It’s very weird to see a series that has until now had such a small, tight team with a very clear authorial voice jump in prestige so that we’re now several rereleases out and firmly in the realm of originally unintended sequels and spinoffs. I didn’t realize that Apollo Justice actually preceded this game in release or I WOULD have played that one first and even now that I’ve committed to cleaving the series in half by trilogy with this little stop off in Investigation town in between. my brain is beginning to itch a bit. But it’s a neat exercise to get such a hard break in style from the original games and this one, which sees Takeshi Yamazaki (who came onto the series during the DS rerelease period and seemed like mostly an odd job guy before getting a planning gig on Apollo Justice) as the scenario writer, working closely with relative series newcomer Motohide Eshiro in the producer role to innovate the gameplay quirks that define this subseries. The fresh writing alone gives the game a very distinct vibe from its predecessors for better and worse.

The shift towards investigating with the intent to prosecute crimes places a greater focus on the methodology of the acts you’re looking into, and cases are generally speaking really complex in this game, and less structured, which I think is good. Investigations are more dynamic to begin with just by virtue of moving a little guy around a usually pretty limited screen, which drastically reduces pixel hunting – but they also only go as long as they need to because you’re not inhibited by the two-or-three day long trial system. It leads to a more natural progression. Edgeworth’s special logic minigame where he pieces together little bits of information in his mind as he collects them is unfortunately simple the whole time but it doesn’t ever stop being satisfying in the way that getting an answer right in these games almost always is. That’s the saving grace of the game – the act of playing Ace Attorney simply feels good.

The grace needs to be saved because the PACING is completely dreadful the entire time. There’s no punch, no drama to any of the cases here. Not even one time do you nail a villain at the end of a chapter with a big drop of a huge reveal or a satisfying click of a puzzle piece coming together. More than once I was caught off guard when I finished a case because I didn’t realize that the small, mundane piece of information I’d just revealed was going to be the clincher. This is at its worst in the final case, which might be the longest finale in the series, or maybe it only FEELS like it is, because it is so deeply tied to the previous case and it completely solved all of the emotional arcs of every major character roughly two hours before the game ends. Yeah you wrap up your spunky teenaged sidekick’s traumatic backstory, you earn the respect and friendship of the interpol detective who hates prosecutors, you solve the decade-old mystery of the phantom thief that’s haunted the game.

But what’s this? You have to catch the guy who runs the smuggling ring! Who killed….some guy! And it’s SO easy. Not once in this sequence did I find myself unable to immediately guess the correct answer to a riddle fifteen minutes before I was allowed to present it, and we are CONSTANTLY being interrupted by new characters storming into the room not to save the day but to do comedy bits. It doesn’t really spoil the mood though because there’s NOT really a mood to spoil because like I’ve mentioned nobody really cares at this point beyond the basic principle of not liking asshole murderers getting away with it!

On the subject of Too Many Characters, this is a place where the game strikes me as particularly insecure. This game is a nonstop parade of guys I Did Not Need To See Again. Why is Maggie Byrde making her third appearance? Why is Officer Meeks here for one scene? How do we, as a polite society, keep letting Wendy Oldbag have bigger and bigger roles in these games even though she continues to have One Joke and it Sucks Ass??? It’s tough because it sucks in both directions. On one hand, everybody involved in this series (including Shu Takumi, he is not innocent here) should be tried in a criminal court for the character assassination of Larry Butz, who in the first game was a kind of mean and stupid guy who is unlucky in love but ultimately has a heart of gold and is a key person in the lives of both of his friends and over time has become a moronic creep who will try to fuck any child he meets and doesn’t understand most of the things that come out of his own mouth. On the other hand I would love to spend more time with Ema Skye, I would love to check in with her, see what she’s up to, hear all about what she’s got going on. There’s a lot of potential for that character, especially free from the shadow of her big story in the re-release of Ace Attorney 1. Why is she only in one screen of the entire game?? If she’s gonna be here she should be here. It feels weird and desperate, like they’re scared I won’t like the game if they don’t constantly jangle keys in the shape of guys I remember in front of my face.

