TL;DR: Hollow Knight is a uniquely fresh take on an exploration game that perfectly captures the principles of what it means for a video game to be fun. While its DLC is somewhat of a slog, the main game offers excitement at every turn for hours due to the amount of effort put in to build its world and story. It’s easily one of the best games I have ever played.

In almost everyone's lives there is a time where we are exposed to something so new we feel lost. It might be because we're going somewhere as exciting and large as the Grand Canyon, taking in every inch of its magnificent view from high above the ground or somewhere small yet crafted with such incredibly painstaking attention to detail that it's difficult not to admire it, like a museum. The world is full of new things to experience and when we humans are faced in a situation where we are to venture into the unknown our natural tendency for curiosity wants us to explore. We want to explore until every single turn, building, and other exciting thing is just etched into our memory. Even if we may find danger, there are very few things more thrilling to us humans than experiencing something new to distract us from our lives.

Hollow Knight takes this basic human instinct and turns it into a game. The foundation of Hollow Knight's story and gameplay is built on mystery and exploration and the game expertly and delicately crafts a world very unlike any you've ever seen. I can confidently say there are very few games that can offer an experience as charming, satisfying, and fun as the one presented in Hollow Knight. It's more than just a game, it's a thrilling journey through one of the most captivating universes ever put into a story.

When you start this game, you are introduced to The Knight; the main character of this story whose background and motivation is unknown. All we know is that he travels to a strange wasteland, equipped with nothing but a robe and a nail and starts from a cave. From the very first minutes of the game, the mystery has already begun. From here, how does the game help you solve the mystery? The answer is that it doesn't. At least not in any way traditional games do. There are no explicit objectives, there are no markers beyond the ones you set yourself, and there is not even an end goal to be achieved. You are, in the most literal sense, lost from the very beginning and it's up to you to find your way again.

This design choice perfectly reflects the philosophy that Hollow Knight sets out to prove works effectively. The only way to progress in this game is to explore. The game almost never tells you what you need to move forward, you have to figure it out for yourself by looking at things like your surroundings, interacting with characters you meet across the world, and learning to effectively traverse the map using the tools you've been given and the tools you find along the way as you explore. The game continues this practice all throughout its runtime.

Many modern games seem to assume the player is downright stupid or incompetent and feel the need to post tutorials at every second of the game or mark out explicitly in your face where you're supposed to go next to progress the game. The end result of this practice is that people become disassociated with the world the game is trying to build. "Who cares what this character is or what they're saying! I just need to move onto the next objective so I can be done with this game!" To me that is the very antithesis of a video game. Video games are meant to immerse people in them and to have developers build an entire world full of characters and locations only to have it completely ignored by the player feels downright disrespectful to the people who made the game.

Hollow Knight truly feels like what a video game is meant to be because of how heavy it leans on the player building their own path through the game. I would daresay that it's probably one of the most liberating games I have ever played because of how much freedom it gives the player while they play the game. Because there are no objectives or even a single order the game's map can be explored, the player is effectively forced to pay close attention to where they've been, what they've seen, and what they want to see next. In other words, it's a game purely driven by your own curiosity.

Of course, all this talk about exploration is meaningless if the world to be explored is boring. If every location in the game felt the same or did not have any substantial depth to them, this exploration would get boring very fast. Naturally then, Hollow Knight's locations have been carefully crafted such that there is variety in every single location.

When you start the game, things feel small; you start in a very boring town and there's only one way to progress; moving down into the depths of Hallownest. When you start, the game deceives you in this way by making you think that Hallownest is small and the only thing of note are the various caves full of Geo (in-game money) for you to get. However, Hollow Knight's map quickly becomes a hydra; explore one part of the map and then two new locations appear. After even a few hours of playing, you quickly realize that one small hole you found before has turned into over 10 different locations that are waiting for you to explore them. By the end of the game, the map becomes so massive that you start wondering how you even thought the game's map was so small to begin with.

While these locations are all a part of the same map, each one feels very distinct. Much like Minecraft biomes, the place you are exploring can change not only appearance, but tone is just a matter of seconds. One moment, you are in the calm, lively, open spaces of the City of Tears and the next you are in the dark, ominous, and crowded caves of Deepnest in your exploration. Each of these locations comes pact with their own set of enemies, music, and story that’s just waiting to be sought out through thorough investigation. Whether it’s talking to characters, searching through the remains of the deceased for a key item, or just plainly observing the scenery, every single location in Hollow Knight has some unique aspect it adds to the overall lore of the game.

It’s also worth calling out the interesting approach this game takes to developing its lore, story and mystery. There is almost never a point in the game where it’s just reciting some story to you or giving you some ten minute flashback about what happened in the past. It’s hidden in every aspect of the game. In fact, it is so hidden it’s possible to get through the entire game without really having any kind of understanding as to what is going on in the world.

There are some games out there that just drown the player in a completely unnecessary context that distracts from playing the game. While it’s nice when games have world building, there are times where I just want to play the game and not be given a 10 hour lecture on fictional science or politics. When a game has that kind of world building they want to give, they usually jam it away into optional side conversations that a player can activate if they want to learn or in what’s usually called a “journal” entry by some character you never get to meet. This is also, in my opinion, a very poor practice primarily because it’s incredibly boring and very inorganic. Many of these things feel like they were just given a second thought and exist to extend the game’s runtime/content for advertising.

In other games though, the developers do treat the world building with respect and at least put some effort into giving the backstory in a fun way. One of my personal favorites is how the backstory for Rosalina is explained in Super Mario Galaxy. While it’s optional and short, the medium it is told through is Rosalina reading you a children’s book that goes over her experiences and how they formed her into who she is when you meet her in the game. It fits the theme of the game well and it’s just a nice piece of context that you aren’t required to know about if you want to just play the game. However, it’s not quite perfect because you actually need to stop playing the game in order to get that context. It’s almost as if in many games story and gameplay are treated as two distinct entities that need to be separately fleshed out in order to work.

Hollow Knight does away with this and interleaves the story with the gameplay. When I said that every aspect of the game has some lore behind it, I really do mean every aspect. Even things as insignificant as how the signs you look at for 5 seconds get rebuilt after you destroy them have lore behind it. Despite the lore being incredibly deep, the interesting thing is that it’s often not exposed to you through optional side conversations or the typical journal entry you find lying on the ground. It’s exposed to you as you play the game. And no, it’s not through cutscenes or character conversations that just halt the gameplay. The story is embedded in the gameplay. It’s in the look of enemies you encounter as you play. It’s in the architecture of the buildings that form each of the in-game locations. There is even a whole ability you can earn that allows you to learn lore by reading the thoughts of enemies while you fight them in combat. Everything is meticulously placed for a reason and the game challenges you to think about why things exist as you explore the game. Super dedicated Hollow Knight fans have investigated every single thing put into this game and even today, years after the game launched, they are still finding new things that deeply change how they look at the story and world of Hollow Knight.

The major benefit of this gameplay-first approach to storytelling is that much of the lore and story is effectively optional. Again, you do not need to invest yourself in the story to enjoy Hollow Knight and many people find a lot of fun out of just speedrunning the game. But if you do choose to invest in it, it’s not as boring as reading a bunch of dry text. It involves actually playing and improving at the game so you can unlock hidden things. In other words, the game rewards you for exploring and being curious by offering things that change your view of the world. There is a legitimately fun reason to want to understand more about Hollow Knight and dig into it. To me, that’s one of the primary things that makes Hollow Knight such a brilliant and captivating game. It’s a continuous cycle of the gameplay supporting the narrative and the narrative supporting the gameplay that is just almost never done in many games today and it’s hard to put the game down without getting an itching feeling that you missed something important.

