TL;DR: A very poor entry in the Ace Attorney series that marked the beginning of a shift away from the founding principles of the games.
I'll say it plain and simple; Apollo Justice is the worst Ace Attorney game in the series by a long shot. It's not only bad because it fails to achieve it's primary goal, but it also sets in precedents that stain future games in the series. Before we get into a deep mauling of this game, let's first talk about what this game does get right at the minimum.
So at its bare minimum, it's an Ace Attorney game. This means you do get the standard Ace Attorney gameplay that you like. There are trials and investigations and when the game is just being an Ace Attorney game, it's really fun. I love pointing out contradictions and there aren't many points in the game where I was straight up lost. Additionally, the soundtrack in this game is really good. It's unique and catchy. As far as positives go (except for some small ones I'll talk about at the end), this is really about it. All 2.5 stars are because of this and nothing else.
Now let's get into the bad starting with the high level. The first thing anybody immediately notices when looking at the box for this game is that it says "Apollo Justice" and has two pictures of him on there. So the natural thing to think is this is a game about Apollo Justice and it will have many new things to love. This is the expectation I had walking in and what you get is exactly the opposite. This is not a game about Apollo Justice at all. This game seems to want to be about everyone else, but him and to me that's the biggest problem of this game. It's a game that's too scared to do anything new with its new protagonist and so they throw him into the shadows as a side character. Yes, the protagonist of the game is a side character to his own story. To understand why, let's first talk about gameplay.
If you've played Rise From the Ashes from the first game, the gameplay in Apollo Justice isn't that much new. Investigations are almost the same in this game except they add on more science gimmicks such as x-rays and footprint analysis. I can see that they were attempting to make investigations more fun with these gimmicks, but they're not that fun. I don't get much joy out of wiping the screen of my DS with the stylus 100 times trying to ink out someone's handwriting. At their best they're neat little minigames and at their worst they're irritating distractions that make me want to toss my DS at a wall. My point is I would have genuinely preferred a simple and normal investigation as opposed to just throwing in these lazy science minigames. I will say though, investigating evidence in 3D is actually an interesting gimmick that is used a lot in later games so credit to that.
As for the trials, they're pretty much the same with one new addition; the new perceive gimmick. This is supposed to be Apollo's differentiating factor. When a witness tells a lie, you can occasionally zoom into them and slow down time while they are talking and find their nervous habits. These habits give you clues as to what it is they're lying about and provide a unique way to make progress in cases without explicitly providing evidence. This sounds like a good idea on paper, but there's two main problems I have with it.
The first is that it's not really put to good use half the time. The appeal of this gimmick is that it allows you to figure out things you normally wouldn't have figured out without it, but often times, the things you perceive are incredibly obvious or could be proven with evidence normally. For example, one use of perceive is in the second case when you are trying to provide a reason why the killer would go back to the victim's clinic after leaving once. You have the reason in evidence and could easily have just presented it, but they made it a perceive moment with no reason why it needed to be. Of course, there are moments where this is put to good use, such as the first case where you hit a wall and use it to branch into a new theory, but when it's not used well it's pretty disappointing.
The second is that it doesn't feel like natural at all in this game. In my review of Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright, I noted that the appeal of the gimmicks in that game was that they felt like natural extensions of the simple gameplay we're used to in the trilogy. It was incredibly easy to see when the gimmick needed to be put to use and as a result the game didn't need to hold your hand every single time you were supposed to use it. Here, perceive is so outlandish and unnatural that the game needs to basically give you the answer to the perceive almost every time you use it. There's no fun to the gimmick if half of its uses are spoiled for you by the game itself. With psyche locks, the game restrains itself from telling you exactly what you need to do to break the locks. Sometimes Phoenix thinks to himself that he has all the evidence he needs to break the locks, but he never tells you how to break the locks because the actual lock breaking is something players are already familiar with from trials. You do get used to perceive in later games and it gets more natural over time, but for this game, where you only ever use it like 5 or 6 times, it's painful to see it go to such waste.
