The original trilogy are some of the best games I’ve ever played, no cap.
But you know, I think I realized something as I slogged through 1-2 yesterday (Adventure of the Unbreakable Speckled Band). Part of the enjoyment for me (an enjoyment that extended to Investigations and Apollo Justice) was getting to play it sitting on my sofa, or in bed with the lights off. Having the DS in my hands gave the game a very different feeling from sitting at my desk after a long day of telecommuting. The latter sort of made the game feel like work.
Some of this is to blame on 1-2, which is all investigation, no trial (trials are the best part of AA, don’t @ me). Eventually I was worried I’d get carpal tunnel and turned on autoscroll, and the game dragged me through such a long linear dialogue tree (stick?) that my monitor turned off. I’m not talking about cutscenes, I talking about the portion of the game that is ostensibly gameplay.
And listen, I’m not complaining that *AA *is too much a visual novel. Two of the best games I’ve ever played, and my favorites, are Suzerain and Disco Elysium. I don’t demand visual flair from my hyperlink fiction. But where GAA differs from, say, Batman is Screaming, is that the latter lets you engage at your own pace. Suzerain and DE both let you do that. All good visual novels should, unless they are insisting upon fully taking control from you, like in a cutscene.
With GAA we lose the snappiness of the sprites in the original trilogy. Even if you click through dialogue so that you don’t have to watch each letter type into the text box, there’s still this weird… lag, I guess. It hangs for half a second before you try to click through to the next, and I blame this on the animations of the 3D models. GAA looks good, there’s no doubt about that–but I also don’t know that it looks significantly better than the wicked sprite work in AA. And if they look roughly the same in terms of quality, then the only remaining factor is how they complement the experience.
GAA never lets you feel breathless in the way that AA’s snappier spritework and more responsive skip button did. It has the same issues of worn-down shoe leather as AA, but AA at least made it easy enough to speed through the parts where Phoenix looks at the murder weapon and goes “This looks familiar, but I can’t quite put my finger on why…” and you go “Because it’s the murder weapon” and your supporting character goes “Hey Phoenix, doesn’t this remind you of something? Go into the court record and see if there’s any E V I D E N C E to jog your memory.”
I don’t know, I might have to see if I can get it to play on my laptop. If I’m curled up under a blanket with a cup of coffee I might enjoy it more.
It’s odd. Ace Attorney has always been a series that I’ve kind of loved in spite of itself. I’m generally not a fan of cartoonishness, the puns don’t land for me, and the highly shonen tone has often created a bit of a dissonance with what’s actually going on in the plot (putting aside the fact that I’m not a fan of shonen in general). Thus far (maybe five or six hours in), I have felt that GAA insists on itself in a way that AA did not. Herlock’s dance of deduction is cute but I loathe the fact that it has to play out in exhaustive entirety before you can even begin to amend it, and that before you can amend it Ryusuke has to stop and check in with Susato so she can remind him that she thinks Herlock is a great detective, but maybe he needs to tweak it here and there. Yes, as I said, it is a game that too often insists on itself.
Not to get too off topic, but should I play Aviary Attorney? I’m very intrigued but I’ve heard that it has hard-lock lose states in a way that AA doesn’t.