World building and story, while critical to exploration, they are just half of the whole. The gameplay of Hollow Knight is the other half that completes the game. In Hollow Knight, the gameplay mostly involves two things; platforming and fighting enemies.

On the platforming side of things, this often involves traversing new areas on your quest to find key items and progress. At the start, the controls you are given for platforming are rather simple; you can walk, jump, and hit things with your weapon, a nail. Naturally, as you might expect, where you can go with just these three abilities is rather limited. However, once you play the game more and explore new areas, you encounter bosses that give you brand new abilities that help you reach not only more places, but also help you backtrack very quickly through places where you’ve already been. You can earn abilities such as a very quick forward dash, a double jump, and even a hook that helps you climb walls. Getting these abilities after exploring for a bit is such a satisfying experience. Almost immediately it’s easy to see how these abilities would help you get to places you’ve never been to before and exploring these new areas is just like getting a gift for Christmas; you don’t usually know what you’re going to get, but it’s probably something good.

Despite the numerous abilities you get throughout the game, it never feels overwhelming and it also does not feel like any of these abilities are put in randomly. In most situations you use about 4 of these abilities (the exact abilities depend on what you’re doing) and they are very easy to master even after just a few minutes of using them. It’s a common trap for games to introduce very “one-off” abilities that feel like they were made with the sole intention of getting through one specific part of the game and then are never intended to be used again. In Hollow Knight, even things that were introduced to you within the first hours of the game will be used again up until your last hours of playing the game and it seems Team Cherry had the discipline to make sure they were adding in only abilities that could be used more than a couple times throughout the game. The result is that the set of abilities to help you platform is rather small, yet large enough that you actually have to think about how your abilities can be used in unique combos together to help you reach new areas in the map. Sometimes you need to climb up a wall then do a double jump dash to get to where you need to go. Other times, you need to carefully dash then do a double jump to avoid an obstacle or enemy. Again, the abilities are easy to master and by the end of the game you feel like a real speedrunning pro with how you use these abilities in tandem to traverse the map.

Next is the enemies. As I’ve mentioned before, every area in the game has a unique set of enemies. While there are hundreds of different enemies in this game each with their own unique quirks, the important ones are the big bosses that you encounter along the way. These bosses are usually what give you access to new abilities such as increased health, damage, or perks (called charms in the game) as well as access to new areas in the game. What’s interesting about these bosses is how you can feel your progression through the game as you fight them. If you are playing the game normally, you will typically encounter each boss once, yet each boss, in addition to the abilities they offer, give you some additional knowledge that helps bosses later on. Knowledge in this game comes in two categories; “factual” and “intuitive” knowledge.

As every boss in the game has a very small set of attacks and phases to them, there is at least one strategy that works very effectively for each boss in the game. Strategy is either using your abilities in the game to effectively dodge and attack the boss or coming up with an optimal charm build that works against the boss. I would call this knowledge “factual” as you get to experiment with combos against bosses that can be leveraged against other bosses as well as interesting quirks about the gameplay system that can make your life easier for some other bosses. In other words, these are factual tips that can help out later. For example, one interesting thing that people might not know when starting out is that you can attack spikes while jumping to get another bounce off of them. This is useful for quite a few bosses that require a good amount of dexterity to fight effectively.

The other form of knowledge is what I’ll coin “intuitive” as there’s really no numbers or factual thing about the gameplay that you’re learning, but just general things that can be applied to bosses later on. Things like how to get better at dodging attacks, how to be more confident and precise with your nail strikes, and how to effectively leverage spells to take out bosses quickly fall into this category. As you play the game more, you become more comfortable with its combat systems and learn how to effectively make use of them based on your style of play. If you are more of a pro at platforming, you can equip charms that will help you move around faster and more precisely which makes it easier to dodge attacks. If you’re more of the brawler type, there are charms and abilities that help you tank attacks while also dealing a lot more damage.

You might notice I am going deep into the combat system of Hollow Knight to explain the last few points. That’s because I am trying to illustrate that the gameplay itself is another form of the brilliant exploration the game utilizes. Beyond finding new areas, the game encourages you to experiment with enemies and abilities to match your style of play and to improve overall. I think that’s another key to why the exploration in this game works effectively. This game is not simply walking and exploring. Your progress is impeded constantly by huge and hard bosses looking to be an obstacle. At these points you are faced with a choice; you can try and fight the boss and experiment until you’ve mastered them or you can turn back and look for new abilities that will help you fight the boss. While there is often no correct choice, what you choose has major implications on what your experience will be in the game. Some players may choose to challenge themselves and take on bosses without having too many abilities under their belt. They will die a lot early on, but quickly ramp up on “intuitive” knowledge as they will not be relying heavily on abilities to take out bosses. This is critical for fighting very skill heavy bosses that appear near the end. On the other hand, you can also prioritize exploration and finding items which helps with getting through the easy bosses early, but makes things a bit of a struggle when fighting hard bosses at the end. This is what most people would call the “risk” aspect of the game and in this sense, the fun of the game is coming up with strategies to mitigate it. When should I fight this boss? Should I explore this area now or save it for later after I fight X? And certainly your choices are not the end all be all. If you fight a boss a few times and find it to be too hard, there is no shame in trying out some other area in the hopes it will reward you with something that will help you. Hollow Knight’s death system encourages you to take risks and face only minor penalties when they don’t pan out as you expect. When you die a little shadow is at the spot you died and you lose your money as well as a bit of your capacity to hold soul (the thing that powers your attack spells). To regain this, you just need to go back and kill the shadow. Once done, you’re back to exactly as you were before and nothing was lost except a bit of time. So it’s certainly very easy to experiment with bosses and have fun with learning their attack patterns as well as what works and what doesn’t.

So overall, the key to Hollow Knight’s fun is in its exploration. How you choose to explore the map. How you choose to fight bosses, And how you choose to solve the mystery the game has laid out in front of you. All of these things work together to give a unique take on risk versus reward that is unlike one I’ve seen in a game. There’s plenty of fun to be had in Hollow Knight even after the credits roll and after spending over 82 hours in the game myself, I can say that the base game has very little to be upset about, especially for the very low price tag it has on it today.

Now that I’ve talked about what works, let’s also spend a bit of time talking about what doesn’t work too well.

While this approach of letting the players explore the game completely works at the start while there are things to explore, it becomes a bit of a burden near the end. As I’ve mentioned before, the map is very huge once you’ve explored a good amount of it. At some points you run into walls that you cannot pass simply because you don’t have the right ability for it. Unless you were keeping track of all of these with markers, it’s extraordinarily hard to remember where you’ve gotten stuck before. Sometimes you can see it because the in-game map is cut off at the point where you were stuck, but other times it’s difficult to pinpoint every location on the map that’s cutoff. Sometimes these incredibly small entrances can be holding very key things to getting completion in the game, so it was rather annoying finding these places again without a guide.

There are also some things that are not even shown on the map or hinted at at all that are key to progressing the game. For instance, the last two DLCs in the game are accessed by breaking a couple of hidden walls in different areas. These walls are not shown on the map, there are no abilities to help you find it, and there are absolutely 0 interactions or objects in the game that allude to the location of the DLC. You just somehow have to have the eyesight to notice the wall is breakable when you pass it which is really annoying. At some point I just gave up and looked up a guide on where they were. I wish for things like this there was some indication as to where you needed to go to access it, but maybe I missed it. This really only becomes a problem when you are trying to complete the game though. I was able to pass the game without 100% completion without a guide just fine.

