One might assume that a franchise titled 'Ace Attorney' would appeal to players as some kind of legal drama, but for the 90% of people who are turned off by that, rest assured that the judicial hellscape of Japanifornia has little to do with a boring, functional, real-world legal system. 'Discovery periods' and 'pretrial hearings' and 'jury selection' have no place in the AA world, where trials are usually resolved three days after the crime was committed by tearing apart the testimony of a man who came to court in clown makeup or by calling a literal animal to the stand to testify.

Aside from soap opera shenanigans, Ace Attorney mostly works based on its strength as a playable mystery novel, where you need to solve the crime through a combination of crime scene investigation and destroying the Prosecution's witnesses with facts and logic. When it works, chasing down contradictions in testimony and sweeping away the lies in the official narrative to uncover the truth is exciting, heroic, and makes you feel like your brain has a big penis. When it doesn't work, you're mindlessly shuffling through the same three areas examining every object you can trying to figure out how the game expects you to find the next clue, or getting penalized in trial because you solved the mystery before the game expects you too and it actually wants you to chase down a red herring for another half hour.

The former far outweighs the latter, though, and the cast of characters are as warm and likeable as they are colorful and absurd. This a a good game to show to people who wonder what the appeal of a visual novel could possibly be.