Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Justice for All (2006)

For some reason, I enjoyed this game much more during my replay than I did during my original playthrough.

• I enjoyed all four cases
• It was neat seeing returning faces and the new characters were pretty swell

• I wasn't a fan of the new songs
• I thought the first game had a nice balance of investigation and courtroom segments, but this game felt like it leaned more heavily towards the courtroom sections. Sometimes the courtrooms sections had to be split up into multiple parts even when they took place during the same time of day.

• The game is a lot more difficult than the first game. Health is persistent instead of being fully recovered after each segment, so you have to be more intentional with your actions. I also found it less straight forward to make progress because there were portions where I just wasn't sure what to do next or what to present to get more information. Presenting profiles is an added mechanic that seems neat, but it also adds to the pool of possibilities of info you could present to people and sometimes I found it easy to miss when I was expected to do so. I'm not sure if it's because the game is more obtuse or if it's just because my memory of the game isn't as good as it was for the first.
• The magatama system is interesting. It affects the narrative in that Phoenix can explicitly tell when someone is hiding information, so he has to figure out what they are hiding and why they are hiding that info. It also requires the player to be more proactive with understanding the story by making stronger connections with how the evidence fits into the story and scenarios.
• It seems like the devs wanted to get more experimental with the courtroom procedure. There's a lot more instances where you just have to press every statement or press different statements in a certain order rather than finding a contradiction right away and refuting testimonies with evidence. They also added scenarios to make you play with more intentionality by changing the stakes of pressing the wrong statement or showing the wrong evidence at the wrong time.
• Story spoilers and random thoughts: I was hoping Phoenix would be more independent in this game after getting help in cases 2-5 of the first. In this game, he gets a lot of help in cases 2 and 4. 4 is understandable given the circumstances, but in case 2, Franziska bails him out of losing cases at least twice for the sake of her winning a case perfectly thing and it kind of felt like a cop out. Case 4 is interesting because it's the first case where the goal isn't to uncover what happened. The player more or less figures out who and how was involved and why before the end, but the drama built around the situation and the change of how the story unfolds kept me invested and it showed that the series can unravel a story and build suspense beyond the formula of its standard cases. Another aspect of the story I wanted to discuss was Phoenix's attitude towards Edgeworth, which I found to be unenjoyable for most of the game. I just can't really buy that he felt as strongly as he did for the level of betrayal he felt he experienced.

Overall, I think I still put this as the weakest in the original trilogy, but the gap isn't as wide for me as it used to be.

Case 3-4 spoilers

How was anyone supposed to guess that the bust was in the court? WHY HAVEN'T WE ALLUDED ACRO'S BODY? IT'S SO OUT OF LEFT FIELD. The cloak latching onto the bust was one of the most ridiculous stretches that I have ever seen in anything ever. And then there's the fact that a 31 year old and 2 20+ year olds have the kahoots for a 16 year old which more than irks me. I came into this game blind without looking up reception towards the case and I didn't like this case. God, this case was bad.