Really enjoyed revisiting this trilogy especially since it included the DLC cases for DD and SoJ that I had never played before~ ^w^ And since I basically marathoned the three games one after another, I picked up on strengths and weakness of them that I didn't notice on my first plays that happened years apart from one another .w.

The first game, Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, is a compact little adventure especially in comparison to Dual Destinies and Spirit of Justice, but I greatly appreciated how all the cases were interwoven and led to big reveals by the end. Phoenix's characterization was very interesting and Klavier is definitely one of my favorite prosecutors in the series~ the "big bad" of the game is also one of its strong suits (heh...). I don't fully love the "meta" elements that were brought into the last case, however, though the Jurist System idea was neat (and more fully realized in the Great Ace Attorney games).

Dual Destinies was a fun ride~ ...though I think it still stands as the weakest Ace Attorney game by my personal rankings. It gives too much away within its first two cases and doesn't really hit its stride until the third... before being kiiiiinda bogged down again by the last two cases. And, while I adore Athena as a character, I think her introduction here, along with a desire by the writers to make Apollo more "interesting", reaaaally convolutes Apollo's backstory to the point that it's hard to suspend disbelief (Spirit of Justice is also quite guilty of this though I think the story is stronger there). There's just too many conveniences that don't feel natural in the storytelling .w. Unrelated to the story, it was an odd choice to not allow you to examine things freely (except in certain spots) during the case investigation segments - that's something that allowed for a whole bunch of quirky, fun dialogues in past (and future) AA games so it gave an impression of something being missing in comparison to the others .w. As for some positives... I do like case 3 a lot as I mentioned before and Simon is a cool prosecutor. I especially like his and Taka's antics in the courtroom segments x3 The animated cutscenes were also very nice and the 3D presentation was appealing~

Turnabout Reclaimed was a great addition to Dual Destinies. The animal lover in me really enjoyed the unique setting for the case as well as the important nonhuman characters that were introduced :3 The twists were decently unexpected and the conclusion satisfying, I feel~

Now onto Spirit of Justice which I feel was the better follow up to the original Apollo Justice game than Dual Destinies. It has a stronger story and feels more impactful and memorable than its predecessor~ it holds up very well from the first time that I played it. I will say that it's kinda a shame that they brought back Maya to pretty much serve exactly the same role as she did in the original trilogy though (as both an accused and kidnapee)... with little to no development from when we saw her last ^^"" Athena also got majorly shafted by only being the leading character in one short case which was disappointing. I think I enjoyed pretty much everything else this game had to offer though and I was satisfied with how things concluded... minus that massive tease where they still never revealed one of the big twists from Apollo Justice to the characters, mrghhh >w<"" lol

Turnabout Time Traveler had predictable story beats and a blatantly obvious culprit, but I enjoyed its themes of love and "time traveling" in the non-literal sense :3

Overall, I was glad to give these games another play and I really hope that Capcom comes out with another Ace Attorney game soon. It's been too looooooong :'C

Strange how there’s no AA4 and it just skips straight to Dual Destines. I mean, DD randomly introduces this Apollo guy out of nowhere. I wish this trilogy gave us a game where we could play as him and establish him as a character.

Anyways
AJ:AA - 2/10
DD - 9/10
SOJ - 10/10

Case ranking coming soon

First of all, not only is this not an "Apollo Justice" trilogy, I think it's questionable to even call these three games a trilogy to begin with. I'll get to why later though, let's talk about the games first.

Full disclosure, I didn't play Apollo Justice on this new collection since I'd only fairly recently finished the 3DS version; however, I'll still mention it here since it's part of this collection. To restate what I said back then, it's probably my favorite of the mainline series- I think it's the most consistently good of any of the six main games, the second case is the weak link but it's still much better than most of the other games' weakest cases and the other three cases (including the often-reviled third and fourth) are all great. Apollo isn’t as strong of a protagonist as Phoenix, but the new cast is still pretty likeable overall and AJ also makes Phoenix himself a much more interesting character. I can’t help but compare what this game did with him and the fandom's reaction to it to what The Last Jedi did with Luke Skywalker a decade later, and I think both works did it just as well- neither is perfect by any means but I don't think a character completing their initial journey means they should just become flawless forever, and being able to see them face new troubles, fall to their lowest moments and have to reckon with that and overcome them only makes them better heroes to me.

