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.

This game is weird. For as many good ideas as I think it DOES has it tends to miss a lot too. Notably speaking, I think a majority of the good ideas are fantastic, and probably some of my favorite things to come out of the series. My favorite cases were 5-3 and 5-DLC, as I thought the characters in those cases were really fun, and they’re just fun. Dual Destinies is easily one of my least favorite Ace Attorneys but I still had fun. I also liked 5-4 and 5-5, even though 5-5 is probably one of my least favorite finale cases. A lot of the story beats with Simon and Athena are really good, and both of them are easily some of my favorite characters to come out of this series. I really like Simon’s whole samurai aesthetic and how he interacts with his bird, Taka, in his animations. His role in the plot is cool and I enjoy him a lot. Similarly, I love Athena. Not only does she have one of my favorite objection themes in the series, but she’s just really funny, speaks phrases in different languages just for fun, and her new gameplay gimmick, mood matrix, is a really great way to change the way courtroom testimonies are typically handled, even if it is stupidly easy at times. She is definitely one of my favorite takes on the “assistant character” that Ace Attorney loves doing.

One of the biggest issues with the game though, I feel, are that the second trilogy of games cannot decide whether they want Phoenix to be Apollo and Athena’s mentor, or be the main character again, but I don’t like how they try to have their cake and eat it too. People really like Phoenix Wright, and I do too, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to introduce new main characters that could use the spotlight more just to be constantly overshadowed by Phoenix in almost every case in the game. Remember how I referred to Athena as an “assistant character”? Yeah, she’s a lawyer, and the plot is technically focused on her, but Phoenix is always in the drivers seat most of the time and I wish this wasn’t the case. I mean, out of the game’s 6 cases, Apollo leads 1, Athena leads 1 and a half, and Phoenix gets the other 4 and a half. The game is about issues both Apollo and Athena face yet they don’t get the opportunity to actually be the player character more than once. Combine that with the fact that Dual Destinies takes the poker-playing hobo version of Phoenix and throws it out the window in favor of having his trilogy self back, and I think it should be pretty obvious why I don’t really love Phoenix in this game compared to previous titles. He’s still a fun character, but to me, disbarred Phoenix felt like a harsh, but logical progression of the character (in the sense that Phoenix isn’t the one running cases all the time anymore) that Dual Destinies instead decided to treat like just another phase in his life.

Dual Destinies is a ok game, but a very lacking sequel to Apollo Justice and fails to capitalize on the true potential it could have as a sequel. Instead of trying to make something out of the unresolved plot threads from Apollo Justice, they instead do a reboot of a reboot and throw away mostly everything from that game in favor of new ideas. Some work well. Some don’t. Some really annoy me. For reference, I don’t think any Ace Attorney games are actually bad, but they can be pretty ok at times. Dual Destinies, in my opinion, misses a lot of what was interesting about Apollo Justice by lowering the tone that was present in that game and choosing to go a safer, less morally gray route. It’s a game that feels lacking because it plays it too safe, and while I did enjoy my time, I think the game could’ve been much better.

After the conclusion to Phoenix Wright’s story that Trials and Tribulations gave Ace Attorney fans, Shu Takumi believed the third game would be a good stopping point for the series. And, to his credit, he had a point; Phoenix’s story was done with the ending of Trials and Tribulations. Phoenix had grown from a bumbling, unconfident rookie into an extremely competent lawyer who was able to take down some extremely corrupt and, to be blunt, horrible people while solving many issues that plagued him and his friends’ pasts. So, where would Phoenix go next?

This question would be answered in the fourth game, Apollo Justice, showing how Phoenix’s life took a drastic turn and how the world of Ace Attorney shifted after a seven year time gap.

The tonal shift Apollo Justice gives to its characters and the world is one of my favorite things to come out of this series. To stop beating around the obvious without spoiling things too heavily, Phoenix is unable to practice law in this game and is no longer the main character. The famous lawyer who’d grown so much the past three games has been shifted into a morally gray, suspicious man who you can never get a real read on ever during the game. And, there’s so much theming around how the world changes over tike through its other characters, too.