Lastly, there is the Godmaster DLC. This is the last DLC of the game and it essentially adds boss rush modes to the game. These boss rushes have you face bosses you have fought throughout the game previously as well as new bosses created just for the DLC. While I like the concept from the surface, its execution isn’t that great and it really goes in opposition to the points I made before. The exploration in this mode comes from the new bosses; the old bosses are sometimes slightly modified (e.g. for one of the bosses they removed the floor and made it so there are only floating platforms available to stand on). While that’s fine and dandy, to get to these bosses you have to go through bosses you’ve seen before. As I’ve mentioned before, these bosses are pretty hard. Some of them are fairly easy once you’re at this stage of the game and have pretty much every ability and upgrade in the game, but some bosses are a challenge even at this point. You have to be extraordinarily good at these bosses to beat the rushes (also called pantheons) and often that requires hours upon hours of practice. It’s very easy to get discouraged as a result.

The final pantheon is probably the worst of them all because in addition to adding new bosses, it takes pretty much every boss in the game and jams them all into a super mega boss rush that lasts for about an hour. And even worse it’s sorted by easiest to hardest meaning you are more likely to die at the end where you’ve spent the most time. Dying in the rush means you have to start at the very beginning with the easy bosses again. I have no idea why there are no checkpoints anywhere in the final pantheon. It just becomes an absolute slog fighting the first 30 bosses over and over again because they aren’t that hard. It’s really only the last bosses that cause trouble. Even dumber is that the final boss in that rush can only be practiced in isolation after being fought one time meaning you have to waste 45 minutes of your time to even get good enough to fight them. At this stage, the aspects of the game that were fun are now gone because all it is is just practicing at getting better at execution. You aren’t experimenting anymore and you certainly don’t have a choice of exploring other parts of the map for better abilities as you are already at your peak at this point. It just becomes a waiting game for the boss AI to finally like you and give you the win. I think just attempting this final room added 60 hours to my playtime. Your reward for this suffering is an achievement and a new ending so unless you really want it, I wouldn’t recommend going for it.

Hollow Knight is a really great game. It’s clear that Team Cherry put their absolute heart and soul into making sure this game was perfect and they did not disappoint. Every aspect of this game is polished. The gameplay is absolutely fun and it's clear they had a vision to make exploration the driving factor of this game from the very beginning and it shows in every aspect of the game. My only gripes with the game are if you are trying to be a completionist and do everything, but even then if you are dedicated enough to complete the game, I’m sure you could look past these flaws. I would highly recommend this game as not only just a fun game, but also as a project many other game developers can look at to understand the basic tenets of making a game fun. Hollow Knight may seem like a small game from the outside, but it has a lot of heart and soul to offer the player and a lot of charm to back it up. We will meet again when Silksong finally comes out.

TL;DR: A fairly weak entry in the Ace Attorney franchise that sets itself up for great things, but fails to tell a compelling story. While fun at some points, much of Dual Destinies is often irritating to play through due to how much it forgets the games that came before it.

Next in my journey through all of the Ace Attorney games is Dual Destinies. This game has received tons of criticism from both fans and newcomers alike and after playing through the entire game for a second time, it’s hard not to hop onto the hate train. Much like Apollo Justice, Dual Destinies presents innovative and fresh ideas at the cost of ditching the previous games that came before it. This completely new direction is seen in all facets of the game from the story to the art to the gameplay. While it’s great to see Ace Attorney trying to stay fresh and fun, in this game, it’s often not executed as well as it could be.

To start, let’s talk about the story. Dual Destinies takes place not too long after the events of Apollo Justice and focuses on continuing the plot of the Dark Age of the Law that it set up. In Dual Destinies, Phoenix makes his return to the courtroom after 7 years of being a hobo with the intent of ending this Dark Age of the Law chock full of corruption from the courts. By his side he has Apollo and a new attorney by the name of Athena Cykes who excels in psychology. Already in this description, there are a couple of things wrong with the game.

The first problem is that Phoenix is making a return to the courtroom. I said in my review of Apollo Justice that one of the great ideas they had with Phoenix’s character was to put him on the side and away from the spotlight. While the game didn’t live up to this idea, it was certainly interesting to think of how the game would be if Phoenix stayed as Apollo’s mentor and let him have the great moments of that game. In this game, they do the complete opposite of this good idea and have him take the spotlight again. With his badge back, he is now once again the protagonist of the game when he really has no business being one anymore. Not that I don’t love Phoenix Wright, but if Ace Attorney wants to convince me that their new characters are worth anything, they have to give them moments that give them value. With Phoenix at the helm again, he steals these moments and pushes everyone else to the side.

The second problem is that they’re introducing a new attorney into the mix. While Athena Cykes is a fine character, in my opinion, there is no room for her to actually be an attorney here. They have barely even started exploring Apollo’s character and adding in Athena Cykes means they have to spread time more thinly across all the characters. In the end, the breakdown is that Phoenix gets 2 out of the 3 story related cases, Apollo gets 1 story case and 1 filler case, and Athena gets 1 filler case. Even in the game after this, Spirit of Justice, she again gets 1 filler case and nothing else (and this filler case she gets happens to be the worst case in the game). So overall, even though the story is centered around her, you don’t even get to see her act as an attorney at all. They made this mistake once with Apollo Justice, and they made it yet again here. This is irritating point number 1. Things get worse when you consider how the game ends. More on that later.

After the premise, there is the actual plot of the game. As I mentioned before, the plot of the game focuses on this concept called the Dark Age of the Law. The Dark Age of the Law began when Phoenix presented forged evidence in court 7 years ago and a prosecutor commited murder. People began to lose faith in the courts and defense attorneys and prosecutors alike had been taught that in the end, only verdicts and results matter instead of finding the truth. I think this concept is fantastic for a followup game for Apollo Justice where literally the villain of the game was the embodiment of this concept. They had the perfect continuation for the game,so you would expect it to at least callback to the events of that game, wouldn’t you? Well if you did, you’d be dead wrong; Dual Destinies doesn’t even attempt to do anything like this. They set themselves up with the perfect opportunity to correct the mistakes of Apollo Justice and at the same time tell a plot that fits perfectly into the new story being built up. But instead of taking this opportunity, they just completely abandon Apollo Justice and start from scratch. By scratch, I mean literally start everything from scratch. This is irritating point number 2.

Let’s start with Phoenix. In Apollo Justice, Phoenix’s character was completely different. He made sure to rarely show emotion and act like a mature attorney. In the one case in Apollo Justice where you play as him, there’s a sense of experience and calmness from him. He doesn’t even panic when charges of forging evidence come on him and he always keeps a straight face in the most harsh of situations. It was an absolutely perfect embodiment of the lessons he learned after the events in Trials and Tribulations. In addition, it was perfect for that game since they constantly make mention to even the tiniest of emotions giving away people’s intentions and character. One tiny movement of a finger was enough for Apollo to take advantage of people’s weakness and find the truth and Phoenix made sure to give nothing away.

In Dual Destinies, he completely regresses to how he was in the first game. Every 5 seconds someone needs to bring up the fact that he bluffs and whenever he’s trying to make legitimate points in court, they just bring it down by saying it’s a bluff and he’s just some third rate attorney. Even in situations that are very easy to get out of, Phoenix loses his cool and breaks down into a cold sweat. I think there were almost no points in this game where Phoenix could do anything without hesitating and acting like a complete newbie. I miss that confident Phoenix from Apollo Justice and having him regress so much in this game feels like a disservice to what happened in the trilogy.

