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

I can't believe this game still got me all chocked up by the end. The first three cases are rocky and don't feel all that well written but that final one elevated the entire game. That was some really good stuff.

The second game in the Ace Attorney series for the most part felt... fine, I guess. Not great, just fine. The jokes still had me laughing along as I played but the cases often relied far too heavily on characters returning from the first game acting as witnesses (I'm so damn sick of Lotta Hart, and I liked her at first!) and what new characters were introduced didn't feel particularly memorable or just flat out sucked. Shout out to Ini Miney and Matt Engarde though. Both are great in their own ways. I just wish this game had more original characters.

Oh and sorry for the poor image quality. I played on my 3DS, which makes screenshots tough and phone cameras much more appealing. Anyway, moving on to the final case...

The last case in this game is a massive step up from the others. It's a doozy, and took up just under half of my total playtime in the game. The writing in this one felt much tighter and there were far fewer leaps in logic required to follow what was going on, which was welcome after the travesty that was case 3, Big Top Turnabout. I'm also very happy that this case tackles an issue which has been bumping around in the back of my mind since I began playing these games: What happens if I have to defend an actual killer? I found the way the writing tackled this to be more than satisfactory. I want to see more philosophical impasses like this, please.

It's also the conclusion to this case that makes this game actually feel like a really good sequel. It pushes the stories of several characters-- old and new-- much further along, providing them some welcome development. In fact as I was watching the ending I somehow got really sad, as if I was saying goodbye to them even though I'm still so early in the series. I had been leaning towards a lower rating, but that pushed it up for me. The last case is just too good and makes this required playing where it otherwise might not be.

I see myself jumping into the next game very very soon. I need more of these goofballs in my life.

I really don't get why this game is liked or highly reviewed. Maybe I'm not getting the comedy, 'cause god damn the characters are stupid. I didn't like any of them in particular, and Phoenix is my LEAST favorite character, very annoying.

Next, this was the switch port, however, they made the pixel art into more-dense-pixel-art, and it's ugly as sin, at least the backgrounds.

The cases are rocky ranging from quite clever and plottwisty to downright stupid. Maybe I'm missing something here, or the writing went over my head or something, but I did not enjoy this game one bit.

Maybe this series just somehow isn't for me?

As with the first game, I was a spectator while my friend/roomie played through this. I do own the collection on Switch, but had just never played the games on my own.

Many of my complaints about the first game are still present here, but worse. The investigative parts now include Psyche-locks where you have to do even more back and forth to gather clues, information, and evidence in order to get more clues, information, and evidence from a person who is hiding things. This is not an inherently bad mechanic by any means, but these cases already suffer from terrible pacing in the investigative parts and then just stupid shit during the trials.

The last case was an absolute garbage heap. I see so many people saying it's fantastic or outshone the rest of the game, and I am all for people being of that opinion but I cannot understand it at all, like I am legit confused. It just KEEPS GOING for an eternity, and then it's by far the most incredibly STUPID trial. Oh yes, let's call the ASSASSIN WHO HAS MY ASSISTANT AS A HOSTAGE as a witness over a RADIO so we can buy time for him to not kill said assistant but we can only kind of poke holes in his testimony--but not too much or he'll kill said assistant. There were probably fifty other witnesses or methods they could have gone with to deal with the hostage situation and Phoenix's turmoil over defending a guilty client. What an absolute slog. My friend plays through the series probably a few times a year, and has played this one the least, and I gather it's widely regarded as the weakest, but I was enjoying the previous cases just fine. The last case just tanked anything good this game was doing.

Let it be known that I play a lot of otome visual novels and am an avid reader, so it has nothing to do with "having to read a lot" or not enjoying text-based games. I also love crime dramas, police procedurals, etc., so again, not a genre issue. There are some great funny moments and some solid characters, but they're so overshadowed by the obnoxious characters that you spend way too much time having to interact with and incredibly stupid trial moments.

Edit to add that the circus was was bonkers but still fun minus the MULTIPLE adult men going after the 16-year-old Regina, which was gross.

My friend has lived with me for six months due to a housing/job issue and is moving out next week, so playing the rest of the games together is not going to be an option. At the same time that I want to see where the other games go, my main takeaway from these games has been "tedious" and I just don't know if I'll ever boot up the others. It's a shame, because there are some great name-puns, the case stories themselves are interesting, and I do like a number of the characters.

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.

I played the first game around a year ago, and started this one soon after. I played the first trial and then put it down. I only now came back to it, and finished.

This game was played on the switch as part of the triology series. This game took me around 20h 30m. Overall it was a great game and I look forward to moving onto the third game. That said it is not the strongest of the two played so far.

It has some interesting game mechanics with the introduction of the lie detector in the later game. That said I think the mechanics of the first were much better and I would've loved to been able to continue using some of those.

The early trials of this game are forgettable and it really shines late game. I didn't even realize I had previously started this game because the first trial was not very good. I had played the first trial and then put the game down for quite some time.

This game was easier then the first however just as long. In the first game there are 5 trials; In the second there are 4. However, even with less trials, the second game took me around 1-2 hours longer to complete.

Overall I recommend the game to anyone who likes murder mystery as a genre; however I recommend to follow the series in order as this is very much a sequel and not a stand alone title.

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.

Justice for All is one half a bad continuous slog, a quarter decent legitimately ok story writing, and a last quarter that's just entirely amazing. It's a mixed sequel to the first game to say the least, it keeps most of the charm of the first game although a considerably weaker soundtrack at the same time. It keeps up character writing and introduces a couple mainstay characters that are fine and then one really irritating and excruciatingly underwritten character that takes up way too much screentime.

The casewriting is pretty much the same, with two cases that are bad with trash characters and a complete waste of time both in a writing sense and a structural sense, but also contains easily the best case I've read so far from this series by a very very significant margin that not only characterizes the personalities of the people involved but also has such an excellent motive, logical reasoning for how the case happened, and fantastic thematic storytelling. Had it not been for the rest of the game, I honestly would have called AA2 really good. Unfortunately the poor sides of the game manage to be lower than the first game and it's hard to look at this game as a cohesive whole.

That being said, it did manage to keep my attention and interest a little bit more than the first game, and I think the highs equalize with the lows to where I can say AA2 is still alright and worth reading alongside the first, maybe even a pinch more. It's a sidestep forward instead of a genuinely competent sequel, but I had my fun where I could. (6.5/10)