So to summarize the gameplay, there is certainly something new here. The issue is that the game tries to forge a new identity with its gameplay through scientific minigames and perceive, but it doesn't do it well because it's caught in the middle of trying to stick with stuff we're familiar with and be something new. The developers don't trust us to use perceive freely because it's not something we're familiar with. Scientific investigations amount to just bland minigames most of the time because they want to keep investigating the same as it's always been but they wanted to do something different. Because it's caught in the middle here, it's hard to figure out what this game is trying to be. Is it trying to create a new image for Ace Attorney starting with Apollo or is it trying to stick with what's it's good at with new characters? Until the gameplay decides what it wants to be, it can't deliver something consistent.
Next let's talk about the story. The story is where this game really sucks. Right at the end of the first trial, Phoenix himself says that this is Apollo's story. There has never been a greater lie in the entire series.
The whole narrative revolves around events that take place 7 years ago where Phoenix Wright submitted forged evidence and lost his badge as a result. For the past 7 years, the courtroom has become more corrupt in its practices and Phoenix believes resolving the mystery behind this forgery will begin a revolution towards more just trials. He sets out to gather evidence relating to the trial from 7 years ago which involved a group of magicians called the Gramaryes. Due to his investigation and his efforts to instate a new jury system, he is able to find and convict the true culprit behind the forgery and usher in a new era for courtroom trials.
Notice that summary of the plot did not mention Apollo a single time. Apollo's only role in this game is to serve as a defense attorney for Phoenix because he lost his badge. He's basically a puppet for Phoenix to talk through anytime the main story is talked about and it hurts to watch. Some may argue that Apollo is indeed involved in this story because of a reveal at the end of the game that connects him to it. But that to me seems like a lazy way to include him into the plot of the game. Apollo has no personal stake in this plot at all. If he lost one of these main trials, he would lose absolutely nothing. This is in stark contrast to Phoenix Wright who defends people like his mentor's sister or his childhood friends and in this case, the future of his newly adopted daughter.
The original trilogy goes through great lengths to make sure these trials are about Phoenix Wright and appallingly, this game does too. The only plot relevant cases are the first and fourth one (yeah the third one doesn't count). The first trial of this game has Apollo defend against contradictions for the first bit, but when it actually gets interesting, Phoenix basically hijacks the defense since he already knows every contradiction. Apollo gets no time to shine in this case. In the fourth case, Phoenix is basically the guy who does 90% of the investigating and figures out the entire mystery by himself without ever going to a trial. Apollo in this last trial basically just repeats what Phoenix found out. He even credits him as the guy who made it happen and the villain, when he breaks down, screams out Phoenix's name. Again, Apollo doesn't do anything himself and is just a puppet that relays Phoenix's findings. The other two cases are the only cases where Apollo actually gets to do his own thing, but those cases are the worst in the game because they're filler cases with terrible characters and premises. More on that in a bit. The main point here though is that if there are any good moments in the game, they're stolen by Phoenix. Phoenix's character was already finished with the trilogy so not only does he take these crucial character building moments, but he also does nothing with them because he's already learned the lessons from them. It's absolutely astounding to me that Phoenix is nowhere on the cover of this box, even though he's the guy at the center of everything in this game.
Like I said earlier though, Apollo does get some moments of his own, but those are found only in the second and third case which are filler cases. There are only 4 cases in this game and so Apollo only gets his moments in half the cases and in the half of the cases that don't mean anything to the plot.
The second case honestly feels the closest to a familiar Ace Attorney case in this game. It has a minimal amount of gimmicks and it's relatively short with only two investigations and two trials. The issue with this case is how it ends. Because it's short, there are only 2 witnesses. From the moment you start investigating the second time it's incredibly obvious who the killer is. But why is it so obvious? Because the killer goes and does stupid stuff that basically guarantees they'd be caught. For example, for some unexplained reason the killer swaps out her shoes for the medical shoes leaving her old ones at the scene of the crime. I tried looking at the scripts and Google for a reason why she does this and I legitimately can't find one, leading me to believe her goal was to get caught so Apollo could look good. Because obvious clues like this were left everywhere, it doesn't take Apollo any time to grind her in court and win. It was so fast and obvious that she didn't even have a proper breakdown and just confessed because she got bored of testifying. I honestly don't know how else to interpret this ending. This is the most boring ending to any Ace Attorney case I've ever seen and as a result Apollo doesn't even feel that cool in the end.
