Spirit of Justice is a bit of a complicated game for me. It starts out promising, but I feel it never fully realizes some of it's ideas, and instead goes in other directions instead of backing up what's already been established. A lot of the game didn't sit right with me, but before I go into what I didn't like so much, let me start with the many things I did like, because I did really enjoy SoJ.

I: Regardless of What I Say, I Think Spirit of Justice is a Good Game
Regardless of how my feelings may seem, I do think SoJ is a genuinely good entry to this series and very worth playing. Solving the game's mysteries was especially fun. A lot of them are based around scenarios that seem pretty cut-and-dry, where you hardly have any information and the only plausible explanation seems to be that your client was the only person who could've done it. Many Ace Attorney games follow this structure, but I particularly like how SoJ frames a lot of it's mysteries around locked rooms and special areas. It leads to many of the puzzles themselves flowing very nicely.

I particularly enjoyed how 6-2, The Magical Turnabout, handled this. I won't spoil too much of what happens, since SoJ is now pretty relevant again due to the Apollo Justice Trilogy, but figuring out the mystery around how this murder happened and how your client didn't do it is really incredible. It was easily my favorite case in the game.

A lot of the reason I like The Magical Turnabout is actually another cool thing about SoJ. Trials feel like they wrap up fast. Magical Turnabout, for instance, is 1 day 1 trial. 6-1 and 6-4 are trials without investigations. Cases in this game feel faster paced, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, but I think it's a decent change for the series.

Additionally, the character writing in this game is really good! Like DD, I tend to enjoy a couple of the newer characters more than the returning ones, but even the returning cast is mostly all around enjoyable. This game has basically fixed most of the issues I had with Dual Destinies' character writing. Villains are no longer goofy and feel like they have more to them than being evil (mostly). Characters feel less one note in general. Throughout my playthrough I ended up liking a lot of the side characters; the cast here is genuinely really good. It does have a few misses, though.

AA6 has a lot of positives. On paper, it seems like an excellent game, fantastic even. I would agree, but I think the game fumbles on the execution of many of it's great ideas. Ideas like:

II. The Absolute Failure of a Character That Is Nahyuta Sahdmadhi
If you like Nahyuta, that's fine. I'm very sorry, though. I hardly have anything positive to say about this guy aside from the fact that his theme is good and I like his design. There's not a lot of Ace Attorney characters I genuinely dislike, and most of the time when I do dislike them, they're only around for 1 case or so. Nahyuta however, is one of my least favorite main characters to come out of this series BY FAR.

Imagine a shoddy attempt at making another Edgeworth, except he’s instead an annoying prick who’s obsessed with winning and has the personality of white bread while cycling through the same couple of insults that boil down to telling you you’ll turn into (insert creature) and burn in some kind of hell. He has no witty banter, no smart counter-arguments, and not even a fun gimmick. He’s literally just a brick wall that does nothing except waste your time in court and add nothing meaningful to the courtroom sections.

He’s extremely missed potential, and you have to deal with him for three and a half of the 6 cases in this game. I was already tired of him by the end of the second case. The game wants you to like him, and I want to, since he's a major character, but there's nothing that makes me want to like him and it's frustrating.

III. The Failings of Khura'in
There's so much I could say about why Khura'in negatively fails for me. Firstly, It's a place that seems grander than it actually is. The whole premise of SoJ is that this is a huge kingdom, yet you hardly meet a lot of people from Khura'in though-out the game. This is of course, probably due to the fact that half of the game's cases are in America and the others are in Khura'in, but it leaves the narrative very confused. The game clearly wants you to be invested in the story of Khura'in, but it's difficult to when most of the information about the country isn't even revealed until a super long and poorly spread out info-dump in 6-5. Khura’in feels really tiny and lifeless in a game where it’s supposed to be the big new locale, so much to the point where it hardly feels like a country.

Another issue I have with Khura'in also has to do with the Defense Culpability Ace itself. I'm not gonna elaborate on it too hard, as I'd like this to be pretty spoiler free, but having something that artificially raises the stakes in every Khura'in trial sucks. It doesn't make me worried for the characters, it just feels like it's trying to randomly build tension without understanding what actually makes you worried about characters.

The DC Act also feels so not Ace Attorney. It's genuinely baffling how less grounded the game becomes as a result of it. The thing I always loved about Ace Attorney was how immersive and real the worlds felt; It’s hard to get immersed in Khur’ain as a place the same way you can get immersed in the unique ancientness of Kurain Village (No, not Khura'in; they're different places, yes it might be confusing), for instance. Khura'in feels so much less personal, to me. It doesn't feel like this could be a real place, and feels instead oddly like a fantasy adventure town plopped in Ace Attorney.

IV. The Complicated Role of Maya Fey
Maya Fey, in the Phoenix Wright trilogy (AA1-3), was basically the heart and soul of that game for many people. I love Maya Fey, she's one of my favorite characters from these games. With Maya, Shu Takumi had managed to create a girl that was funny because she was an isolated village girl who was overly excited about the world around her. Maya Fey has so much to her in the original trilogy. She's strong to ensure the people around her are happy and doing well, and the whole trilogy practically always involves her, emotionally or spiritually, the entire time. She's a pivotal and necessary character for the narrative of those games.

So, to commemorate the return of one of the series' fan favorite characters for the first time in a mainline game since 2004, SoJ chooses to honor this by doing a terrible job with the implementation of Maya in the game.

Maya Fey is terrible in this game, and it's not even her fault. In SoJ, Maya's big issue is that she doesn't get to do anything. Whenever she's around, it's because the plot needs her and that's it. She's never just hanging around with Phoenix in Khura'in, whenever she's around, it's always because she's being used as a plot device and it really sucks.

The one case where she isn't forced to be a plot device is Turnabout Time Traveler. One case out of 3 Khura'in cases. Maya being stuck to only having a role in Turnabout Time Traveler sucks when she's supposed to be one of the big things about the game. She's an important character to this series and it really sucks how SoJ refuses to do anything with her.

V: Apollo Justice
Look. There's a lot I wanna say about Apollo in SoJ. Most of it is spoilers, though, and this review has already gotten long enough. Like Dual Destinies, Apollo has another backstory, and I actually find the content of Apollo's new backstory to be fine, it's just the way it's executed in the final case of the game and how it connects to the story that I don't like. That's incredibly spoilers, though.

So that's Spirit of Justice. With the release of Apollo Justice Trilogy, Spirit of Justice is relevant again. Will it have the same staying power the games of the original trilogy has in game discussion? Maybe not. But I particularly enjoyed Spirit of Justice. It's a game that has a lot of good ideas, and even if it doesn't follow up on all of them very well, I still greatly enjoyed my time. Spirit of Justice is a good game, and if you like Ace Attorney you'll probably like it. But for as good as it is, it misses quite a bit and I don't think it matches up to the quality of most other Ace Attorney games. Here's hoping the next game ends up being more in line with how good the previous entries were.