The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures

released on Jul 09, 2015
by Capcom

The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures is the ninth installment of the Ace Attorney series of text adventure video games. New gameplay mechanics introduced to the series include Dance of Deduction, in which Ryunosuke must deduce mistakes and oversights in Herlock's overboard logic and uncover new facts, and Summation Examination, in which players must point out discrepancies among jurors' arguments to make their defendant’s case and ultimately secure a "Not Guilty" verdict.


Reviews View More

This review contains spoilers

I love the atmosphere and the setting, I love the characters, and I love the setup this game has for the next game. I can tell that its cooking up something awesome for the sequel. But, holy crap the pacing and amount of exposition in this game is too much. The game is extremely long and padded out for an ace attorney game.

Es el juego más experimental de la franquicia con diferencia, desde su ambientación hasta sus mecánicas pasando por la estructura de sus casos. Esto se lleva hasta la última consecuencia con el hecho de que deja muchos cabos sueltos de forma explícita de cara a la secuela, cosa que por un lado deja a esta entrega un poco más coja pero que también aumenta el hype por la siguiente.

En cualquier caso, los puntos más fuertes de la saga permanecen: casos interesantes, personajes encantadores, momentos de pura emoción, mucho humor y una banda sonora exquisita.

A nivel jugable los elementos más destacables son las deducciones de Herlock Sholmes (divertidísimas, como todo lo que rodea al personaje) y la presencia del jurado en los juicios (que llega a dar un juego tremendo de las formas más insospechadas).

Mencionar, por último, que ni el setting victoriano ni la presencia del lore de la obra de Conan Doyle son, en absoluto, elementos puramente cosméticos; sino que se integran perfectamente con los temas de la historia y hacen la experiencia muy inmersiva.

very charming game that captures a lot of the magic that ace attorney 1 had. it was refreshing to enter this new world with endearing main characters that felt fleshed out and distinct from other ace attorney offerings. far and away one of the game's strongest features is its animations being a lot crisper and detailed, due to being mo-cap'd. even minor characters had little animations that i found a joy to watch.

biggest flaw with the game, for me, is the unevenness of the narrative. the pacing is very peculiar, with a third case that feels like it belongs in the fourth case's slot due to how heavily referenced it is by the fifth case. and the cast is either incredibly endearing or absolutely repugnant with basically no middleground. i love characters like susato, gina, and even sholmes, but cannot stand characters like von zieks and gregson. also, it seems like this game has a pretty heavy recurring element of racism that doesn't ever get really touched upon in a meaningful way, which is an odd choice imo. it's definitely what i would expect from 1800s britain, but it's just weird to have sooooo many microaggressions (as well as the occasional outright "i hate the japanese" esque comment) and not really make a point of having naruhodo or susato react to them in meaningful ways. in many ways, this is the most divisive cast because the great characters are stellar, while the awful characters are series lowlights.

i'm very interested to see what tgaa2 does considering how heavily this game leans into being a duology. there were a lot of unanswered questions and dangling threads i didn't expect to remain unresolved by the game's conclusion, so i'm hoping that extending them into another game means the payoff will be even better. i've heard a lot of good things in passing about tgaa2, so it'll be hard to not have high expectations. if nothing else, i was pleasantly surprised that this concept that i had next to no interest in was able to deliver a charming experience.

It really was a the great ace attorney adventures

As someone who has only played the very first Ace Attorney game before, this kind of blew me away. The presentation is so fantastic, the music is absolutely amazing and while I usually prefer 2D sprites to 3D models in games like these, the 3D models were so expressive and full of life! Very cool. The story in this engaged me with its longer sort of storytelling rather than in AA1 where the stories were (mostly) contained to their episodic formats. And while TGAA was plenty serious and dramatic, it was also funny and delightful. The game has a few issues for me, mostly contained to ch.4, but on the whole I had a very cozy and fun experience with this. Chapter 3 is a masterpiece, do not @ me it just is.

This gets 4 stars because I can't give it 4¼. But just imagine it's somewhere between 4 and 4½ stars.
EDIT: Okay it's been a couple of days and i am listening to the OST constantly and can't stop thinking about this game and the few problems I had with it feels like barely anything in comparison to how much I enjoyed it, so congrats TGAA1 here are your 4½ stars