As for the third case, it's simply the worst Ace Attorney case in the series. No case comes close to the amount of pain I've suffered while playing this case. First, let's start with the premise. The premise is absolutely stupid. You are defending Machi Tobaye, a piano player who is blind and a child. The victim is a huge bodyguard that was killed by a revolver that has been claimed to be so powerful shooting it even once will break your arm. The prosecution claims that because the shooter shot twice and missed a shot, they must have been blind and there's only one blind guy! What????? Good thing they quickly abandon this premise and just go with "he was the only one who could have done it because he's small." This is still dumb because he had no injuries at all meaning he couldn't have shot the gun, but it's not as dumb as the previous one they went with. Besides the premise, there's the gameplay. The gameplay consists of using a mixing board and listening to the same song and video 10 times. If you are tone deaf like me, the mixing board just turns into a game of guessing until you get the right thing. The video you are forced to watch 10 times over is so slow, boring, and awfully made that it's a pain to even watch once. Oh and you can't skip it so you're forced to watch it every time it comes on. Notice I haven't even talked about Apollo yet, these are just the gimmicks. These gimmicks are the most irritating gameplay moments I've ever had in the series and if I ever see them again I'm going to shoot that revolver 20 times at my DS. As for the case itself, it's fine. The contradictions and twist In the middle are cool and it plays like what you'd expect from a normal Ace Attorney case. I just wish this case had more relevance to the events of the main plot because it's clear they were trying to connect it, but I didn't see a connection other than just one person existing. It's unfortunate that one of the only cases Apollo actually gets his own cool moments in is shadowed by so much pain and agony.
Lastly, let's talk about the characters in this game. I hate 90% of them. Of the 10% that are good, they are the Gavins, Trucy and repeat characters like Phoenix and Ema. Pretty much everyone else in this game is either incredibly boring or irritates me in some way. Apollo is boring because of the reasons I described above. Almost every witness in this game irritates me to death because of how much of an asshole they are. Zak Gramarye, for example, orphans his daughter so he can escape the law, gets Phoenix's badge taken because he withholds crucial evidence from him (that he doesn't tell him about for 7 years >_>), and motivates the main villain of the game to kill people by being mysterious and condescending during a game of poker. I can find at least one reason why every witness is annoying or an asshole and that spot is usually only reserved for the worst of the worst in the original trilogy. The best witnesses in that trilogy typically are motivated with funny or good intentions and only act the way they do because they've fundamentally misunderstood something. Almost nobody in this game acts like this and they just choose to be assholes for the sake of being assholes.
So overall, this game sucks for a variety of reasons. It puts its main character to the side for the sake of highlighting characters we already like, it sacrifices simple Ace Attorney gameplay for cheap and annoying gimmicks, and features a cast of characters that are boring and painful to talk to. It basically forgets what made the originals great and tries to capitalize on their success in the worst way possible.
What is most painful about this game is that they were clearly trying to make it work. There are some really good and interesting ideas in this game that never make it past this game because of how terrible the rest of the game is. I would have genuinely loved if Phoenix remained a hobo for the rest of the series and acted as a mentor to Apollo. Then maybe if Apollo didn't get his time here, he'd get another chance. The MASON system and jury system was genuinely interesting and I would have loved for either of them to see a comeback. Only the jury system comes back in a completely different fashion in The Great Ace Attorney. Instead what this game told the developers was that they just needed to try again with a different set of characters and gimmicks. That's where Athena Cykes and her mood matrix comes in. That's where the Divination Seance comes in Spirit of Justice. While these aren't bad gimmicks, it's clear that the culture of Ace Attorney is now to try and shove more and more gimmicks into the games instead of focus on the simple principles that make great games like the first or third one. Trials and Tribulations literally made no changes to the gameplay of Justice for All and it was the best game in the series because of how well written it was. If the writers would just slow down and actually write a consistent story about one character, I think that would make for better games. But unfortunately, starting with this game this is now the new standard for Ace Attorney games and it's hard to forgive and forget the one that started it.
