very few characters are completely one-dimensional, although some of them could stand to get a bit more fleshing out, and the game recycles its own joke about recycling NPCs one time too many. The writing handles serious situations just as easily as it highlights ridiculous ones - and believe me, there are ridiculous ones. Character development can be sparse, but focus is given to Nina's slow, sometimes awkward attempts to come into her own. While the general cases are self-contained, the narrative makes it clear early on that there's something sinister lurking in the shadows, although it's not really clear how many episodes it might take before that comes fully into the spotlight. The game also takes a lot of inspiration from some popular anime and anime tropes, and while there's always an after-episode skit breaking down the major references and inspirations, I do wonder if some of the slang or less subtle references might weigh against players who aren't already in on the joke. My only real complaint is how some of the investigations' minigames are implemented, both mechanically and narratively. In a general sense, the second and third cases revolve around characters who are experts at a competitive <Thing>, either as clients, witnesses, or victims. Other experts at <Thing> are reluctant to talk to Nina about the case, both due to their own potential involvement and Nina's outsider status. Thus Nina takes up <Thing>, which becomes the minigame for the chapter as Nina works her way up the ladder, eventually going toe-to-toe with the experts. From a mechanical standpoint this is fine for the first few runs, but when it turns into ~3-5 minutes per game and it needs to be done 8-10 times a chapter, it starts to feel a bit like padding, even when you can turn on an auto-win setting. It's also kind of cheap from a narrative standpoint to see Nina go from a complete nobody to a master of whatever she sets her mind to over the course of less than a week, especially given her general character arc. I do enjoy that the dev is doing more than just the basics of the genre, and I look forward to what the next chapter has in store, I just can't claim to be a big fan of how these particular games were implemented. Overall I found the game to be very enjoyable despite my gripes, and while it may not have the depth or runtime of a name-brand attorney sim, it doesn't have the price tag of one, either - even at full price you can at least get an hour per dollar, and much more when it's on sale. And if you have money to throw at big-name ports and remasters, certainly you can spare a few bucks to help an indie dev making something new, right?

This review covers through chapter 3, which is all that has been released at this time. I liked this game a lot! The Ace Attorney style gameplay is on point, and the stories are interesting and twisty, and are generally well-paced (except for a couple mini-game segments, I'll get to those shortly). One aspect I appreciate a lot is how this game treats the legal system a little more realistically than the AA series. There's still the arbitrary 3-day rule for cases to be settled, but a lot of the interactions in the courtroom are actually based in some sense of reality (e.g. objecting to leading questions, use of character witnesses). The main prosecutor is also neither evil nor a buffoon, which is a refreshing change of pace. My main gripe is the mini-games. I'll get into more spoiler-lite description below, but the short version is I thought the first mini game was kind of whatever, and the second was pretty bad. They both serve to drag out the play time in ways I didn't find that interesting. I'm not opposed to mini-games in general, I think they could be a fun way to break things up and engage the player, and I'm glad they give you a few different ways to "opt-out" of the games, but it's not great if your players are opting out of the games because they're bad. [spoiler] The chapter 2 card game was the more interesting one, but ultimately every single match devolved into passing until waiting for the opponent to play a monster, then playing the counter-element monster. The special abilities were almost useless. Still, it was kinda fun, and I do feel like my patience was rewarded, so in that sense I did get to "feel smart." [/spoiler] [spoiler] The chapter 3 racing game, in contrast, had almost nothing worthwhile, gameplay-wise. Narratively it was totally cool, a nice parallel to Nina's growth as an attorney and also a core part of the mystery. The rock-paper-scissors gameplay was pretty boring, though. Once again, most of the powers you pick up don't matter (just the Press ability, imo). I'm not 100% sure about this, but I think the instructions given to you in the tutorial race are just...wrong? Like, it says rage beats belief, belief beats technique, and technique beats rages, but I don't think it actually works that way. I'm normally a completionist sort of gamer, even when there's no reward or achievement involved, so at first I was determined to play out all the races myself, but by the third day of the case I was totally sick of the gimmick and just auto-raced every time. [/spoiler]