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!
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!