Next, let’s talk about Apollo Justice. If you have read my review of Apollo Justice, you will know that I am not a fan of his story in that game. The highlight of his story in that game was his origin. The game spends a fair bit of time explaining how his true parentage makes him special and gives him his powers. They don’t wrap up all loose ends though and leave many things for his origin to be explored. Dual Destinies decides to take that setup and do absolutely nothing with it other than to use it as leverage for yet another backstory for Apollo. I don’t know who put it into the head of the guy writing stories for the new Ace Attorney games, but there are far more interesting ways of making a character relevant to the story than to give them a tragic backstory. Ryunosuke in The Great Ace Attorney doesn’t even have one, yet in every single event in the story, he earns his place. More than being an attorney, his heritage and resolve are what are vastly important in making him feel relevant in every single case you play in. Apollo is only relevant because of the backstory the game gives him and they use this approach every time they want to expand his character. Instead of giving him natural growth, they just make him remember what he learned from some tragic backstory that he has. It’s quite boring in terms of character development and serves to only make his character more complicated than it needs to be. To be clear, I’m not saying that giving a character a tragic backstory is a bad idea, but when it’s the only form of development a character gets (like Apollo) it’s very bad.

Besides characters regressing, you also have a brand new plotline that focuses on Athena’s backstory. While Athena’s backstory is hyped up much at the start of the game, it only becomes relevant in the last two cases. The last two cases focus heavily on a murder that took place at a space station many years ago as well as a second murder that happened at the space station recently. While the cases themselves aren’t bad, their effect on the overall plot is horrendous. To talk about irritating point 3 here, I’ll need to delve into spoilers.

=== BEGIN SPOILER FOR CASES 4 AND 5 ===

In the last two cases, we see both Athena’s and Apollo’s backstories come into full play. Apollo is grief stricken as the murder victim is his childhood friend Clay Terran and Athena has to recall the events that made her lose her mother’s life. This stuff is the good stuff; we learn more about Apollo and Athena as characters and we get to see their beliefs come into play. It’s very reminiscent of AAI2’s conclusion where Edgeworth’s actions help people choose their own paths in life, even if they’re different from the path the people before them have taken. In the end, much of Ace Attorney is about finding the truth, no matter what form it takes. Whether it’s being a lawyer and exposing criminals in court, or being an astronaut and searching space for the cosmic truth, everyone has their own way of finding the “one truth” at the end of the journey.

With that being said, the way the 5th case concludes takes this premise and completely throws it out of the window for shock factor. The villain of that case, The Phantom, is easily one of the worst written villains to ever grace Ace Attorney. He has absolutely nothing to do with what came before in the games and comes completely out of nowhere in the last case. His only personality trait is that he can wildly vary his emotions and the only real connection he has to the main plot of the game is that he’s a villain who committed a crime. This is exactly the kind of character that has no business being in Ace Attorney in any capacity. The game tries to make you think he’s some kind of intimidating presence, but he comes off as a pussy because of how little he actually does.

To explain this better, I will compare him with someone who is similar, Shelly de Killer. Shelly de Killer in Justice for All is a force to be reckoned with.

He first off actually does stuff. He kidnaps Maya and makes demands of you. It’s clear if you don’t appeal to his commands, he will not hesitate to kill Maya. The Phantom doesn’t do anything like this and just relies on his name to carry him. This completely removes any sense of fear or intimidation from his character. It’s not enough to just say he’s a dangerous criminal; we need to actually see it in action to be scared of it. The one who does any actual kidnapping in this case is someone who is not at all related to him.

Second are the rules they follow. Shelly de Killer is an honorable assassin meaning he lives by a strict set of rules and expects his clients to do the same. If he is betrayed, then he will not hesitate to seek revenge. This trait is used beautifully in the final case of Justice for All to catch the true killer. The Phantom’s only rule is not to expose his identity. He doesn’t want his identity exposed because he runs the risk of being assassinated himself. This would be a fine rule if it was actually followed. This stupid idiot, as soon as Phoenix starts grilling him, pulls out all of his spy gadgets, starts ripping off his masks, and varies his emotions (which by the way was directly stated was something only the phantom can do). He is practically screaming out that he is the Phantom by existing. It’s only when Phoenix points out the obvious conclusion with evidence that a sniper takes him out. How could anyone have conceived a villain so horrible at following their own rules?????

Lastly, we have their relevance to the game. In Justice for All, Shelly de Killer is super important to the message of the game. Finding the truth is not an easy thing to do and sometimes sacrifices must be made in search of it. Justice for All’s finale gave the player serious questions to consider and a choice to make. The game even lets you make this choice and choose for yourself what it means to be a lawyer. Even though it doesn’t affect the story, the choice itself and the implications of the player’s choice could only have been proposed if Shelly de Killer actually posed a serious threat to the player. In Dual Destinies, the goal of the plot is to end The Dark Age of the Law. You would expect someone who is actually involved with the law and the courts would be the big baddie at the end of the road. Instead, you get The Phantom whose only connection with The Dark Age of the Law is that he blamed a crime on Prosecutor Blackquill a bunch of years ago. The game treats it like The Dark Age of the Law is something that could be solved simply by catching this random spy who committed a crime. But that’s not at all true from what the game presented us. The Dark Age of the Law is a mindset; something that is drilled into lawyers even when they’re in school as case 3 showed. Catching one villain who is barely connected to the courts doesn’t seem like it does anything to change the mindset of people. This would be a good middle chapter to a longer running story on The Dark Age of the Law, but the plotline just kind of sizzles out here.

=== END SPOILER FOR CASES 4 AND 5 ===

So overall, I’m not a huge fan of this plot. It has great moments in it for sure, but the main plot is pretty terrible. It reminds me a lot of Apollo Justice; instead of just being a fairly simple game that introduces new characters, it feels the need to just up the trilogy in weird ways and it tries too hard to achieve it. It tries to be different than the trilogy, but new isn’t necessarily better when it comes to plot. Forgetting everything that happened before and starting over is the worst thing a sequel to anything can do. It’s a shame to see that Dual Destinies is taking this route.

The plot is my biggest gripe with the game, so the next few points should hopefully be shorter. Next up we have the gameplay. The main difference in the gameplay here is the introduction of the new Mood Matrix mechanic. During a trial, when a witness does not want to testify, you get the opportunity to conduct a therapy session with them and observe their emotions during the crime. As they show you their emotions, you find ones that seem out of place and continue this until there is no more discord left in their emotions. I think on paper, this is actually a very great and creative mechanic. It’s fairly simple and intuitive to understand. You just look at a testimony and find a contradiction using the 4 emotions. Nothing too out of the ordinary with normal gameplay. In addition, there’s a wide amount of variety possible with it. The game itself takes great advantage of the variability and has segments where emotions can run out of control and also points where you can use evidence to point out contradictions with the witness’s memory.

The big problem with the mood matrix is how it’s applied practically. The mechanic in practice is far too easy. If you get an emotion wrong, there is absolutely no penalty. Also, to avoid any ambiguities, the game makes it painfully obvious what the wrong emotion is most of the time. If there’s a point where the witness says “I saw the dead body with blood pouring out of their eye sockets in an incredibly gruesome way,” the game will put Happy over it. There were almost no points where I got stuck on the mood matrix, but for the rare occasion where I did get stuck, I could just guess literally everything with no penalty. It’s practically begging to be skipped. In Apollo Justice there was some penalty for getting perceive wrong so you had incentive to at least try and think.

Other than that, the gameplay is pretty similar to what we’ve seen before. Trials and investigations are still the main method of gameplay and there are short segments in the investigation where you get to use Apollo’s bracelet and Phoenix’s Magatama. These segments have also been made easier since there’s also no penalty for making mistakes there which is different from the way it was before. Perceive specifically has been made 1000 times easier since the game only uses it during investigations and there’s also a huge glowing icon whenever you’re supposed to use it so you never have to actually think of when to do it. This is a pretty big downgrade. I liked how it was used in trials to make progress whenever you hit a dead end and were stuck. It also took a bit of thinking since the game put it in cross examinations with multiple statements. Now it’s pretty brainless and feels like a chore to get past since you have to slowly wait for the right statement to find the nervous tick on. Taking existing gameplay and making it easier for no reason is irritating point 4.

