Finished this game as part of the Ace Attorney Trilogy. Being a big fan of the original Phoenix Wright trilogy I was excited to experience my first playthrough of Apollo Justice.

Apollo as a character is a charismatic successor of Phoenix, mostly because he has similar traits as him and fills in the same "newbie" spot. Trucy, Apollo's companion, manages to stand out more on her own. I like the dynamic of the new prosecutor Gavin - I was constantly switching between admiring and cursing him. The return of some familiar faces is nice, even though the game feels more like a followup of Episode 5 of the first PW:AA than the entire trilogy in that regard.

Apollo's "sense" ability is a new feature in the cross-examinations which seems a little bit too gimmicky to me. On the other hand the 3D inspections of the evidence is underutilized.

My enjoyment of an Ace Attorney game depends mostly on the cases (logical use of evidence, twists, mystery, emotional investment, opponents). Sometimes the game relies too much on wild turns that didn't make much sense to me, but nevertheless were guessed correctly by me because I assumed the game would want to create a big twist. The final case does an excellent job of connecting loose threads spanning several years in the story. Unfortunately, catching the true villains of each cases never really had a big emotional impact for me.

All in all Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney succeeds as a new chapter in the Ace Attorney saga and has all the trademarks the game series is known for. I liked all cases but neither one of them could hook me completely.

One technical nitpick about the Xbox One version: Switching between dialogues and evidence often interrupts the music for a short moment which was never the case in the original DS version of PWAA as far as I remember.