It’s an interesting experience to jump into a series you feel like you know when your familiarity is entirely through memes. Phoenix Wright isn’t nearly as fast paced as I thought it would be, or QUITE as zany. What I got instead was a pretty sharp Perry Mason simulator with shockingly few outrageously impossible-feeling logical leaps in puzzle solutions (which makes the two or three times that did happen stand out a lot more).
20 years on, I’m really impressed with the game in general, especially given the knowledge of its shoestring budget, tiny staff, and quick dev time. It’s a little creaky in places - investigations are frequently longer than I’d like given how often you’re just reiterating redundant information in them, and there’s not a single case in the game that couldn’t be a day shorter than it is and be better for it, but what we have here is a really charming and solid foundation for a gameplay system and a cast of characters I really like and I’m excited to play more of them.
Thematically I feel like this game does a lot of table setting, mostly more concerned with establishing characters and the setting over broader themes until 1-4 tries to drive home some of the philosophical differences in Phoenix and von Karma’s attitudes towards justice and the law but given how much more intensely case 1-5 gets into that stuff (my understanding is that 1-5 was added to the DS version and written after the rest of the trilogy) I’m excited to see later games push the politics of the setting more to the forefront.
I’m pretty positive that I’m never gonna get more out of this series than a very lukewarm liberal take on what justice looks like in this series but I guess I should just be grateful that it wasn’t made by like Abe style neo fascists. Excited to be disappointed.
The game is simply very fun to play
20 years on, I’m really impressed with the game in general, especially given the knowledge of its shoestring budget, tiny staff, and quick dev time. It’s a little creaky in places - investigations are frequently longer than I’d like given how often you’re just reiterating redundant information in them, and there’s not a single case in the game that couldn’t be a day shorter than it is and be better for it, but what we have here is a really charming and solid foundation for a gameplay system and a cast of characters I really like and I’m excited to play more of them.
Thematically I feel like this game does a lot of table setting, mostly more concerned with establishing characters and the setting over broader themes until 1-4 tries to drive home some of the philosophical differences in Phoenix and von Karma’s attitudes towards justice and the law but given how much more intensely case 1-5 gets into that stuff (my understanding is that 1-5 was added to the DS version and written after the rest of the trilogy) I’m excited to see later games push the politics of the setting more to the forefront.
I’m pretty positive that I’m never gonna get more out of this series than a very lukewarm liberal take on what justice looks like in this series but I guess I should just be grateful that it wasn’t made by like Abe style neo fascists. Excited to be disappointed.
The game is simply very fun to play