It’s a shame too because I do think the original characters are the actual best part of the game. I like Ema but I think in her original appearance she’s way too much of a Maya clone, distinguished mostly by having a Different Gimmick rather than a different personality. Kay Faraday is a completely different genre of spunky teen sidekick than either of the previous girls, and I find her endlessly funny and charming. Aggressively weird and goofy and cool and with a very fun gimmick that she clings to based on a series of genuinely affecting tragedies. Everyone in her orbit rocks too, Callisto Yew and Detective Badd both hall of fame Ace Attorney guys. Lang’s drama is not convincing to me but his connection to Shih-na is and his reactions to how their relationship evolves salvage him for me, and his affection for his subordinates is by far the funniest joke in the entire series. The original stuff here is consistently the best shit in the game. I wish it felt like they knew that.

For the first game that as far as I know had zero involvement from the series creator, it’s really interesting to see how it feels the same and how it feels different, and where it’s successful and where it’s not. I think the flaws are desperately glaring, and they are unfortunately mostly play-related, but the moment-to-moment act of Doing Ace Attorney is maybe the best it’s ever been. I just wish it was remotely as impactful as it ever had been in the past.

what can i say i love this idiot man.

this game has literally the best characters and dynamics for me. i love gummy kay and franziska so much!!!!

the narrative is surprisingly pretty solid for a spin-off and i have to say i had more fun with the "only investigation" gameplay bc it's the part i love the most in ace attorney games. sometimes the "logic" is pretty obvious but it's perfect for dumb people like me lol. i had so much fun with it,, i intend to play the second game.

It's got good moments and Edgeworth is as enjoyable as ever in the protagonist seat, but the pacing in this game is terrible. The whole "solving crimes in the field" thing is a great concept, but it just doesn't work well when every case stalls forever with drawn out arguments built around "no decisive evidence" even when in reality most legal systems can and have convicted off of much less circumstantial evidence than the mountain of it you have in each case of this game.

This game's text speed would also be abysmal in any game, let alone an actual visual novel. That alone kills a lot of my excitement.

Were I to make to give this review a sensationalistic title, I might go with something like "Better than Phoenix Wright?", or "The best DS games that no one has played!".
Admittedly, I played this game a hot minute ago. The reason I feel qualified to review it, is just that I was honestly born and raised on Ace Attorney. I played through the original trilogy when I was a young lad, and I confess there was very few times when I wasn't consulting a walkthrough.

After playing through most of the Ace Attorney games (except Spirit of Justice, which I gotta get to), those sensationalistic ideas I suggested at the beginning are some things I honestly somewhat believe, just hyperbolized.
Investigations does a complete twist on the "normal" Ace Attorney formula; that is, travelling to areas (which are most often just drawn backgrounds) using a kind of menu. This is the more common option, and what had been done for the early Japanese detective games, a la "The Portopia Serial Murder Case" and "Famicom Detective Club".

The simple difference here is now the investigations are done mostly in top-down, third person segments. Oddly, this just makes the game 1000% more endearing to me. Just being able to walk around already makes a huge difference to how connected you feel to these areas.
That's not the only thing that makes the two investigations games among my favorites. For one, the game feels much less fragmentary and disconnected, dare I say "cold", than the trilogy. There was a certain coldness about the trilogy, every case, every case-specific character, seemed like simply a "one and done" set piece, never to be revisited. Here, there is genuinely some build-up (which I won't spoil). Each character, each case is carefully weaved to be an intricately connected web. There are no "filler" cases to be seen here, as in other Ace Attorney games.

The humor is just awesome. Everyone plays off of Edgeworth's stone cold, stoic, no-fun disposition. The comedic writing here is some of my favorite of any game. Edgeworth is an ultimately sympathetic character despite being a bit of a jerk, because you know he secretly loves his friends deep down.