Next we have the characters. I’ve talked at length about Apollo and Phoenix, so let’s try Athena next. Like I mentioned before, Athena is a fine character, but she isn’t given that many chances to grow as one. We learn about her tragic past near the end of the game, which is great, but a major problem is that they basically gave away all of it and didn’t really leave her with a place to belong once they were finished. In Spirit of Justice, I constantly asked “why is she still here” whenever she did anything. It’s not that I don’t like her, but rather what purpose does she still have in these games? Her story wrapped up quite nicely in this one and there aren’t any more avenues of her character left to explore. I have an itching feeling that if they make another Ace Attorney game with her in it, they will give her another tragic backstory to give her a sense of purpose. It was more than possible to get around this by actually giving her her own set of beliefs that are different from Phoenix and Apollo. What did she learn from her traumatic experience other than that she can mix psychology and lawyering together? The game doesn’t spend any time expanding on this so her character is still unclear.

As for side characters, they’re alright. Blackquill is an absolutely amazing prosecutor and he's incredibly funny. Perfect antagonist for an AA game. While he doesn’t have the emotional impact that someone like Edgeworth or Godot had, he does well enough on his own to warrant a thumbs up from me. The case specific characters are at least what I expect of AA, but they aren’t that great. One of my favorite things about playing The Great Ace Attorney was that almost every character put a huge smile on my face and made me gush out with all sorts of emotion. Everything from their distinct personalities to their designs was something I absolutely loved. Dual Destinies doesn’t really have that kind of impact on me unfortunately. While colorful, many of the characters are lacking charm. It’s hard to describe what “charm” here constitutes, but I think most people who have played this game and The Great Ace Attorney (or even the trilogy) would agree that there is something different about the characters in this game and the characters in that game that just makes them more likeable.

Lastly, we have art and music. After seeing both The Great Ace Attorney and Spirit of Justice, looking back at the 3D models in this game makes it feel like the game is unfinished. There’s a certain level of polish in TGAA and SoJ that this game is missing. It’s hard to describe what that polish is, but it’s easy to see when comparing two pictures of the games. There’s also a distinct lack of 3D animation in this game. Having those animations in The Great Ace Attorney and Spirit of Justice really made the game feel more alive. Most of the heavy animation in this game is done with anime cutscenes, and while many of these are justified, some could have easily been replaced with just 3D animation that would have fit it better. Some examples include Phoenix entering the court for the first time in the game and when they find Apollo knocked out in the destroyed courtroom.

As for the music, it’s alright. It’s up to par with the Ace Attorney standard, but it’s nothing special. It has a nice space theme throughout it, but I’m not really a huge fan of it. Something like Trucy’s theme, which was styled to fit the soundtrack of AJ, doesn’t fit that well in this game since it sounds like you’re eating at some fancy restaurant as opposed to getting ready to explore a complicated plot at the space station. It’s a very mixed bag of really good tracks and tracks that work well on their own but don’t fit the overall theme of the game.

So overall, Dual Destinies is not a terrible game. It gets many things right and it’s often fun to play through. Its main issue is that it doesn’t fit at all into AA continuity and irritatingly just ignores it while it tries to be fun and unique. I love it when it’s just sticking to what was fun about the previous games while twisting the formula slightly. The DLC case is the perfect embodiment of this. It’s not unnatural for Ace Attorney to do weird things like cross examine animals, but the ending of that case is something that is done very rarely if ever in most cases. It’s plain and simple and doesn’t overcomplicate things. Unfortunately, most of the other cases don’t follow its example. I personally wish this game didn’t exist and Spirit of Justice came after it since it fits in better with the story. Unfortunately, this game continues to be in the main Ace Attorney franchise, and despite how much Capcom tries to make us forget about it existing, it’s already too deep to be forgotten.

TL;DR: Easily becoming my favorite game of all time, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles poses itself as one of the best mystery stories ever conceived thanks to its colorful cast of characters, grand plot, and joyous gameplay. The team behind this deserves the highest of praise for their absolute dedication to this project.

Before I start this review I want to give a warning. I expect that this review will be incredibly long and contain spoilers for this game and other games in the series. I will clearly mark where the spoilers happen so you can skip over them, but if you don’t want to risk looking at them don’t read this review until you’ve completed them. This game deserves praise for everything it does and I can’t really talk about everything it does without spoiling some of it.

To start, let’s talk about my impressions of the game before I ever even played it starting out with the initial gameplay trailers. I first saw the trailers not too long after I had completed Apollo Justice for the first time and I started with the trailer for the first game. The first thought I had when I saw this trailer was fear. The major problem I had with Apollo Justice was one of identity. Who is this game about and who is it going to focus on? As I explained very in depth in my Apollo Justice review, the focus of that game was Phoenix Wright even though it wasn’t even in his own game. In these trailers, they heavily pushed the idea that the main character Ryunosuke Naruhodo was the ancestor of Phoenix Wright as if that’s the only reason you’re supposed to like him. It seemed to be his complete identity from the trailers since that’s the title he’s given. In terms of gameplay, I had expected much of the plot and world to dedicate itself to somehow pandering back to Phoenix Wright’s world and failing to form its own identity like Apollo Justice.

I am pleased to report that I was proven dead wrong from the very first case. When the first game, Adventures, first came out it was only in Japan. Some YouTubers had managed to translate the entire game and each of their cases into English though so I started by watching all of those videos for the first game. Even without playing the game at all, I was hooked into the game by almost everything that was presented. From the very first frames of the game, you are presented with something new.

The very first new thing you are presented with is the setting. This game begins in Japan during the Meiji Period; a time of great reform in Japan as it is the first time they opened their ports to the world in years. They had just finished signing a treaty with the largest superpower in the world at the time, Great Britain, and began to be greatly influenced by their culture. How does the game make this clear to you besides just flat out telling you? The dev blogs go into great depth on this, but the gist of it is that these references were carefully inserted into every facet of the game from the clothes people wear to the brief political debates characters have in the courtroom. Even the way the first case ends is heavily dependent on the events happening at the time. The point here is that the setting is not for show; this game and its story would not work at all if it didn’t take place in the setting it did. Already the game justifies one of its major selling points.

The next new thing you are presented with are the characters. In this game, the protagonist is Ryunosuke Naruhodo, a university student who has just been accused of murder! And not the murder of just anyone, but one of London’s most praised scientists. In order to avoid the harshest of sentences, he must team up with his best friend and aspiring defense lawyer Kazuma Asogi to prove his innocence. I think there are two things to point out here.

The first is that nowhere in this description or in this entire series is Phoenix Wright mentioned or even relevant. From the very start of Apollo Justice, his identity was linked to Phoenix Wright’s. I mean this in the most tight of ways; Apollo Justice could not exist without Phoenix Wright because he is so crucial to his development. That was the fundamental problem behind the identity crisis of Apollo Justice and it’s what made the game fail; Phoenix didn’t need Apollo, but Apollo needed him and so he was too dependent on him. In this game, Ryunosuke is the focus of the story and he doesn’t need to depend on anyone who has come before to tell his story. They even had rejected some themes that were too similar to the original Ace Attorney themes because the game looked and felt so different from the originals.

The second is that even though Ryunosuke is the main character, he doesn’t even start out as a lawyer. Pretty much every single main character in Ace Attorney has some tragic backstory that led them to where they are now and it’s this backstory that gives them a connection to the plot of the game. When this is done with moderation, it’s not a bad strategy. This is how Phoenix makes his mark in the first and third game. But this can backfire by giving us characters like Apollo Justice who constantly become the butt of Ace Attorney memes because he has so many backstories. In this game though, they decided to take a new risk and instead have Ryunosuke become a lawyer due to circumstance. Like backstories, this can also backfire; if Ryunosuke wanders aimlessly for the entire game and just says he’s a lawyer because he was forced to, then that makes him feel incredibly distant from the plot of the game. However, in this game, they take a careful effort to make sure that Ryunosuke has a deep emotional connection to every case in the game. As a result, his development feels a lot more natural than the characters with a backstory. More on this later.

