TL;DR: An absolutely epic adventure that never ceases to be interesting or thrilling. It takes the best parts of Professor Layton and Phoenix Wright and combines them into an incredibly satisfying experience.
At the time of this writing, I am currently on a quest to play every single Ace Attorney game again. I have made it through the entire trilogy as well as Apollo Justice. In my replays of these games I have undergone quite a journey with regards to what my view of a perfect Ace Attorney game is.
In my Trials and Tribulations review, I mentioned that the game was great because it stuck to providing simple and familiar gameplay and expanding on its story and characters. For me, this is really all an Ace Attorney game needs to do to be successful in my opinion. Later games in the series aren't as great because they complicate the simple and working formula with terrible and complicated gimmicks that distract from the main reason I play the games.
I bring this up because after going through PLvsPW for the first time, I have to once again question what it means for an Ace Attorney game to be great. The reason is that, even though this game is quite bold in terms of how much it changes the gameplay of a standard Ace Attorney game, it succeeds in providing an experience that feels right at home for me. This game is a beautiful blend of the new and creative as well as the familiar and it achieves this blend by mixing together the best aspects from both Professor Layton and Ace Attorney games into a brand new formula that just works.
To see this formula, let's first start with the gameplay. Like Ace Attorney games, each part of the game can be divided into two distinct categories; investigations and trials.
Almost all investigations take place in the town of Labyrinthia, a place where magic is real and stories are reality. Even though the town is quite small, there's almost never a place you can go that isn't brimming with life and something interesting to look at. Part of the fun of an Ace Attorney game is just tapping everything in the environment to get some fun dialogue from the main characters or some side characters. This game not only encourages the player to do this by providing very uniquely designed background characters, but it also mixes in hidden puzzles and hint coins into the background so you're more than encouraged to look around and take it all in. I personally didn't use any of the hint coins, but I still got them because it was a lot of fun searching for them. It's a beautiful setting with equally beautiful life living all around it just waiting to be explored.
Where investigations differ from the standard Ace Attorney fare is that you do not spend most of your time talking to witnesses or examining crime scenes. The bulk of your time is spent solving puzzles, Professor Layton style. What once used to be a very long prelude to the much more fun trials is now replaced with shorter investigations and puzzles to keep your mind occupied. That is to say, you are almost never doing nothing in this game. While the puzzles can sometimes be completely orthogonal to what's going on with the plot, they serve as a fun distraction from reading a bunch of text for hours. It's a unique way to spice up long investigations while keeping Professor Layton fans happy. I loved all 70 puzzles in the game and just wanted more by the time I finished.
The next gameplay component are trials. While the first trial is the standard Ace Attorney trial format that we all know and love, the subsequent trials are what make this game outstanding. From the second trial on, all trials are witch trials where you defend your client from accusations of being a witch. The key component that makes these trials work is absurdity. There is no way in hell that you could say the defendant flew away from the crime scene or turned invisible in a standard Ace Attorney game, but that is the norm here. Because witch trials are allowed to be so absurd, the gameplay is allowed to expand in tons of new and interesting ways.
For instance, one new gameplay component is that the game puts every witness on the stand at once now. Yes, all witnesses testify at the exact same time. The last case even has you cross examine 10 witnesses at once. By doing this, testimonies feel fundamentally different; it's not one person's point of view anymore. Statements can vary wildly in claims to the point where every witness says something completely different. This allows you to use witnesses statements as evidence for contradictions and allows you to get the opinions of other witnesses while another talks. This exact same mechanic would be replicated in The Great Ace Attorney and in both games the mechanic is done exceptionally well.
The key thing to note here though is that it's not complete absurdity. Even when trials deal with magic, things still follow logical rules. The rules are not complex and are kept simple on purpose to avoid making the gameplay feel convoluted. Many later Ace Attorney games fail to have this kind of discipline when they add new mechanics to trials and, like I said earlier, it distracts from the fun parts of those games. The new gimmicks in this game work because they're incredibly natural extensions to the simple gameplay of Ace Attorney and they aren't infuriating to make use of.
Next let's talk about the story. I think this is the point where many people tend to criticize the game. For me, the story in this game is very well done, even if it needs to rely on a lot of asspulling to get it done. One thing I really love about this story is that there is absolutely no filler. None. Zip. Nada. Every single chapter of this game is dedicated to telling one narrative and it's interesting to see when pretty much every Ace Attorney game has at least one filler case in it. The game is never distracted and is always telling the main story in the most interesting way it can. Even with this focus though, the pacing of the story is very inconsistent as the game goes on. I would say 60-70% of the story is told at the very end of the game in the epilogue and the earlier parts of the game are just setup for the endgame.
