Today is my birthday! And for such an occasion, me and my bestie are playing through the Ace Attorney trilogy, in what is the first revisit I've had to the original games since I was a child

Anyone who knows me knows the importance the AA trilogy had in my early years. As an adult, I'm somewhat forced to view the game in a different manner, but I can also now look back to see the purpose this held to me, in the past. To be a child in the western world is to be ignored, I think. Especially a child like me who could understand these things more than most. Adults play little lords who can offer no refuge from the agony they bring, purposeful or not. It always seemed to me that everyone was making base mistakes that I could never fathom, that reflected off them and burned into me because children have no say in anything that goes on around them. And I could never understand their actions- I could never understand the screaming, I could never understand the deeply ingrained violence, I never understood why no one listened or could even parse things that were immediately obvious to me. Or why no one felt spurred to change. For years, I just ghosted the world feeling like one big tear all the time, very alone, but I would rather be alone than be with people like that. But I never forgot it, the extreme frustration of being that child. The child who is forced into situations with no voice and no autonomy, getting punished when I myself could not say anything back, lashing out and being unable to convey my desperation. Its pure bile and anger to be there.

I had so many feelings and thoughts about this growing up, the above can only be a tame simplification of many years of displacement. But one day, I caught a glimpse of a weird lawyer game on my shitty little ipod's app store in 2013, and things kind of changed. As I played, suddenly, I could see what it was like to have a voice. I could see what it was like to have friends, to find a family. I was introduced to a manner of things through Ace Attorney, a new manner of thought even, which at the time felt very cathartic to me. It reinforced a conviction that I've held since I could remember and I could see myself a little in it, sometimes. It was a comforting space. As an adult who knows more about the world than I did then, the writing isnt so mind-blowingly fantastic. But boy, as a child was it sure fucking incredible. To shout your objections and have pure, undeniable proof of what you meant at terrible people who otherwise would never see it. It was the spark of that more than the actual meat of it.

As for this game itself, it's more about what it did for me rather than what it is. To encourage thinking for ones self, to encourage that faith in an informed conviction. And that which fueled my fire for creative work, that I am still drawimg today. I talked about this a lot in my aai2 review, and I will talk about it again, but the introduction of Miles Edgeworth resonated with me so much back then. Who doesnt want to watch their shitty father bash their head into a wall- but that meant so much to me then. Actually, I forgot that this character largely introduced the concept of homosexuality to me. I would have figured myself out sooner or later, as I would with all these things, but at the very least I finished this game back then with an appreciation for a masculine demeanor and a strong need for a fitted suit.

I'm kind of rambling, and not well, but its my birthday so I'm allowed to. In present times, I'm noticing many spelling errors and sometimes a lacking of tone. And sometimes I feel like it relies too much on a joke so that the whole thing comes off as clowny, but I also feel like it might just be the english translation that made things this way. This was the first of its kind after all, and I've seen how the series has grown, so I can cut it some slack. Turnabout Goodbyes and Rise from the Ashes are still fantastic cases, and what's been even more fun than running down memory lane is watching my best friend experiencing it with me for the first time. I cant explain how much I absolutely love every piece of these games, though. They feel like a part of me, and I'm fairly proud of that. Its been a blast, and I cant wait to rediscover the rest of the series again.


Dont forget DL-6!

Parry Nightmare is something of a bullet hell game, where instead of solely trying to dodge your main form of attack is parrying approaching enemies. You play as a soul, trapped in a lucid nightmare along with your demonic guardian Honnou, in which you must fight and reflect on major points of trauma and stress in your life.

I have a few points of contention with this game. I will start first by saying that aesthetically and atmospherically, it succeeds hard. Despite being short, it gives off a well polished and kind of eccentric vibe... when I first started playing, I thought it had a feeling like Paper Mario or Warioware though the gameplay didnt reflect that, of course.

The game is hard. It might be one of the most difficult games I have ever played. It is not like other bullet hells, where they slowly ease you into things, with your safety net of bombs or other clearing objects for when you get stuck. You stand in a circular room, enemies coming from all sides, your main point of interaction is hitting A when an enemy gets within a certain range of you to parry. Honnou will then shoot when they are down and you can collect a light fragment from them, 100 being needed to beat the level... though, one light drop from one enemy only seems to be .1 instead of a full figure, which isnt that big of a problem, but you also cant see at first and need to collect 70 of these light drops to have a full range of the room. You can not take many hits, and when youre down to your last health you become sluggish until you gain some more (which pretty much means youre going to die), your clearing bomb isnt on hand but instead its built up when you do well, so if you get hit once or parry early you can lose it and become overwhelmed. Bosses can also only be hit with this attack and take up a large portion of the arena. Even though traditional bullet hells are long, somehow dying in this feels worse. The levels are short, can be beaten in under 5 minutes, but somehow every time I died I felt like it wasnt my fault. Enemies move very, very fast and its incredibly easy to just have a boss sit its ass right down on you when youre sluggish and can barely move. It feels like I make one tiny mistake, parry early, my level goes down (as it does when you miss a parry), then Honnou isnt strong enough to fight off everyone and I get overwhelmed and die and now its dark again and uuuuugh. If there was one safety net (like a mid level checkpoint) I feel like it would be much more manageable, but as it is now it is insanely difficult.

Story-wise, I also had a sour taste in my mouth after finishing. Parry Nightmare takes place in Japan, and a lot of the protagonist girl's problems extend out of stresses common in the region (high workload, lack of personal time, shaky relationship with family), and though these issues are semi-universal, the problem presents itself in how the ending treats these traumas. Throughout the game, the girl makes it clear that she is deeply miserable on a base level to the point where she barely recognizes she has things she enjoys. She has little time to herself, her entire life commandeered and seen through what other people expect of her, down to the makeup brand she uses. Her mother makes her deeply unhappy and scared her as a child, her apartment is messy and fraught witn objects reminding her of stress. It is clear that if she continues living the way she is living, ignoring the messages from her body and mind, that she will get deeply sick, live a completely unsatisfying life, and probably die early. That's what I thought the game was leading up to- a wakeup call, time to make a change. Instead, the ending? "Your soul can overcome anything! Just keep pushing through!" And then it cuts to a cutscene where the girl is doing her work efficiently and talking to her mom on the phone, happily. So, what is it then? Was the moral of the story that everyone has things that stress them out, that the best thing we can ever hope to do is "push through them" instead of confronting why it is exactly that we dislike our parents, yet can't seem to admit it, why it is that we force ourselves to work so hard. Is the best we can ever hope to do is "push through" all of it? Is that healthy? There is a major contradiction in the game's messaging here. Though it seems like you're fighting off these traumas at first, it appears all you're capable of doing is subduing them until the next time they wring their ugly neck out in whatever form they take next. It felt icky, watching this person go back to a job they hate and a mother that has hurt them. I cant stand that ideology of "just deal with it" that has ruined many bodies and minds all at once.

So, it was interesting. Parry Nightmare feels good, solid. It's mostly the attitude it takes on the matter of stress that sours my opinion of it in general, as well as the difficulty. If you like short, challenging games then perhaps I would reccomend checking it out, just don't go taking life lessons from it.