I'll say it plain and simple; Apollo Justice is the worst Ace Attorney game in the series by a long shot. It's not only bad because it fails to achieve it's primary goal, but it also sets in precedents that stain future games in the series. Before we get into a deep mauling of this game, let's first talk about what this game does get right at the minimum.
So at its bare minimum, it's an Ace Attorney game. This means you do get the standard Ace Attorney gameplay that you like. There are trials and investigations and when the game is just being an Ace Attorney game, it's really fun. I love pointing out contradictions and there aren't many points in the game where I was straight up lost. Additionally, the soundtrack in this game is really good. It's unique and catchy. As far as positives go (except for some small ones I'll talk about at the end), this is really about it. All 2.5 stars are because of this and nothing else.
Now let's get into the bad starting with the high level. The first thing anybody immediately notices when looking at the box for this game is that it says "Apollo Justice" and has two pictures of him on there. So the natural thing to think is this is a game about Apollo Justice and it will have many new things to love. This is the expectation I had walking in and what you get is exactly the opposite. This is not a game about Apollo Justice at all. This game seems to want to be about everyone else, but him and to me that's the biggest problem of this game. It's a game that's too scared to do anything new with its new protagonist and so they throw him into the shadows as a side character. Yes, the protagonist of the game is a side character to his own story. To understand why, let's first talk about gameplay.
If you've played Rise From the Ashes from the first game, the gameplay in Apollo Justice isn't that much new. Investigations are almost the same in this game except they add on more science gimmicks such as x-rays and footprint analysis. I can see that they were attempting to make investigations more fun with these gimmicks, but they're not that fun. I don't get much joy out of wiping the screen of my DS with the stylus 100 times trying to ink out someone's handwriting. At their best they're neat little minigames and at their worst they're irritating distractions that make me want to toss my DS at a wall. My point is I would have genuinely preferred a simple and normal investigation as opposed to just throwing in these lazy science minigames. I will say though, investigating evidence in 3D is actually an interesting gimmick that is used a lot in later games so credit to that.
As for the trials, they're pretty much the same with one new addition; the new perceive gimmick. This is supposed to be Apollo's differentiating factor. When a witness tells a lie, you can occasionally zoom into them and slow down time while they are talking and find their nervous habits. These habits give you clues as to what it is they're lying about and provide a unique way to make progress in cases without explicitly providing evidence. This sounds like a good idea on paper, but there's two main problems I have with it.
The first is that it's not really put to good use half the time. The appeal of this gimmick is that it allows you to figure out things you normally wouldn't have figured out without it, but often times, the things you perceive are incredibly obvious or could be proven with evidence normally. For example, one use of perceive is in the second case when you are trying to provide a reason why the killer would go back to the victim's clinic after leaving once. You have the reason in evidence and could easily have just presented it, but they made it a perceive moment with no reason why it needed to be. Of course, there are moments where this is put to good use, such as the first case where you hit a wall and use it to branch into a new theory, but when it's not used well it's pretty disappointing.
The second is that it doesn't feel like natural at all in this game. In my review of Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright, I noted that the appeal of the gimmicks in that game was that they felt like natural extensions of the simple gameplay we're used to in the trilogy. It was incredibly easy to see when the gimmick needed to be put to use and as a result the game didn't need to hold your hand every single time you were supposed to use it. Here, perceive is so outlandish and unnatural that the game needs to basically give you the answer to the perceive almost every time you use it. There's no fun to the gimmick if half of its uses are spoiled for you by the game itself. With psyche locks, the game restrains itself from telling you exactly what you need to do to break the locks. Sometimes Phoenix thinks to himself that he has all the evidence he needs to break the locks, but he never tells you how to break the locks because the actual lock breaking is something players are already familiar with from trials. You do get used to perceive in later games and it gets more natural over time, but for this game, where you only ever use it like 5 or 6 times, it's painful to see it go to such waste.
