In my written reviews, I like to end with a “key word”, to summarize my entire experience with a game into something that sticks with you easily. Keeping what this word is secret until the end, I feel, gives the experience of reading the reviews a kind of cute tension, of trying to figure out what the word will be as you read through. But for this game, one single word was so prominent for the entirety of the experience, that I feel I need to write the review around it.

Because as I was playing Great Ace Attorney 2, the word that kept popping up in my head was “justification”. This isn’t to frame the game in a bad light, nor in a good light, but that much of the game felt as if it was trying extremely hard to justify both itself and the game its a direct follow-up to.

Indeed, its kind of a first for Shu Takumi to write a game so thoroughly reliant on you having experienced a prior game to understand it, and in many ways it allows this particular entry to shine in ways the series never has. Though the stories of games like Trials and Tribulations, the Investigations series, and Spirit of Justice shine far brighter with prior series knowledge, they were all still written to be complete, understandable stories in their own right - their villains, heroes, arcs and storylines are properly set up within themselves, and are moreso “enriched” with said prior knowledge. This is in complete opposition to The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures, a game that ended up ballooning in scope enough to where it had to be divided up into two halves of a greater story. When The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures became a game made up almost entirely of unsatisfying buildup, then this follow-up wants to be nothing but satisfying payoff.

Fundamentally then, the sequel exists to justify that first game being as meandering as it was, and the answers to many of those questions and the way they’re delivered are among Ace Attorney’s greatest ever moments. For a series already lauded for its explosive pitch-perfect finales its remarkable just how well Naruhodo’s adventures wrap up, and that is in large part due to just how well it was built up. Despite being my favorite game in the franchise, Spirit of Justice in comparison stumbles to wrap itself up due to needing to both build up and resolve a conclusion worthy of ending the entire series within just one game. Here, meanwhile, all the pieces were already in place, and the game is able to have a much more satisfying pacing resolving it all as a result. Additionally, characters from the first game are built upon and fleshed out naturally, in a way that feels like a natural extension of that first game rather than needing to grow to suit the whims of the new game. That’s not something I ever disliked in the main series, but it was refreshing to experience character growth that felt so thoroughly natural based on events that were long foreshadowed beforehand.

The promise of this kind of game, one able to exist solely to pay off what its predecessor set up, is remarkable, and the game shows many times just how well it works. Which makes it all the more baffling to me why they chose not to stick to it wholeheartedly. As I said before, “Justification” doesn’t just mean retroactively justifying the first game’s content, but actively justifying choices that seem to go against the intended vision. Simply put: If the intent of the game is to resolve what the first game started, why do we still need to go through a tutorial of all the game’s mechanics? Why, in this game about giving us answers to a game all about questions, is the first thing we do an almost complete non-sequitur from what that first game set up?

I’ll be blunt and say that the first two cases of this game are among the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel cases in the series for me – they are shamelessly disconnected from what the game sets up in all but extremely minor ways, yet those few connections are emphasized to a ridiculous degree to make it feel important. The game’s first defendant, Rei Membami, appears prominently in the game’s key artwork, and is said to be a close friend to Susato, who gets a playable debut in this game. Additionally, my favorite character from the first game, Inspector Hosonaga shows back up – I was giddy as I started this first case, yet as I played further into the game I realized just how inconsequential it all was. Susato taking her own action into the courtroom is never built further upon, Hosonaga ends up accomplishing nothing at all, and – get this – neither him nor Membami show up for the rest of the game. In the end, all the first case ends up being is a way to tutorialize the player paired with some fun fanservice, a case that makes up a ton of reasons for the player to experience it yet doesn’t make any of those reasons feel satisfying to the player. Hosonaga never shows up past this case because he’s working in Japan and the rest of the game is in Britain. Susato’s playable debut is to justify tutorializing the player again. The little plot importance of the case is to explain what happened to the first culprit of the first game, a plot point so brief it could’ve easily been included in idle talk across the rest of the game (which, it honestly kind of is already).
The second case in the game, meanwhile, is only “important” because its a followup to the first game’s filler case, making the two important to each other yet completely inconsequential to the first game’s story. With The Adventure of the Clouded Kokoro, its disconnected nature could be chalked up as a calm-before-the-storm meant to mainly provide worldbuilding, yet with this new game we’re seven cases deep and still being provided with complete clown antics rather than progressing the main story or addressing any of its loose ends.

