Nina Aquila: Legal Eagle, Season One

What a delightful little experience. This game has heart, which is more than I can say for quite a few of the Ace Attorney installments, and humor. For those of us who remember the early days of Final Fantasy and other chibi-based representations in serious games, this is a clean, well done homage. I know that may be unfamiliar to Modern gamers, but this was once how we treated almost all of our more serious titles, in particular those coming from Japan in translation. The responsibility was on the player to imagine the depth of characterization and emotion, but the animations in this game are evocative and believable. The background parser is extremely fleshed out, meaning that when you click on objects in the environment you receive a response. Back in the day you sometimes had to guess where to click, and that's not true here. I didn't encounter any bugs or issues, and at no time was it unclear where to go next. One of the achievements requires a lot of guesswork, but there's a guide if you can't hack it. There's no complexity here, no ability to put the game in an unwinnable state, and for some Modern players that's too facile. But for me that's quite all right. Not every game has to be a challenge against the developers worst nightmares. If you like humor and courtroom drama, absolutely pay full price for this game. For an independent studio, this is an extremely polished and well done game. It doesn't break through any new barriers or advance gaming into some new era. But it's worth every penny.

Я випав коли мені почали цитувати копіпасту про 300 кілів

整体来看还是挺不错的，不过拿汉化软件翻译后，名字框有点挡正文

gg

Fun and feel-good game to run through on a few evenings, with enjoyable gameplay!

definitely worth your cash, 10/10

It's short, about 6.7 hours playtime, but man this really was pleasantly surprising. If you like Ace Attorney Style games then this one won't disappoint. It has good plot hooks, characters and has some good fun with each case introducing it's own thing in the form of a mini-game. I'd say it's worth it.

A game with a lot of heart that's really hard to put down. Not to be missed for those hungry for some tense courtroom battles. I am thoroughly impressed!

I played the itch version of this, so my Steam playtime is a red herring. Talking about red herrings, there are many delightful ones in this game — which really gave me everything I wanted from Ace Attorney and then some. Please play this if you like mystery games, adventure games, anime games or any combination of those genres!

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]