Played via the Trilogy collection on Xbox.
I found this game to be mechanically unpleasant to the point of being nearly unplayable. One game design element I have never understood is the practice of animating text boxes, where instead of giving you all the text at once, you have to sit there and watch each letter appear one after another. I have no idea what this is meant to accomplish, but for me its effect is extreme irritation. How is making me read the text piecemeal, at a sluggish pace, supposed to help me enjoy the game?
I'm a pretty slow reader, but I still read faster than the text appears. The designers must have known this is a horrible feature that everyone will hate, because they gave us a workaround. You can hit the "continue" button while the text is animating to make the text animate faster. This mostly works, except that Ace Attorney is full of filler lines like "..." and "Hngh?!" and it's easy to get out of rhythm and accidentally skip a line because you're trying to get through at a normal reading speed. And of course, there's no way to go back and check your log to see what was said previously. To top it all off, the text animation is accompanied by a piercing, hyper beeping sound like a mosquito with a jackhammer. This is a game where dialog is a central mechanic, and they seem to have gone out of their way to make it maximally irritating.
I probably could have gotten past this if I could find anything else to enjoy. Nothing about the gameplay grabbed me at all. The investigation phase is a pure checklist; there are no skill checks or mechanical tension of any kind. The trial phase is essentially a trial (ha) and error affair. They want you to select the prompts that reveal inconsistencies in the witness's stories, but the prompts are so vague and unrelated to the dialog that I found blindly clicking options to be more effective than actually trying to engage with the story in any way. Pretty much everything that came out of Phoenix's mouth in response to my own commands was a complete surprise to me, which seemed like a pretty bad sign considering this is a game ostensibly about winning arguments through logic. At least the trial phase has a way to fail so there is some kind of tension. However when I learned that losing at trial meant simply restarting the entire case from the beginning and having to trudge through every stupid dialog again, I basically stopped wanting to play the game.
And then, of course, are the character designs and writing. This looks like yet another one of those games that's obsessed with sex, but can only manage to engage with it at the level of a poorly-educated pubescent boy. The first woman you meet is your boss, some kind of super lawyer who seems to be wearing a bustier as both an undergarment and overgarment. She hilariously accessorizes it with a suit coat, you know, because she's a professional.
The next woman I met continued the inevitable trend line and that pretty much killed the game for me. The character is a by-the-numbers trope; the sexually liberated woman who won't fuck you so of course she's evil. She's also cartoonishly stupid (of course). I've played too much of this crap lately and my patience for it is thoroughly exhausted.
I didn't even get to the end of the second case in this game. This was a huge disappointment as I've heard so much praise for it but I couldn't find a single redeeming quality.
I found this game to be mechanically unpleasant to the point of being nearly unplayable. One game design element I have never understood is the practice of animating text boxes, where instead of giving you all the text at once, you have to sit there and watch each letter appear one after another. I have no idea what this is meant to accomplish, but for me its effect is extreme irritation. How is making me read the text piecemeal, at a sluggish pace, supposed to help me enjoy the game?
I'm a pretty slow reader, but I still read faster than the text appears. The designers must have known this is a horrible feature that everyone will hate, because they gave us a workaround. You can hit the "continue" button while the text is animating to make the text animate faster. This mostly works, except that Ace Attorney is full of filler lines like "..." and "Hngh?!" and it's easy to get out of rhythm and accidentally skip a line because you're trying to get through at a normal reading speed. And of course, there's no way to go back and check your log to see what was said previously. To top it all off, the text animation is accompanied by a piercing, hyper beeping sound like a mosquito with a jackhammer. This is a game where dialog is a central mechanic, and they seem to have gone out of their way to make it maximally irritating.
I probably could have gotten past this if I could find anything else to enjoy. Nothing about the gameplay grabbed me at all. The investigation phase is a pure checklist; there are no skill checks or mechanical tension of any kind. The trial phase is essentially a trial (ha) and error affair. They want you to select the prompts that reveal inconsistencies in the witness's stories, but the prompts are so vague and unrelated to the dialog that I found blindly clicking options to be more effective than actually trying to engage with the story in any way. Pretty much everything that came out of Phoenix's mouth in response to my own commands was a complete surprise to me, which seemed like a pretty bad sign considering this is a game ostensibly about winning arguments through logic. At least the trial phase has a way to fail so there is some kind of tension. However when I learned that losing at trial meant simply restarting the entire case from the beginning and having to trudge through every stupid dialog again, I basically stopped wanting to play the game.
And then, of course, are the character designs and writing. This looks like yet another one of those games that's obsessed with sex, but can only manage to engage with it at the level of a poorly-educated pubescent boy. The first woman you meet is your boss, some kind of super lawyer who seems to be wearing a bustier as both an undergarment and overgarment. She hilariously accessorizes it with a suit coat, you know, because she's a professional.
The next woman I met continued the inevitable trend line and that pretty much killed the game for me. The character is a by-the-numbers trope; the sexually liberated woman who won't fuck you so of course she's evil. She's also cartoonishly stupid (of course). I've played too much of this crap lately and my patience for it is thoroughly exhausted.
I didn't even get to the end of the second case in this game. This was a huge disappointment as I've heard so much praise for it but I couldn't find a single redeeming quality.