This review contains spoilers
Man, this game is a mess. My main problem from my first playthrough is realising that I barely knew anything new about Apollo at the end of the game. That same issue arises here.
A story that's supposed to introduce your new attorney that ends up spending 75% of its plot tying up loose ends of the previous one.
The best moments come from when you are free from that gosh darned ex-lawyer Phoenix Wright. I don't even think he's written poorly; hell, it's kinda interesting as a premise. The problem is shoehorning in a old character's redemption arc with the first entry of a new trilogy. With only four cases in the game, it's bound to get cluttered.
And the cases? Oof, it's mixed. Turnabout Corner and Turnabout Trump are pretty good cases, especially the latter. Trump breaks the mold by having a longer-than-average intro case with some pretty challenging elements to it off the bat. It ends on a stark note and really sets up the mystery of the game.
Unfortunately, the rest of the game falls flat. Turnabout Corner is a decent case. By which I mean, the crime is interesting, but the characters and crime-family-drama don't really engage me compared to past cases. It gives me similar vibes to Recipe for Turnabout from T&T, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
One of Apollo Justice's best additions that thankfully stays in the series is interactive evidence. Using the touch screen to analyze fingerprint and blueprints, as well as rotating evidence for more precise clues has great potential.
And you know what? It does pay off a lot of the time! The game doesn't outright say what makes a piece of evidence unique. You really need to go digging in your court record to find out the quirks.
At the same time, there are still a lot of growing pains. I think that's most evident in Turnabout Serenade.
Mechnically speaking, this case is all over the place. One of the better moments is using a sound mixer to isolate a dud note in a song (foreshadowing a later point where you use it to detect a gunshot; it's really well handled imo).
But then you have the video tape. That accursed FMV. That siren song. I close my eyes and I see it. It echoes in my ears. This video is the bane of my existence. Seeing a single frame of it sets off my fight-or-flight response.
It just never ends. You have to examine it so many times, presenting it in court, re-watching it, with minimal playback control. Rise from the Ashes had something similar, but at least that was used more sparingly (and had more than one or two clues to suss out).
Along with generally tedious investigation segments, a lacklustre story and an almost nonsensical choice of defendant, it's not a great case in the slightest.
But it's not even the worst case in the game.
That infamy belongs to Turnabout Succession. It has the potential to be the sloppiest case in the entire series. In real-time, you get to see the game crumble under the weight of its ambitious storyline. Phoenix is redeemed, Apollo gets the bad guy, we have a new court system.
And that's it I guess? Barely anything feels satisfying. You don't really grow with Apollo like Phoenix in AA1; you discover just how shallow the main villain is; you discover the (very questionable) disbarrment of Phoenix Wright; and you have to go between the future and past in a semi-simulation, semi-recollection using the MASON system. To top it all off, you don't deduce anything major for the final section of this case; you have a button that says Good Ending/Bad Ending.
I finished this game with a feeling of wanting less. If this was how the rest of the new trilogy was going to go, I might've just been content with the original games. Thankfully, this game is a hurdle worth getting over for its sequel.
A story that's supposed to introduce your new attorney that ends up spending 75% of its plot tying up loose ends of the previous one.
The best moments come from when you are free from that gosh darned ex-lawyer Phoenix Wright. I don't even think he's written poorly; hell, it's kinda interesting as a premise. The problem is shoehorning in a old character's redemption arc with the first entry of a new trilogy. With only four cases in the game, it's bound to get cluttered.
And the cases? Oof, it's mixed. Turnabout Corner and Turnabout Trump are pretty good cases, especially the latter. Trump breaks the mold by having a longer-than-average intro case with some pretty challenging elements to it off the bat. It ends on a stark note and really sets up the mystery of the game.
Unfortunately, the rest of the game falls flat. Turnabout Corner is a decent case. By which I mean, the crime is interesting, but the characters and crime-family-drama don't really engage me compared to past cases. It gives me similar vibes to Recipe for Turnabout from T&T, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
One of Apollo Justice's best additions that thankfully stays in the series is interactive evidence. Using the touch screen to analyze fingerprint and blueprints, as well as rotating evidence for more precise clues has great potential.
And you know what? It does pay off a lot of the time! The game doesn't outright say what makes a piece of evidence unique. You really need to go digging in your court record to find out the quirks.
At the same time, there are still a lot of growing pains. I think that's most evident in Turnabout Serenade.
Mechnically speaking, this case is all over the place. One of the better moments is using a sound mixer to isolate a dud note in a song (foreshadowing a later point where you use it to detect a gunshot; it's really well handled imo).
But then you have the video tape. That accursed FMV. That siren song. I close my eyes and I see it. It echoes in my ears. This video is the bane of my existence. Seeing a single frame of it sets off my fight-or-flight response.
It just never ends. You have to examine it so many times, presenting it in court, re-watching it, with minimal playback control. Rise from the Ashes had something similar, but at least that was used more sparingly (and had more than one or two clues to suss out).
Along with generally tedious investigation segments, a lacklustre story and an almost nonsensical choice of defendant, it's not a great case in the slightest.
But it's not even the worst case in the game.
That infamy belongs to Turnabout Succession. It has the potential to be the sloppiest case in the entire series. In real-time, you get to see the game crumble under the weight of its ambitious storyline. Phoenix is redeemed, Apollo gets the bad guy, we have a new court system.
And that's it I guess? Barely anything feels satisfying. You don't really grow with Apollo like Phoenix in AA1; you discover just how shallow the main villain is; you discover the (very questionable) disbarrment of Phoenix Wright; and you have to go between the future and past in a semi-simulation, semi-recollection using the MASON system. To top it all off, you don't deduce anything major for the final section of this case; you have a button that says Good Ending/Bad Ending.
I finished this game with a feeling of wanting less. If this was how the rest of the new trilogy was going to go, I might've just been content with the original games. Thankfully, this game is a hurdle worth getting over for its sequel.