I love the trilogy as much as the next person, but I did think there was much to be built on, and I wanted to see them go farther. After all, they were originally GBA games in Japan. Playing the Investigations series, however, just feels like they really stepped up the anty in the graphics and music department. The original games were already pretty graphically and musically impressive, so it was a high bar, but they surpassed it. One of my favorite game soundtracks of all time.
Overall, this game, as with the AA series, is like comfort food to me. I even considered speedrunning it, if it qualifies for speedrunning.

Singlehandedly the worst set of writing I've read so far this year.

I couldn't get past the first two cases, the writing was so utterly awful and the case logic and characters so hamstrung boring, with it wasting your time more than any other VN I can think of at the current moment. Not to mention the self fellating it does every hour for either fanservice or weak attempts at characterization.

Put it in the fucking bin and read the summary if you want to play AAI2.

A lot of the investigation sections seem to drag on a little too long and unfortunately a lot of the opponents' rebuttals are some form of "bUt ThAt'S jUsT a ThEoRy, AcTuAlLy AlL oF yOuR eViDeNcE iS CiRcUmStAnTiAl", but when this game's twists get revealed, that's when the game goes full throttle and does not let up. It also helps that most of the lovable characters from the original trilogy are back in some form, and most of the new characters are quite entertaining in their own right. All in all, it's a good game with a bit of filler; all the great parts of an Ace Attorney game are there, just need to reduce some of the needless rambling and meandering.

I like it! It’s cool to see the Ace Attorney series tackle a different level of gameplay! It’s pretty fun to move around the crime scene yourself to investigate, and it’s also cool to learn that the characters have legs!

Logic is a pretty good addition as well. It fits Edgeworth as a character, giving him a more “professional” way of piecing crimes together. And of course, the music slaps.

Where this game falls short, in my opinion, is its overarching plot and characters. I’m just not interested in the main conflict of this game; the secondary conflict, the identity of the Yatagarasu, was FAR more interesting in my opinion.

Overall, this is a fun diversion from the main series, but it definitely could’ve gone farther… Oh wait, that’s what the sequel did!

Has 3 quite good cases and 2 absolute slogs of cases that are hardly entertaining in the slightest. Case 3 and 5 are the ones I refer to. I never want to see the Blue Badger ever again, and the big final villain is such a damp squib that gets shown up by the reveal directly before him, it's quite sad. And of course, both of those cases are quite important to the game's more central ideas and overall plot. Attempting to prosecute someone above the law or using it for unjust means has grounds for a cool plot for a prosecutor, and it's kind of squandered. Ironically all 3 of the cases I enjoyed far more were ones where that theme was not quite as present. Kay and Lang are both quite weak characters, neither appear until the third case which is hardly a good introduction. You only use Little Thief three times in the entire game, which would be really cool! You get to point out discrepancies in statements with accompanying visuals, and then 1/3 times it's used, it's a cop out to get you into the haunted mansion that just got closed off, so it may as well only be twice. Logic is also kind of an undercooked mechanic, but it's also kind of funny that messing it up damages you still. Edgeworth just goes "ah I must look like an idiot for thinking the wrong things" and not even saying anything aloud. I wish there was some kind of mechanic that would allow Edgeworth to do something different during testimony to separate himself from the lawyers you play as in all the other games. I hear Investigations 2 is a better package than 1, so I'll try that out shortly.

TL;DR: An interesting entry in the Ace Attorney franchise that has fun gameplay, but lacks the story and characters that make Ace Attorney a world class franchise.