Because so much of the actual story is in the end, I'll focus mostly on that. The end of this game is dedicated to explaining pretty much every mystery that was brought up before. Every chapter before it sets up the dominoes and this chapter knocks them down. The main person responsible for knocking down the dominoes is Professor Layton. For some reason, he becomes an absolute genius at the end of the case and basically solves every mystery himself. He stops himself at some points to give other people (AKA Phoenix) a chance, but everyone constantly remarks that he already knows the answer to everything and he leads the case so forcefully into the truth. The reason this is required is because the plot dug itself so deep into a hole that the only way out was to pull magic plot stuff out of the smartest character's ass.
The previous paragraph sounds bad and if you read other reviews here you'll see other people complain about it. But in my opinion, it's quite tolerable. Ace Attorney is no stranger to having some wacko science or magic be the focus of a plot. The last case of the trilogy depends heavily on spirit medium mumbo jumbo to be interesting and it's the best case in the trilogy. What these cases both get right is that they use this asspulling to develop its characters meaningfully. The interesting part of those cases isn't debating the how, it's debating the why. Why do these characters make the choices they do? What goals are they trying to achieve that require them to resort to such ridiculous methods to get them done? These questions get satisfying answers by the end of the case and it leads to one of the most compelling plots in the series.
Because this story is so dedicated to putting its characters center stage, we get some of the most interesting characters in the series. Espella Cantabella is the focus of every chapter in the game and once you learn her story, you can't help but love her. Even antagonistic villains like Inquisitor Barnham get a good amount of the spotlight as they all work towards finding the truth of the town. Besides the new characters, you have the main characters Professor Layton, Phoenix Wright, Luke, and Maya. When they team up, they have really great chemistry together. This chemistry works well with jokes as well as emotional moments. The game designs its story such that the characters can relate to one another very well and play off each other in unique and interesting ways. It's hard to say how exactly this is done without delving into spoilers so I'll just say that they do something very interesting in the last case that relates to the title of the game.
So with all that said and done, what's bad about this game? For me personally, the only really bad thing is the voice acting at some points. The voice acting ranges from incredibly good to I want to claw my ears out. More often it's towards the latter. While characters like Layton, Luke and Maya often sound just fine, other characters talk in a way that irritates me to death. Thank goodness this only happens for cutscenes and select pieces of dialogue. This game would have a 5 star rating with better voice acting.
Overall though, this game is definitely the most unique Ace Attorney game out there. It mixes in Professor Layton puzzles with the standard Ace Attorney gameplay while also adding its own unique spin to trials. As someone who's seen most of the series, it's incredibly refreshing to get a game as creative as this. It doesn't stray too far from what I love about Ace Attorney, but it's not afraid to take calculated risks with its story and gameplay. Every trial is exciting and makes for top tier material in the series. There's no hope of this ever, but I do hope we get another crossover some way some how on PC. This was a delight to play.
At the time of this writing, I am currently on a quest to play every single Ace Attorney game again. I have made it through the entire trilogy as well as Apollo Justice. In my replays of these games I have undergone quite a journey with regards to what my view of a perfect Ace Attorney game is.
In my Trials and Tribulations review, I mentioned that the game was great because it stuck to providing simple and familiar gameplay and expanding on its story and characters. For me, this is really all an Ace Attorney game needs to do to be successful in my opinion. Later games in the series aren't as great because they complicate the simple and working formula with terrible and complicated gimmicks that distract from the main reason I play the games.
I bring this up because after going through PLvsPW for the first time, I have to once again question what it means for an Ace Attorney game to be great. The reason is that, even though this game is quite bold in terms of how much it changes the gameplay of a standard Ace Attorney game, it succeeds in providing an experience that feels right at home for me. This game is a beautiful blend of the new and creative as well as the familiar and it achieves this blend by mixing together the best aspects from both Professor Layton and Ace Attorney games into a brand new formula that just works.
To see this formula, let's first start with the gameplay. Like Ace Attorney games, each part of the game can be divided into two distinct categories; investigations and trials.
Almost all investigations take place in the town of Labyrinthia, a place where magic is real and stories are reality. Even though the town is quite small, there's almost never a place you can go that isn't brimming with life and something interesting to look at. Part of the fun of an Ace Attorney game is just tapping everything in the environment to get some fun dialogue from the main characters or some side characters. This game not only encourages the player to do this by providing very uniquely designed background characters, but it also mixes in hidden puzzles and hint coins into the background so you're more than encouraged to look around and take it all in. I personally didn't use any of the hint coins, but I still got them because it was a lot of fun searching for them. It's a beautiful setting with equally beautiful life living all around it just waiting to be explored.
Where investigations differ from the standard Ace Attorney fare is that you do not spend most of your time talking to witnesses or examining crime scenes. The bulk of your time is spent solving puzzles, Professor Layton style. What once used to be a very long prelude to the much more fun trials is now replaced with shorter investigations and puzzles to keep your mind occupied. That is to say, you are almost never doing nothing in this game. While the puzzles can sometimes be completely orthogonal to what's going on with the plot, they serve as a fun distraction from reading a bunch of text for hours. It's a unique way to spice up long investigations while keeping Professor Layton fans happy. I loved all 70 puzzles in the game and just wanted more by the time I finished.