It pains me that so many parts of this otherwise excellent game feel held back by strange story choices like these, choices made with justification that runs counter to the idea that this game is meant to be a continuing story from the first. One of the shining stars of the first game was Gina, a pickpocketer turned detective-in-training who was set to carry on the legacy of Detective Gregson after he got himself in hot water in the game’s last case. This game wants to explore Gregson further however, and because it can’t guarantee that players have actually played the first game and know who he is, Gregson is let back onto duty despite literally cooperating with a murderer just a few months earlier. Though I ended up loving what they do with Gregson here, it left Gina with the extreme short end of the stick, as half the time I wish I could’ve spent with her went toward an effectively finished character.

The embodiment of all of these choices is Kazuma, a brilliant yet confused and aimless character that you really get the feeling they struggled to incorporate back into the series. The case of his death in the first game, The Adventure of the Unbreakable Speckled Band, is that game at its absolute lowest, with an important and charismatic character dying to the hands of a completely avoidable misunderstanding from a scared child. Since the sequel needed him alive, the case was transformed into this strange conspiracy to keep Kazuma alive, which leads to him getting amnesia and being shipped to Hong Kong…and then magically finding his way to Britain. You participate in one case against a masked apprentice who is very obviously Kazuma, and as soon as the case is over he regains his memory yet stands opposed to our main characters due to a case from many years ago. Kazuma’s importance was already revealed to us in the end of the first game, yet bringing him back to life in this bizarre roundabout way…it befuddles me, yet the game stands proud knowing its just justified yet another story from that first game that wasn’t great on its own. Everything has to resolve something from the first game, yet at the same time bizarre choices are made to ensure newcomers aren’t confused.

It’s all so frustrating, because when the game knows what it wants to be, it really fires on all cylinders. Case 3 in this game is a contender for the best put together case in the entire series, building on previous characters whilst being a compelling story in its own right, and just being a damn fun mystery to boot. It feels as a proper Ace Attorney case should, and is only enhanced by its predecessor rather than feeling as if it needed to be built to only work with – or without – its presence. The issue with the first two cases isn’t even the mystery solving, or the characters, or their self contained story, as those are all pretty okay in their own right, it’s that they don’t fit the game in any sort of way whatsoever and had to be wedged into the game with any justification possible. The game’s first two cases and overall narrative lows only sting so bad because I know this franchise, this series, and this writer, are capable of being so much better than it, which the first two cases even show themselves. As is, the games don’t work as standalone due to the first game’s complete mundanity and lack of payoff, and they don’t work as a pair due to the dreadful pacing of this second game’s first act. It truly is unfortunate how all the games released past that original trilogy are mired with development issues, given how many of them reach the absolute highest highs the series has ever had.

By the time the game had reached its final act, the game was doing exactly what I expected of it yet constantly exceeding my expectations, with twists and turns that felt perfectly foreshadowed yet never spelled out, and narrative beats that truly change several characters involved in the story. Several moments flat-out gave me goosebumps, yet for as caught up in the hype as I was, the thoughts of justification still lingered in my mind. This came to ahead with the resolution of Barok van Zieks character arc, the prosecutor across both games who’s as likable as he is hateable with the blatant prejudice he holds toward the Japanese. The lack of progress in his character was one of the biggest signs that the first game was left an unfinished story, but his resolution here is simultaneously fantastically woven into the greater story and feels forced at the same time. It feels as if they knew the outline of what to do with him, yet also felt a need to justify his racism into nothing but a simple issue from his past to quell complaints from the first game’s detractors. It was when I reached this point that I realized just how conflicted my feelings on this game were, contradictions between thinking the story was excellently written yet simultaneously feeling its forced and unnatural.

Regardless of it all, I’m of course glad The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve even exists, that it survived the troubled development with not many more issues than a slightly confused identity. The game is as far from bad as you can come, and I’m immensely grateful for how well it ended up sticking the landing by the end. Yet at the end of the day, I think the thing I appreciate most about the game, is that it shows Takumi still has it in him to one day pull off that perfect Ace Attorney adventure.

It’s elementary, my dear Takumi!

[Playtime: ???]
[Key Word: Justification]