Back all the way in my review of the very first Ace Attorney game, I noted that one of the primary reasons the game stuck with me for so long was because of its exceedingly colorful cast of characters and dramatic story. Especially in the HD remake for PC, it's hard not to stare at how bright every single background and character is and so I would go through extra effort to make sure I tapped everything in the environment during investigations. Even though investigations themselves were simple preludes to trials, what made them fun wasn't the gameplay, but the time spent meeting interesting people. In Ace Attorney Investigations, it's rather the opposite. I absolutely adore the gameplay, but I wasn't that invested in the story or characters.

To start, let's talk about the gameplay. In this game, instead of playing as Phoenix Wright as you did in the trilogy, you play as his rival, Miles Edgeworth. He is a prosecutor traveling the world to study foreign judicial systems. Instead of being divided into trial and investigation segments, the entirety of the game takes place in investigations (as the name of the game implies) where your job is to look for clues in the crime scene that point to the real culprit of the crime. To this end, the standard investigation style has been revamped greatly.

For the first time in the series, you are now free to walk around crime scenes and explore different areas within it. Whilst exploring, you are sometimes given the opportunity to deduce things about the crime scene. Gameplay wise, this boils down to pointing out an area that seems strange and then presenting evidence that explains what's strange about it. In addition, as you gather clues, Edgeworth keeps relevant facts inside his head. When you gather two facts that are related to each other, you can connect them together using Logic™ to gain more insight about the crime. Lastly, when you gather enough clues about the crime, you will typically find yourself debating with another person about the details, cross examination style. Debates are effectively the replacement for trial segments.

Even though these changes are quite few in number, they make the game feel quite different than a normal Ace Attorney game. In a standard Ace Attorney game, the investigation acts like a necessary ramp up to the trial mode where the actual fun happens. Investigation segments, when done normally, are typically long segments where you read blobs upon blobs of text that you need to soak up like a sponge so you can act competently during a trial. In this game, and many future titles after it such as The Great Ace Attorney, investigations no longer feel like this. They are instead treated like first class citizens where finding out truths in the investigation is as important as finding them out during a trial. In this game, it's taken to the extreme by having the gameplay and plot in full support of finding out the truth in crime scenes and I think that's what makes the idea of this game welcome into the AA franchise. Investigating this way is fun and it's exhilarating when you catch the true culprit right at the scene of the crime and bust contradictions right at their source.

So far, everything seems hunky dory. Though, this is a majority of my praise of the game since it's basically what you're promised before you ever start it. In order for this game to really be something worthy of Ace Attorney it needs a plot and characters that meet the series standard. Does this game have either of those? In my opinion, no. I wasn't thoroughly invested in the plot and characters as much as I wanted to be, and I find that to be an absolute shame for a game with so much promise.

Let's first talk about the plot. In my mind there are really two plots that are built in this game; one that focuses on taking down a global smuggling ring and another that focuses on the great thief Yatagarasu. These plots are connected to each other, but it's really the smuggling ring that gets the bulk of attention in this game. I think that's an absolute shame because that plot is rather boring.

Most of the villains in this game are people who are involved in that smuggling ring and each one has the exact same motive; they killed because they are greedy and/or want power. Certainly it's not a bad motive, but typically in Ace Attorney, that motive is substantiated by something more powerful to make it not feel cliche or boring. As an example, take case 3-2 which focused on the thief Mask☆DeMasque. One of the big reveals of that case is that he became a thief to pay for his wife's excessive spending. He loved her, but he wasn't confident that he could keep her around if he didn't give her everything she wanted, so he resorted to theft. It's a greed motive, but it's substantiated by something that gives it a bit more flavor. The best villains in the series have motives like this, but surprisingly, AAI has absolutely no villains that fit this description.