The next gameplay component are trials. While the first trial is the standard Ace Attorney trial format that we all know and love, the subsequent trials are what make this game outstanding. From the second trial on, all trials are witch trials where you defend your client from accusations of being a witch. The key component that makes these trials work is absurdity. There is no way in hell that you could say the defendant flew away from the crime scene or turned invisible in a standard Ace Attorney game, but that is the norm here. Because witch trials are allowed to be so absurd, the gameplay is allowed to expand in tons of new and interesting ways.
For instance, one new gameplay component is that the game puts every witness on the stand at once now. Yes, all witnesses testify at the exact same time. The last case even has you cross examine 10 witnesses at once. By doing this, testimonies feel fundamentally different; it's not one person's point of view anymore. Statements can vary wildly in claims to the point where every witness says something completely different. This allows you to use witnesses statements as evidence for contradictions and allows you to get the opinions of other witnesses while another talks. This exact same mechanic would be replicated in The Great Ace Attorney and in both games the mechanic is done exceptionally well.
The key thing to note here though is that it's not complete absurdity. Even when trials deal with magic, things still follow logical rules. The rules are not complex and are kept simple on purpose to avoid making the gameplay feel convoluted. Many later Ace Attorney games fail to have this kind of discipline when they add new mechanics to trials and, like I said earlier, it distracts from the fun parts of those games. The new gimmicks in this game work because they're incredibly natural extensions to the simple gameplay of Ace Attorney and they aren't infuriating to make use of.
Next let's talk about the story. I think this is the point where many people tend to criticize the game. For me, the story in this game is very well done, even if it needs to rely on a lot of asspulling to get it done. One thing I really love about this story is that there is absolutely no filler. None. Zip. Nada. Every single chapter of this game is dedicated to telling one narrative and it's interesting to see when pretty much every Ace Attorney game has at least one filler case in it. The game is never distracted and is always telling the main story in the most interesting way it can. Even with this focus though, the pacing of the story is very inconsistent as the game goes on. I would say 60-70% of the story is told at the very end of the game in the epilogue and the earlier parts of the game are just setup for the endgame.
Because so much of the actual story is in the end, I'll focus mostly on that. The end of this game is dedicated to explaining pretty much every mystery that was brought up before. Every chapter before it sets up the dominoes and this chapter knocks them down. The main person responsible for knocking down the dominoes is Professor Layton. For some reason, he becomes an absolute genius at the end of the case and basically solves every mystery himself. He stops himself at some points to give other people (AKA Phoenix) a chance, but everyone constantly remarks that he already knows the answer to everything and he leads the case so forcefully into the truth. The reason this is required is because the plot dug itself so deep into a hole that the only way out was to pull magic plot stuff out of the smartest character's ass.
The previous paragraph sounds bad and if you read other reviews here you'll see other people complain about it. But in my opinion, it's quite tolerable. Ace Attorney is no stranger to having some wacko science or magic be the focus of a plot. The last case of the trilogy depends heavily on spirit medium mumbo jumbo to be interesting and it's the best case in the trilogy. What these cases both get right is that they use this asspulling to develop its characters meaningfully. The interesting part of those cases isn't debating the how, it's debating the why. Why do these characters make the choices they do? What goals are they trying to achieve that require them to resort to such ridiculous methods to get them done? These questions get satisfying answers by the end of the case and it leads to one of the most compelling plots in the series.
Because this story is so dedicated to putting its characters center stage, we get some of the most interesting characters in the series. Espella Cantabella is the focus of every chapter in the game and once you learn her story, you can't help but love her. Even antagonistic villains like Inquisitor Barnham get a good amount of the spotlight as they all work towards finding the truth of the town. Besides the new characters, you have the main characters Professor Layton, Phoenix Wright, Luke, and Maya. When they team up, they have really great chemistry together. This chemistry works well with jokes as well as emotional moments. The game designs its story such that the characters can relate to one another very well and play off each other in unique and interesting ways. It's hard to say how exactly this is done without delving into spoilers so I'll just say that they do something very interesting in the last case that relates to the title of the game.
So with all that said and done, what's bad about this game? For me personally, the only really bad thing is the voice acting at some points. The voice acting ranges from incredibly good to I want to claw my ears out. More often it's towards the latter. While characters like Layton, Luke and Maya often sound just fine, other characters talk in a way that irritates me to death. Thank goodness this only happens for cutscenes and select pieces of dialogue. This game would have a 5 star rating with better voice acting.
Overall though, this game is definitely the most unique Ace Attorney game out there. It mixes in Professor Layton puzzles with the standard Ace Attorney gameplay while also adding its own unique spin to trials. As someone who's seen most of the series, it's incredibly refreshing to get a game as creative as this. It doesn't stray too far from what I love about Ace Attorney, but it's not afraid to take calculated risks with its story and gameplay. Every trial is exciting and makes for top tier material in the series. There's no hope of this ever, but I do hope we get another crossover some way some how on PC. This was a delight to play.