So to summarize the gameplay, there is certainly something new here. The issue is that the game tries to forge a new identity with its gameplay through scientific minigames and perceive, but it doesn't do it well because it's caught in the middle of trying to stick with stuff we're familiar with and be something new. The developers don't trust us to use perceive freely because it's not something we're familiar with. Scientific investigations amount to just bland minigames most of the time because they want to keep investigating the same as it's always been but they wanted to do something different. Because it's caught in the middle here, it's hard to figure out what this game is trying to be. Is it trying to create a new image for Ace Attorney starting with Apollo or is it trying to stick with what's it's good at with new characters? Until the gameplay decides what it wants to be, it can't deliver something consistent.
Next let's talk about the story. The story is where this game really sucks. Right at the end of the first trial, Phoenix himself says that this is Apollo's story. There has never been a greater lie in the entire series.
The whole narrative revolves around events that take place 7 years ago where Phoenix Wright submitted forged evidence and lost his badge as a result. For the past 7 years, the courtroom has become more corrupt in its practices and Phoenix believes resolving the mystery behind this forgery will begin a revolution towards more just trials. He sets out to gather evidence relating to the trial from 7 years ago which involved a group of magicians called the Gramaryes. Due to his investigation and his efforts to instate a new jury system, he is able to find and convict the true culprit behind the forgery and usher in a new era for courtroom trials.
Notice that summary of the plot did not mention Apollo a single time. Apollo's only role in this game is to serve as a defense attorney for Phoenix because he lost his badge. He's basically a puppet for Phoenix to talk through anytime the main story is talked about and it hurts to watch. Some may argue that Apollo is indeed involved in this story because of a reveal at the end of the game that connects him to it. But that to me seems like a lazy way to include him into the plot of the game. Apollo has no personal stake in this plot at all. If he lost one of these main trials, he would lose absolutely nothing. This is in stark contrast to Phoenix Wright who defends people like his mentor's sister or his childhood friends and in this case, the future of his newly adopted daughter.
The original trilogy goes through great lengths to make sure these trials are about Phoenix Wright and appallingly, this game does too. The only plot relevant cases are the first and fourth one (yeah the third one doesn't count). The first trial of this game has Apollo defend against contradictions for the first bit, but when it actually gets interesting, Phoenix basically hijacks the defense since he already knows every contradiction. Apollo gets no time to shine in this case. In the fourth case, Phoenix is basically the guy who does 90% of the investigating and figures out the entire mystery by himself without ever going to a trial. Apollo in this last trial basically just repeats what Phoenix found out. He even credits him as the guy who made it happen and the villain, when he breaks down, screams out Phoenix's name. Again, Apollo doesn't do anything himself and is just a puppet that relays Phoenix's findings. The other two cases are the only cases where Apollo actually gets to do his own thing, but those cases are the worst in the game because they're filler cases with terrible characters and premises. More on that in a bit. The main point here though is that if there are any good moments in the game, they're stolen by Phoenix. Phoenix's character was already finished with the trilogy so not only does he take these crucial character building moments, but he also does nothing with them because he's already learned the lessons from them. It's absolutely astounding to me that Phoenix is nowhere on the cover of this box, even though he's the guy at the center of everything in this game.
Like I said earlier though, Apollo does get some moments of his own, but those are found only in the second and third case which are filler cases. There are only 4 cases in this game and so Apollo only gets his moments in half the cases and in the half of the cases that don't mean anything to the plot.
The second case honestly feels the closest to a familiar Ace Attorney case in this game. It has a minimal amount of gimmicks and it's relatively short with only two investigations and two trials. The issue with this case is how it ends. Because it's short, there are only 2 witnesses. From the moment you start investigating the second time it's incredibly obvious who the killer is. But why is it so obvious? Because the killer goes and does stupid stuff that basically guarantees they'd be caught. For example, for some unexplained reason the killer swaps out her shoes for the medical shoes leaving her old ones at the scene of the crime. I tried looking at the scripts and Google for a reason why she does this and I legitimately can't find one, leading me to believe her goal was to get caught so Apollo could look good. Because obvious clues like this were left everywhere, it doesn't take Apollo any time to grind her in court and win. It was so fast and obvious that she didn't even have a proper breakdown and just confessed because she got bored of testifying. I honestly don't know how else to interpret this ending. This is the most boring ending to any Ace Attorney case I've ever seen and as a result Apollo doesn't even feel that cool in the end.