What also makes this plot boring is that it's incredibly shallow in terms of both development and personal stake to Edgeworth. In terms of development, the smuggling ring plot only gets developed at the end of each case. In the first three cases you only hear small things about it, but you don't actually learn anything about what it is the smuggling ring is doing until the last two cases. This is a thing that is done often in AA, even in the newer games like The Great Ace Attorney. They take a filler case with absolutely no meaning to the main plot, but then slap on one bit of context to the end of it to make it relevant. What makes it tolerable though is that it's not done for a majority of the cases and the filler itself is actually fun. In The Great Ace Attorney, it's only done one time, but in this game it's done for 3 cases which is over half the game. The result is that 90% of the smuggling ring plot is crammed into the last case and it feels incredibly bloated as a result. It also starves the other 3 cases of any kind of sense of relevance for no good reason. Lastly, it also makes it so Edgeworth can't get any personal connection to the events of the game. He doesn't even start formally investigating the ring until the very last case of the game.

So overall, this smuggling ring plot was developed quite poorly throughout the game and when you actually get to investigating it, there isn't that much excitement waiting for you. The plot was too ambitious for the amount of setup it got in the other cases. I do understand why they went with such an ambitious plot though. Gameplay wise, it justifies why things need to be settled at the crime scenes themselves; if they weren't the culprits would have more than enough opportunity to change the crime scene however they wanted and hide the truth forever. The urgency of the situations give rise to things you wouldn't normally see in a standard Ace Attorney investigation like your best friends getting arrested right at the scene based on flaky evidence. One of the main characters in this game, Investigator Lang, often places incorrect charges on people with the excuse that they don't need to find the true culprit yet because they can wait for the trial. So the plot works for the gameplay's style, but as an actual Ace Attorney plot, it's quite shallow and leads to the endgame feeling horrendous. The real meat in my opinion is the Yatagarasu plot.

The Yatagarasu plot focuses primarily on a thief who steals in the name of justice. He acts as a vigilante and often gets evidence illegally. What's great about this plot is that it's pretty much the opposite of the smuggling ring plot; every character in it has purpose and it ties directly into Edgeworth's core beliefs and story. Interacting with the Yatagarasu has made him rethink what the law is and how it should be used not as a strict tool for people to take advantage of, but for people to mold and fight injustice with. It has the stakes you would expect from an Ace Attorney plot, but the issue is that it's way too short. It gets brief mentions in the first 3 cases, the bulk of its plot in the fourth case, and resolves itself halfway into the fifth case. If this was the whole game, then I think people would have been more invested in the plot of it. It also opens itself up to a logical explanation to the cool Little Thief mechanic that gets used a few times throughout the game. Investigating scenes with Little Thief is, in my mind, an underrated and underused mechanic in this game.

That's about it for the plot. It had promise, but ultimately it came out flat because of how ambitious it was trying to be without proper setup. But even though the story itself may not be that great, we at least have the characters to love, right? I personally would disagree. Out of all the new characters in the game, the only ones I really fell in love with were Kay, Lang, Badd and Yew. Every other character was some cog in the boring smuggling ring plot or a repeat character from some previous game. It's weird how much time this game spends with cameos. I think if you were to keep track of the amount of time spent with return characters as opposed to new ones, you'd find that new characters don't make up a huge portion of the runtime of the game. That's a bittersweet thing for me since, as much as I love AA characters making comebacks in games, I really was looking for something brand new from this game. The return characters basically hijack most of the good moments from the new characters unfortunately.

So to conclude, AAI is a game that has incredibly fun gameplay, but an underdeveloped story and cast. In my opinion, it's a real shame that this is the one that got localized into English and not the much better sequel that takes full advantage of the game's features. I miss wanting to touch literally every single thing in the crime scene. I miss pun names that made it easy to remember everything. I miss just cracking a smile every time I saw AA characters. There are far too many things missing in this game that I can't bring myself to like it that much. It just doesn't have the same heart and spirit that the titles before (and after) it have. I applaud the team who made this game for going out and trying something new and I recognize that making spinoff games like this is no easy task. But I really wish they had taken a different direction with it. They clearly learned their mistakes when it came time to make the second game, but this is the game that somehow has seen a localization and a remake on mobile in HD. Life can be cruel sometimes.