The last thing this case gives you is new music and animation. One of the best things about any Ace Attorney game are the soundtracks and character animations. These two things are really what differentiate these games from just novels and it’s these two things that give each game their own unique identity and burst of excitement.

If you listen to the music in Professor Layton versus Phoenix Wright, for example, there is a very medieval and fantasy vibe present in the Labyrinthia tracks and a very refined vibe in the English tracks. These tracks are responsible for putting you in the right mood to investigate at any time because the tracks are specifically tailored for the situation. The Great Ace Attorney is no different. As the dev blogs mention, the tracks use instruments inspired by the time period and location the game takes place in. The first case takes place in Japan, so you get traditional Japanese instruments. But the twist is that, like I said before, Japan at the time was under a new era of reform due to western influence, and so little traces from the tracks that primarily play when the game takes place in London are also present even here. I think the one of the best examples of this is in this track that plays during the first case of the second game.

As for the animation, the animation in any Ace Attorney game is there so you can immediately deduce the personality of the characters from their motions. More hyper characters have more dynamic movements as an example. Ryunosuke in this case has animations that transcend anything the series has put out so far. His pupils and nervous movements at the start of the first case make the player feel just as nervous as him. Additionally the primary witness, Jezail Brett moves with slow and refined movements that immediately paint her as someone noble, but quickly change their meaning as you learn more about her true identity over the course of the games. These animations serve both as subtle foreshadowing for future events, but also are just plain fun to look at because of how fluid and neat they look in comparison to other games in the series.

These are the initial impressions I got just from looking at the first case on a poor quality recording of someone’s 3DS and just directly translated. Even through such a medium, I can already sense that this game had a grand vision for what it wanted to do and it would stop at nothing to achieve it. I knew this game was different from anything that came before it and I quickly watched the entire first game and the first case of the second one this way when it was fully translated by fans. Skip a few years later and we finally get both game packages together as a bundle in Chronicles. I said as much in my review of the first Ace Attorney game, but really this series belongs on PC. Playing it myself with a mouse and keyboard was a far better experience than I would have gotten with a tiny DS screen and stylus. These animations have a right to be looked at on a large high resolution monitor or TV because they are so dynamic and fluid. Additionally, the yellow filter that is put on the 3DS version is now gone and the characters look even more stunning and colorful than when I first saw them. Overall, I am pleased to say that Chronicles as a bundle and game truly is a great package even if you’ve seen everything it has to offer before. That’s why, for the rest of this review, I will talk about things not as separate games, but I will instead treat them as one mega game. I feel this is the intended way to play the game because both parts are so highly dependent on one another. If you, for whatever reason, attempted to play the Resolve first you would be deathly confused and if you tried to play Adventures only, you would make the producer of this game upset if you leave a review saying it’s incomplete.

With that, let’s now expand on the points brought up from the first case starting with the setting. With the exception of a few cases, the game takes place in the capital of Great Britain, London. The transition from Japan to London feels almost magical as almost everything is different from the setting from the first case. In the first case, things felt small; Japan’s courtroom could only seat a few people, you spend your time inside a small defendant’s lobby, and the opening cutscenes show very uncrowded streets. The very first thing you see in London is an enormous train station flooded with people that leads into a busy street surrounded by enormous buildings. It sounds quite grand, but the actual images being displayed and music playing seem to suggest the opposite; they suggest that these are just the day to day activities of people in London. Part of what makes this game so exciting to play is that it feels a lot like you’re looking through a time machine into the past and seeing what the world was like at the time. Even though the game doesn’t concern itself with being even close to historically accurate, just seeing things like jurors complaining that the trial should end because they have to get home soon to feed their family or Sholmes explaining how pawnbrokers are used by many people in London goes a long way to making it feel like you really are seeing just a small part of this lively world setup by the game. Spirit of Justice tried to go for a similar vibe with Khura’in, but I find the setting here more exciting since it feels like there’s more to be explored.

There are times though when the game steps away from normal London life and thrusts you into the heart of something grand. The very first locations you visit in London are the Lord Chief Justice’s office and the Old Bailey, London’s most grand courtroom. Both locations are incredibly enormous; the Lord Chief Justice’s office is structured like a giant clock and its gears moving echo through the room when it’s silent and the Old Bailey has at its center a giant pendulum with fiery scales that lean depending on the mood of the jurors. There are less imposing locations that you get to see later in the game like the Great Exhibition of London that further build the game’s world. A big part of the story and time period is that, like Japan, London was going through a great change as well in the name of the Victorian Era. The era was defined by Britain taking its place as a world superpower by adopting industrialization and science. This change can be seen by the constant references to innovations in science such as forensics, autopsy reports, and even hot air balloons. It’s also present in the way certain characters dress; Sholmes and Iris, for instance, were designed with a very steampunk aesthetic in mind to highlight this. The main point here is that the setting, even after Japan, works not only to give a glimpse into the time period the game takes place in, but to build characters up in smart ways and give a firm ground for the plot to play in. Like I said before, this game would not work in any other time period.

Next we have the characters. The characters in this game are absolutely the best in the series for two reasons; they are the epitome of fun Ace Attorney characters and they were carefully designed to support the setting and plot of this game as best as possible. Back in my review of the very first Ace Attorney game, I mentioned that one of its biggest strengths was that the people you talk to, both in trials and investigations, were full of color and personality. This is what made it fun to tap literally every single object in the background and it’s also why I despise Apollo Justice so much. Characters in Ace Attorney can easily make or break the game. I am pleased to report that this game is the exact opposite of Apollo Justice; instead of there being at least one reason to hate every character, there’s at least one reason to love every character. In this game every character gets the spotlight at least once, whether it’s someone as significant as Herlock Sholmes or someone as transient as juror number 3 in the third case. During the time in the spotlight, you get the zany and whacky Ace Attorney personalities that fans have come to expect from the series from over a decade of games.

What makes these characters the best though? It’s hard to describe generally, but I think for most characters it boils down to their role/impact on the story, the way they speak or dress, or the way they move around. No Ace Attorney game, even Spirit of Justice, has had the level of movement these characters have in their animations, nor the level of effort put in to make sure everyone is adding onto the setting of the game. Every character lends itself to the plot and world in their own unique way and it all culminates into a beautiful final product that’s better than anything put out there.

=== BEGIN SPOILER FOR CASE 5 OF ADVENTURES ===

Eggert Benedict (yeah I’m calling him that) is the best example of this I can come up with and I love him since he falls into all 3 categories. Storywise, his motive is inspired by the emphasis on a class system present in the time period and is responsible for showing the darker side of London by literally making a deal with Inspector Gregson in the middle of the case to make sure government secrets were not leaked. I don’t think there are many Ace Attorney cases with a smarter ending and the ending could only have happened thanks to his unique role in the story.

As for the way he speaks/dresses, his entire look was designed so he looks like a stereotypical rich London man. He has fancy suits, a staff with his initials on it, and speaks a lot more eloquently than most people in the game. The instant you look at him, you immediately feel he’s someone important that you should keep an eye on.

Lastly, his movements. I don’t think there is an Ace Attorney character with more funny and eccentric motions than this guy. Every single time he does anything, he just dances around with a straight face on and ends in a pose. Besides just being the funniest thing ever, it immediately tells you that he’s not the typical rich man his clothes would like you to believe he is. His secret behind the movements can be found by studying the motions of the Skulkin Brothers who he spent a lot of his childhood with. It’s a smart and subtle way of foreshadowing his motive without any words.