As for the third case, it's simply the worst Ace Attorney case in the series. No case comes close to the amount of pain I've suffered while playing this case. First, let's start with the premise. The premise is absolutely stupid. You are defending Machi Tobaye, a piano player who is blind and a child. The victim is a huge bodyguard that was killed by a revolver that has been claimed to be so powerful shooting it even once will break your arm. The prosecution claims that because the shooter shot twice and missed a shot, they must have been blind and there's only one blind guy! What????? Good thing they quickly abandon this premise and just go with "he was the only one who could have done it because he's small." This is still dumb because he had no injuries at all meaning he couldn't have shot the gun, but it's not as dumb as the previous one they went with. Besides the premise, there's the gameplay. The gameplay consists of using a mixing board and listening to the same song and video 10 times. If you are tone deaf like me, the mixing board just turns into a game of guessing until you get the right thing. The video you are forced to watch 10 times over is so slow, boring, and awfully made that it's a pain to even watch once. Oh and you can't skip it so you're forced to watch it every time it comes on. Notice I haven't even talked about Apollo yet, these are just the gimmicks. These gimmicks are the most irritating gameplay moments I've ever had in the series and if I ever see them again I'm going to shoot that revolver 20 times at my DS. As for the case itself, it's fine. The contradictions and twist In the middle are cool and it plays like what you'd expect from a normal Ace Attorney case. I just wish this case had more relevance to the events of the main plot because it's clear they were trying to connect it, but I didn't see a connection other than just one person existing. It's unfortunate that one of the only cases Apollo actually gets his own cool moments in is shadowed by so much pain and agony.
Lastly, let's talk about the characters in this game. I hate 90% of them. Of the 10% that are good, they are the Gavins, Trucy and repeat characters like Phoenix and Ema. Pretty much everyone else in this game is either incredibly boring or irritates me in some way. Apollo is boring because of the reasons I described above. Almost every witness in this game irritates me to death because of how much of an asshole they are. Zak Gramarye, for example, orphans his daughter so he can escape the law, gets Phoenix's badge taken because he withholds crucial evidence from him (that he doesn't tell him about for 7 years >_>), and motivates the main villain of the game to kill people by being mysterious and condescending during a game of poker. I can find at least one reason why every witness is annoying or an asshole and that spot is usually only reserved for the worst of the worst in the original trilogy. The best witnesses in that trilogy typically are motivated with funny or good intentions and only act the way they do because they've fundamentally misunderstood something. Almost nobody in this game acts like this and they just choose to be assholes for the sake of being assholes.
So overall, this game sucks for a variety of reasons. It puts its main character to the side for the sake of highlighting characters we already like, it sacrifices simple Ace Attorney gameplay for cheap and annoying gimmicks, and features a cast of characters that are boring and painful to talk to. It basically forgets what made the originals great and tries to capitalize on their success in the worst way possible.
What is most painful about this game is that they were clearly trying to make it work. There are some really good and interesting ideas in this game that never make it past this game because of how terrible the rest of the game is. I would have genuinely loved if Phoenix remained a hobo for the rest of the series and acted as a mentor to Apollo. Then maybe if Apollo didn't get his time here, he'd get another chance. The MASON system and jury system was genuinely interesting and I would have loved for either of them to see a comeback. Only the jury system comes back in a completely different fashion in The Great Ace Attorney. Instead what this game told the developers was that they just needed to try again with a different set of characters and gimmicks. That's where Athena Cykes and her mood matrix comes in. That's where the Divination Seance comes in Spirit of Justice. While these aren't bad gimmicks, it's clear that the culture of Ace Attorney is now to try and shove more and more gimmicks into the games instead of focus on the simple principles that make great games like the first or third one. Trials and Tribulations literally made no changes to the gameplay of Justice for All and it was the best game in the series because of how well written it was. If the writers would just slow down and actually write a consistent story about one character, I think that would make for better games. But unfortunately, starting with this game this is now the new standard for Ace Attorney games and it's hard to forgive and forget the one that started it.