If Apollo Justice is The Last Jedi, then Dual Destinies is The Rise of Skywalker- after seemingly passing the torch to Apollo in the last game, not only is Phoenix back in the main protagonist role, but the game also introduces a third protagonist to the franchise, pushing Apollo to third fiddle, Trucy gets basically nothing after being a fixture of the last game, and the last game's events and status quo-changing ending are more or less ignored outside of some minor references and the game introduces new concepts and characters we've never heard of before that should definitely have been relevant to the previous game given the timeframe. Unlike The Rise of Skywalker, though, Dual Destinies manages to be a perfectly fine game in its own right if you can ignore the ways it (doesn't) connect to the previous game. Athena is a great addition to the series and her story is probably the best part of the game, and the game serves up a pretty solid set of cases to go along with it- even if none of them are all-time classics, it's probably more consistent that either Justice for All or Trials & Tribulations in that regard. What definitely doesn't work, though, is Apollo's story arc. Without going into spoilery details, the entire thing runs on the game telling the player how important something is while never actually showing it to them- it seriously compromises the climax of the game when a key component of it is this poorly thought out.

I feel like on a case-by-case basis, Spirit of Justice is better than Dual Destinies- it has lower lows, but also some higher highs, but when it comes to the overarching story both games have a lot of problems and I think they probably even out to the same level. The game makes an effort to push Apollo back into the limelight- he's clearly the character it wants to be the main protagonist, he leads the climactic case and it serves as a conclusion to his story for the time being- but Phoenix gets all the big story moments leading up to the climax with Apollo only taking over at the very end, which makes it feel like he's getting sidelined in what's supposed to be his own game again. Meanwhile, it feels like they had no idea what to do with Athena, since she only gets a single brief (and awful) case, which feels like an complete afterthought once the writers realized they forgot about her, as the lead character where her development from the last game is virtually ignored, and doesn't really do anything for the rest of the game besides her obligatory segments- as much as Dual Destinies sidelined Apollo at least they gave him some semblance of an arc even if the execution was poor. As for the whole Khura'in storyline, I get what they were going for with the parallels between the two countries, but it's undermined by Khura'in being depicted as an Exotic Foreign Other and the tribulations the two sets of protagonists face in each country being not equivalent in the slightest. The names for the minor characters are also really terrible and also quite questionable in other ways considering they follow the school of “take an English phrase and make it foreign sounding” and, unlike TGAA, not foreign-sounding in either the devs’ or localizers’ language, so you get such wondrous and culturally sensitive names as “Ahlbi Ur’gaid” and “Pees’lubn Andistan’dhin”. It's not all bad though- like I said the cases are generally better than Dual Destinies', I do like the new characters, it's nice that Trucy finally gets at least one case of focus again and even if the execution isn't the best all the time there’s a bunch of good ideas and some pretty hard-hitting scenes. Overall probably around the same level as Trials & Tribulations, that game has a stronger overall narrative but I think SOJ has better individual mysteries.

Back to the discussion about the trilogy as a whole, a lot of people have mocked the "Apollo Justice Trilogy" moniker and deservedly so. The “Phoenix Wright Trilogy” was an appropriate name for the first three games since, while each game is episodic in nature, they do feel like a single connected series- there’s a consistent main cast, each game builds upon and deals with the fallout of the previous game’s events and minor characters from past cases return in future games, showing how Phoenix saved people and changed people’s lives through his work. The same cannot be said of these three games in the slightest. Apollo Justice introduces a new protagonist and serves as a passing of the torch while leaving a few loose ends. However, Dual Destinies both brings back Phoenix and also introduces Athena, pushing Apollo out of the spotlight, and ignores all those loose ends and almost every character from the previous game. Spirit of Justice tries to put Apollo back in the limelight and brings back both elements from the original trilogy that were absent from the last two games and connections to Apollo Justice (6-2 is the only case in all 3 of these games resembling the pseudo-sequel cases to a previous game that made up a good chunk of the 2nd and 3rd games) but still does it more indirectly than the original trilogy games would have with, again, no returning characters, but in turn shafts Dual Destinies and its new additions. I have no evidence that this was the case, but knowing the state of the fandom at the time, it feels like a constant tightrope walk of trying to appease fans- Apollo Justice was divisive, which led to Dual Destinies largely reversing it, and when the Apollo Justice fans in turn complained about that Spirit of Justice brings back Apollo Justice stuff while making sure to not have too much Apollo Justice in order to not anger the people who didn’t like that game. It’s especially evident when you consider the themes/plot points the three games have in common, which are Apollo’s past and the state of the legal system; each of the three games explore this topic, but in ways that while not contradictory (well, mostly not contradictory) have almost nothing to do with each other despite dealing with the same topic- it just feels incredibly disjointed in a way the original trilogy wasn’t at all. It’s easy to blame the change in writers between Apollo Justice and Dual Destinies for this, but I don’t think that’s the case at all; it’s absolutely possible to follow up someone else’s work in a way that properly builds off it, and as Dual Destinies and Spirit of Justice show, you can have 2/3rds of the same writing team and still make a sequel that fails in that regard. Don’t get me wrong, all three of these games are still good in isolation, but together they don’t really come together to make a satisfying whole the same way the first three games do. Still, all three games are worth playing, and this collection includes a pretty generous amount of extras to help offset the somewhat hefty price tag a bit- it's definitely the best way to experience this rather odd era of the series.