This character just makes me smile every time I see him because of how funny he is and how exciting he turns out to be once you investigate him. It’s not typical that I crack a smile/laugh every time I look at an Ace Attorney character, but it’s the norm in this game because of characters like him.

=== END SPOILER FOR CASE 5 OF ADVENTURES ===

That was a big spoiler, but in addition to the character talked about here, I feel also obligated to write a paragraph about how great Herlock Sholmes is. Whoever decided that he should be in this story deserves a raise and a promotion because it was the smartest decision they could have possibly made. He fits in perfectly with the story and time period the game is going for. In a time so heavily influenced by scientific advances and investigations, there is no better choice than him. In the Sherlock Holmes stories, he often solves crimes by investigating things that were normally written off as irrelevant such as the type of shoe the criminal wore or what they smoked. He did this using a wide variety of chemicals he makes himself. Herlock Sholmes takes a similar approach in his investigations and is often ridiculed for it in this game. He also adds on to the mood the game sets which is that you’re on a grand adventure that should be told for all time in stories. Each chapter opens up as if you are reading a Sherlock Holmes novel with all its witty writing and dramatic language. His animations and references also feel like they’re taken straight out from the novels. His banter about violins and his bowing animation that looks as if he just gave a concert to an enormous audience are testaments to this (that are directly mentioned near the start of the first novel A Study in Scarlet no less). Lastly, his Dance of Deduction is the greatest gameplay mechanic ever put in Ace Attorney. I will talk more about this later, but what works here for his character is that it both gives him the eccentric personality of a standard Ace Attorney character, but ties him directly to his counterpart in the novel since many of his incorrect deductions are based on the short stories in the novels.

=== BEGIN SPOILER FOR CASE 5 OF ADVENTURES ===

My favorite incorrect deduction that is based on one of the stories has to be the one in this case where he incorrectly deduces that Eggert Benedict’s crime is trying to dig a hole underneath the pawnbroker and rob the Great Exhibition’s funding. This is a direct reference to an actual crime inspired by Sherlock Holmes.

=== END SPOILER FOR CASE 5 OF ADVENTURES ===

Now onto the plot. For the reason I gave before, I think this is the biggest reason why Chronicles is the best way to experience these adventures. Both sides of the story feel incomplete without one another, unlike most Ace Attorney games that came before. The plot spans across 10 cases and is intricately set up for a majority of them. There are only 2 filler cases out of the 10, but even the two filler cases have a nice little subplot to them that connect them. The point here is that this plot is enormous and incredibly wide in scope and is therefore the most ambitious Ace Attorney plot to date.

=== BEGIN SPOILER FOR AJ, DD, and SoJ ===

I think it is important to make a quick note about my feelings about the most recent Ace Attorney games. It’s certainly not easy to craft a plot over a duology of games. If people absolutely hate the plot of even one game, then the entire thing crumbles. The place where I think this effect is most present are in the 3 most recent games to the mainline Ace Attorney series which are Apollo Justice, Dual Destinies, and Spirit of Justice.

AJ was not a great game in my eyes since it didn’t really do much to make Apollo an interesting character without Phoenix. As I noted in my AJ review also, they had the potential to make this work. DD could have been a game where it was only Apollo and Phoenix working side by side to solve cases with Phoenix acting like a mentor to Apollo. Instead of trying to recover from AJ though, they completely discarded everything it setup. Klavier Gavin and a few other obscure references seem to be the only things that have survived from that game when it had so much more to offer. DD’s goal instead was to just completely hit the reset button on Apollo’s origin story and give him a new one. Because of that, again, DD had the same problems as AJ; it tried to shoehorn both Apollo and Phoenix while also shoving Athena into it. With only 5 cases (and two of them even being filler!) there’s absolutely no time for any meaningful development for these characters. So what did they do in SoJ? They hit the reset button again and, while it was a bit more successful, it still had the same problems. Athena literally only gets one case and it’s one of the worst filler cases in Ace Attorney. Phoenix and Apollo split the plot, but they once again start Apollo’s backstory from scratch because they can and he feels completely fragmented as a character because of it.

When Adventures came out, it wasn’t well received because it felt incomplete. Ryunosuke’s story only felt like it was just beginning and people wanted closure on the plot. Though, instead of just forgetting about it because of negativity, the team for this game had the resolve to see their vision through. They took what they had made in the first game and expanded on it. They effectively forced things to have relevance by making them important in the second game. That is how you recover from negativity. Resetting a game loses all the work and greatness forever, whereas this repurposes it and gives it value. I hope the team behind the mainline games takes this example and learns from it.

=== END SPOILER FOR AJ, DD, and SoJ ===

Besides being ambitious, I think this is also one of the more darker and thematic plots in Ace Attorney. I think the most engaging thing about the end of Trials and Tribulations was its ambiguous ending. There’s a lot to look at and examine in that ending, character-wise, and it ties directly into the central themes of the original trilogy.

=== BEGIN SPOILER FOR T&T AND ALL OF CHRONICLES ===

The big reveal at the end of the Bridge to the Turnabout was that Godot was the one who killed the victim after he had seen she was channeling Dahlia Hawthorne through her. At the end of that case, a lurking question was about the motive. Did he kill to protect Maya Fey, or did he do it out of revenge? He gives evidence that he might have done it out of revenge, even though he knew that wasn’t actually Dahlia Hawthorne, but everyone comforts him by believing in his desire to protect Maya Fey. That’s what leads to his saying of “A lawyer cries only when it’s all over” having significant meaning.

That is the key behind the brilliance of the whole trilogy; this message of an unwavering belief in finding the truth. There are people out there who are unable to defend themselves because they lack the knowledge or power to do so. Only by pursuing the whole truth and nothing but the whole truth can we hope to decide if these people are truly innocent or if they deserve judgement for their sins. That’s what makes this question so powerful. Is Godot innocent or guilty? We can’t truly decide until we have seen the whole truth, which is impossible. Not even Godot himself seems capable of knowing the whole truth. So what do we have left to rely on? Faith. The evidence is the only thing that matters in court, but the evidence doesn’t tell the whole truth and so we’re left with our emotions. Do we believe that Godot would be capable of ending a life out of revenge? By Maya affirming that she believes in his innocence, that’s enough for him and it’s all he needs to hear to say the case is closed.

Chronicles seems like a natural expansion of this question. What happens when your faith is misplaced and you’re betrayed? This betrayal is present all throughout the duology. Ryunosuke is betrayed by McGilded after he puts his full effort into defending him, Barok van Zieks is betrayed by his older brother Klint and his best friend Genshin Asogi after it turns out Klint was the infamous criminal The Professor, and Gina is betrayed by Inspector Gregson after it turns out he was part of the organization known as The Reaper. Many different views are presented throughout this game to answer this question. For Barok and Gina, their answer at one point was to completely shut the world out. It’s better not to trust anyone so there’s absolutely no risk of being betrayed later. However, we humans are imperfect social creatures; we cannot hope to do everything ourselves and must rely on other humans at some point.

That’s where Ryunosuke’s unique vision comes in. Even though he himself was betrayed, he knows that there is nothing he could have done about it. He didn’t have the whole truth in his hands and so all he could do was trust in the innocence of his client since he was a defense lawyer. If he is betrayed, then so be it. We must have the resolve to move forward and believe that the truth will come out eventually as long as we try and pursue it. The game explains this a lot more eloquently than I do, but that’s the gist of it. Because of his view, both Barok and Gina change their points of view and trust Ryunosuke to defend them with their lives. They also both deal with their own betrayals in their own way. Barok discloses the information of Klint being The Professor publicly and takes on Kazuma as his apprentice. Gina still remains a Scotland Yard inspector to honor Gregson’s mentorship and kindness to her. That’s both growth and a natural continuation of the themes laid out in the trilogy which already makes it a perfect sequel.