Some of my favorites were Apollo himself, while he doesn’t really have a backstory in this game, he makes up for it by just being really funny and being really cool. I just like Apollo a lot. He doesn’t actually have much of a backstory but he’s so enjoyable that I don’t care. Trucy is one of my favorite characters to come out of this game too. She’s a magician and Phoenix Wright’s daughter, and I love how the game handles her. At first glance, she seems just like most other ace attorney assistants, but this is merely the surface level of her character. I love how she’s actually really smart and very clever!! There’s multiple times she figures out things in cases way before Apollo gets close, and unlike someone like Maya Fey, who was interesting because she was so inexperienced with the world outside of her village, Trucy is interesting due to how she understands Apollo so well and can use her magician persona to literally manipulate Apollo at times. It’s so cool, and all of this is hidden under layers of caution towards how emotionally vulnerable she can be to the point where she literally keeps a strong face at times purely fir herself and I love it so much. This character is incredible and she deserved so much better after AJ. I love this game and it’s characters a whole lot.

The cases are a mixed bag for many people. But personally, I love most of them. Everyone who plays this game knows Turnabout Trump is really good. It’s a thrilling twist on first cases that no other game does and I love the mystery. I also really loved Turnabout Succession - even more than Turnabout Trump, but I’d rather not talk about it. It’s one of my favorite Ace Attorney cases ever and there’s so much I can’t say without spoiling the game lol.

“But what about Turnabout Corner and Turnabout Serenade?” They’re both good. I just don’t think they’re super great, unfortunately. I love Apollo Justice, don’t get me wrong, but 4-2 and 4-3 aren’t as great as I really wish they were. Still good, just could’ve been better. Still perfectly enjoyable cases though. I had fun with every case in this game.

And yes. You read that right. I don’t think Turnabout Serenade is the worst thing ever, kicked me in shins and/or spat in my food. Yes, I know it’s extremely hated. But I liked it!

Apollo Justice is a mixed bag of a game to many. Some see it as an irredeemable misstep that took the series in a direction that fans didn’t want, while some love it to death and hold it as a great game in a series of constant hits. I’m proud to say that Apollo Justice mattered a lot to me, and that for as long as Ace Attorney exists, I will never forget how happy this game makes me.

Being someone who thought the first Investigations title was fine but lacking, I wasn’t sure what I was expecting going into the second game. The first game definitely had it’s great moments, but combined with the fact that the story and many of the game’s cases didn’t grab me like they do in other Ace Attorney games, I was worried about what I’d think of this one. Especially considering that prior to my play-through I had heard from many people that it was one of the best Ace Attorney games, one of the best the series had to offer that wasn’t as appreciated by Capcom due to the fact that it was never released outside of Japan. However, I am happy to say that after finishing the game, I think the game is very great.

This game probably has the best story out of any Ace Attorney game. You get five cases with 0 filler and every case in this game connects to the bigger picture in some way. It’s really cool and the interconnectedness of the game’s events along with the fact that it all comes together at the end is spectacular. Furthermore, the quality of the cases also does not disappoint. One of my favorite cases ever, “The Inherited Turnabout”, is a case that revolves around a murder at a museum for desserts. But what makes this case extremely fun (without getting into spoilers) is that it’s a case where you solve a mystery in the present by (quite literally) exploring the past events that happened there 18 years ago. The cases in this game are fantastic and I love them. The entire game also sets up the idea of a “mastermind” who controls the events of the game and when they’re revealed and all the events come together, it’s incredible.

Like Ace Attorney typically does, the characters in this game are excellent. Ray Shields, a defense attorney with a great theme, has a very nice arc in case 2 and 3, and is he does a really good job at representing a guy who’s fun to be around but is serious when the time calls. It’s cool that he’s a connection to Edgeworth’s past. Justine Courtney is an entirely new take on judges in Ace Attorney. Typically, the judge is just a bald guy with the long beard you see in every game, but AAI2 is an entirely new take on judges and I enjoy how Courtney insists on taking Edgeworth’s badge throughout the story. Her arc also feels similar to Edgeworth’s in Ace Attorney 1, in a sense, since she also realizes that the legal system is imperfect throughout the game. The last character I’ll mention is Sebastian Debeste. Yes, it’s kinda dumb to have a prosecutor be really bad at his job and be a major pushover, but to be honest… I just think he’s funny. He also has a really good arc in case 5 about learning to be better and outdo his guardian; once again mirroring Edgeworth in Ace Attorney 1.

However, while I love the way they concluded their arcs, these last two characters, while enjoyable, don’t really develop until case 4. Until that point they feel a little too much like roadblocks because they’re introduced way too early. The problem with them in “The Imprisoned Turnabout” and “The Inherited Turnabout” is they pull the classic “you can’t investigate here” while wearing out their quirks by being roadblocks.

However, the entire game suffers from one big flaw: the pacing. Personally, I’m not someone who’s that bothered by pacing ever, but the game really loves to take its time and crawl along here. Characters will gladly talk for long periods of time and use 100 words to say something that could’ve been said in 15. This also means that it feels like the cases can take actual hours - and they do - because the story is told at a snail’s pace most of the time. It’s not even close to something that ruined my enjoyment of the game, though.

The biggest thing that irked me during my play-through was, oddly, Edgeworth himself, Having the exact same issue he did last game. Edgeworth is very dry emotionally in this game; it’s something I critiqued in Investigations 1 and it has not changed. In this game, Edgeworth feels like has has most of his negative traits watered down or outright removed. He just doesn’t feel as emotionally deep as he does in the trilogy because it doesn’t feel like he shows anything other than “smart smug guy” a lot of the time. Sure, we can see this in text, but the amount of times I can say Edgeworth had much emotional depth to him that was more than him doubting his career or being worried because the truth almost escaped him is… very little.

I hope people don’t think I’m being too negative or patronizing with my review. I was just interested to see why people liked this game so much, and I thought it was great, even if it didn’t entirely deliver. However, the things it got right, it REALLY got right. I love the ambition and interconnectedness of the cases from the insane setups to how gripping the story connects to itself behind the scenes. It’s fantastic and comes together into a masterful piece of writing with some of the largest scale to come out of Ace Attorney, even if it’s told really slowly. While I love the ambitiousness of the game, It’s hard for me to look past what I didn’t like so much about it. While I like the characters, I do wish some of them changed sooner and while it is an improvement over its predecessor by miles, I don’t think it reaches the same level as The Great Ace Attorney 2 and Trials and Tribulations like people say it does, but it’s a great game.

It's ok. I thought it was a bit lacking compared to the other Ace Attorney games I had played up to this point (AA1-3 and both GAA games). Cases generally could've been better and lacked dynamism. Aside from the 4th case, which is actually really great and my favorite part of the game, and the 5th case, which is also good. In general, the game suffers from the lack of emotional depth in Edgeworth. He doesn't feel very connected to the events of the game and at times it feels like he's purely solving cases because he happened to be in the area or it's related to him insignificantly. This also makes the mysteries of the cases feel less interesting due to the lack of personal stake between the main characters and some of the mysteries. It's nothing too bad, though, and it's still a decent enough time, but during my playthrough it just felt like the game was missing something. It's a fine game that fails at making Edgeworth feel connected to it's plot, but it's not bad; it just could be better. Apparently the sequel rocks though. I'm excited to try that.

Mega Man 1 is a fine first entry. Rockman Complete Works is a really nice overhaul of the game that adds in quick weapon switching similar to Mega Man 7 and 8. There's also new music ripped directly from Mega Man 2 The Power Fighters which is available in the game's "navi mode" along with many other quality of life features such as saving. Quick weapon switching helps to make the game feel more fun and takes a game I already think is enjoyable and makes it a little better. If you want a new and fresh way to play the game, definite give this one a try.