In terms of character growth, Ryunosuke goes on a fundamentally different journey than Phoenix Wright, even though they both end up in similar spots by the end. Continuing the point I made a while back ago where I said the game has a lot more natural growth, by the end of Chronicles it is quite clear that Ryunosuke is fundamentally different in his ideals. He starts out simply as a vessel for Kazuma’s mission to change the legal system for the better, but over time the game starts to give him more freedom and choices to make on his own. In case 3 of Adventures, he questions whether it’s right for a defense attorney to go against their client in the name of the truth, and it actually gives the player a choice. Even though the choice doesn’t affect the story, the game really plays off this feeling the choice gives you for the remainder of the game; what is a defense lawyer’s job? Is it the pursuit of truth or the defense of their client as written in the law? This is the question that is played on for the entire duration of the game and it feels a lot different from how Phoenix grows because Phoenix starts out with this vision of defending those who cannot stand up for themselves long before he even becomes a lawyer. Seeing Ryunosuke come into it naturally as he builds his own beliefs about the situations he’s thrown in feels a lot more natural than the growth Phoenix had in the trilogy in my opinion.

=== END SPOILER FOR T&T AND ALL OF CHRONICLES ===

Stepping away from the themes, I just really love how gradually the plot is built throughout the entire game. It’s a slow ramp up that feels a lot more natural than the typical style of the series which is to throw everything at you at once at the very end. It’s the opposite of Ace Attorney Investigations. The benefit to this is that you get to build your own theories as the game progresses and it feels incredibly satisfying to see the truth come out even if your predictions were right or wrong. You have time to think about the implications of certain pieces of evidence/information and see your views of characters change over time slowly instead of all at once like a slap in the face. I wish more games in the series would adopt this style.

Next up we have the gameplay. Like Trials and Tribulations, the game doesn’t really make use of many new gimmicks to keep itself entertaining. There are two legitimately new gameplay components and they are Dance of Deduction and Jury Examination. Everything else in this game can be found in some other Ace Attorney game. I mentioned in my review of Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright that the key to making good gameplay mechanics is to make them not too out of reach from what the player is familiar with so they can instantly pick up on how to use it. Dances of Deduction and Jury Examinations both fit this description since Jury Examinations, as the game itself says, are nothing more than cross examinations. You just pick two jurors (occasionally pressing them for more information) that have contradicting statements and pit them against each other. It’s an extension of a mechanic that was introduced in Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright and here it’s utilized much more. As for Dance of Deduction, it was much more of a risk since it’s a genuinely new mechanic. In these dances, Sholmes attempts to make two deductions about the crime scene. When he explains his deductions he sometimes gets some parts of it wrong and it’s up to you to fix the problems in his deduction. Notice that this really boils down to something players are familiar with; pointing out contradictions in statements and correcting them.

They’ve passed that check, but what makes them different from a mechanic like perceive or mood matrix? I think, currently, the fundamental problem with these two mechanics is that there’s no way to introduce a challenge to either of them. With perceive, the goal is just to pick out the thing that moves while the witness is talking. Often they either tell you the answer or make it so incredibly obvious what’s moving that you never have to use any brain cells to figure it out. With the mood matrix, it’s the same thing. Either the emotion is so obscure that you just have to guess and hope you picked up on what the game devs were thinking or they make it so obvious what the faulty emotion is that you don’t even need to be paying attention to figure it out. Adding penalties onto either of these things won’t fundamentally change that the mechanics need to be made easy so you can get it. With jury examinations, the goal itself is so clear and obvious that they’re allowed to make it harder by putting more subtle contradictions into the juror statements. With Dance of Deduction, they make it harder by making what you’re deducing that much more outlandish/ridiculous.

Dance of Deduction specifically is unique here since the way they make it harder is by being more creative. That’s a rather weird thing to say about a gameplay mechanic. Most games just turn up some nob and make the AI a little more accurate or a little smarter. Here it’s up to the writers of the game to make the deduction itself difficult through the writing. They’ve effectively forced themselves to write a good gameplay mechanic and that is what makes it one of the most interesting game gimmicks I have ever seen.

=== START SPOILERS FOR CASE 3 OF RESOLVE ===

Another part of what makes it a great mechanic is how useful it is to you the player. In my review of Apollo Justice, I said another major problem with perceive is that it’s generally not helpful at all sometimes. With perceive you often deduce things you could have easily figured out an easier way. With Dance of Deduction though, almost every single deduction is something you could not have figured out yourself because of how ridiculous it is. No case better exemplifies this fact than the one in case 3 of Resolve.

In this deduction, you are chasing down conman scientist Enoch Drebber when you go into his bedroom and find that everything has been flipped upside down! In addition, you find a red device in the center of the room with a clock at its center. From this, Sholmes deduces that the device is an anti-gravity device that Drebber made use of to escape the room. Yes, you heard that right. This is on the level of ridiculous that not even Professor Layton versus Phoenix Wright would accept, and that’s what I love about it. You have no clue what the outcome of the true deduction will be once you’re done, but already you’re dying of laughter because of how outlandish this one is. It’s a simple way to make Sholmes feel as whacky as a normal Ace Attorney character while introducing a fun mechanic into the game. It’s brilliant.

By the end of the deduction, you learn that the device in the center of the room is not actually an anti-gravity device, but a bomb and that Drebber is hiding in a safe in the room to avoid the blast. You end up defusing the bomb with 7 seconds to spare. That right there is the beauty of a deduction. You just figured something out that you could not have figured out without the mechanic and it proves that it was actually useful to go through all of that work and flair.

=== END SPOILERS FOR CASE 3 OF RESOLVE ===

Lastly, no Ace Attorney game would feel complete without the art complementing the novel. This includes the music and animations. I’ve said a lot of what makes this music and animation special already, so I don’t have much to add here. I will say that the art here really captures the essence of what this game is; it’s an Ace Attorney game with its own identity. Listening to the soundtrack makes it 100% feel like it belongs in the catalogue of Ace Attorney, but it’s so fundamentally different in instrument and sound choice that it stands out from anything that has come before it. From a 3D modelling perspective, the animations are very reminiscent of what you’d see in Dual Destinies and Spirit of Justice, but animations are more fluid thanks to the introduction of mocap which makes everything look much more realistic and smoother. You also have fully animated 3D cutscenes at some points in Resolve which are something that I think should show up in the series much more often because of how cool it looks. Lastly, you have 2D art pieces as well that sometimes complement the game in the form of anime cutscenes and banners. The one that shows up when you complete the game is my favorite.

This review went on for a really long time, but I hoped to capture just a small hint of what this game has to offer you as the player. Chronicles, on top of these games, also features behind the scenes content that goes into far more depth than I possibly could with this review. I personally had a blast going through every single piece of unused music, concept art, and video looking to see the development process. I really wish every Ace Attorney game was so open with its development process because of how much I loved reading the commentary here. After reading all of it as well as all of the dev blogs, I can say without a doubt that the team behind this game put their entire soul behind this project and it really shows. They had wanted to give us so much in such short development time that I cannot thank them enough for their hard work on this product. I strongly recommend everyone who has played this game to spend some time going through the escapades and other special content because of how fun it is (and it’s why I linked a lot of it in this review!).

Overall though, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is a fantastic game. It gets every single thing it does right thanks to its single vision and resolve to get the vision realized. It has the best music, characters, and plot in the entire Ace Attorney franchise and manages to stay true to the original trilogy’s style while breaking some common conventions fans are used to. It’s one of the most unique spin offs of a game I have ever played and I hope we get more of it in the future, especially since I've already gotten every accolade. No Ace Attorney game has left me so depressed wanting more!