Ace Attorney Investigations Collection Is a Pair of Charming Classics [Review]

There was a moment while playing the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection, late into the wee hours of the morning and about 12 hours into my madcap marathon play, where my eyes began to betray me. Overcome by heavy-lidded doziness, I briefly rested my eyes, and upon opening them, squinted at a black-and-white image of a group of costumed mascot characters who all loosely resembled the poorly drawn “Sanic” meme in a tense moment of gun-toting confrontation. And for a split second, I wasn’t entirely sure if I had slipped into a dream or had awoken to a profound revelation.

Ace Attorney games have a deft and steady way of delivering the unexpected, and there’s something about it that breaks my brain — ever so slightly bent out of reality, I briefly lose myself. And I just can’t get enough of it.

Not that long ago, for over a year, I feverishly consumed nearly every Ace Attorney game one bite-sized chunk at a time. Every night before bed like routine clockwork, I hazily fumbled my way through the various legal pursuits of Phoenix Wright and friends, allowing them to lull me into a colorful, zany sleep full of cries calling out Objection! They’re surreal yet grounded. A mentally stimulating puzzle yet a cradling Ambien. A functioning contradiction. With their off-kilter, cartoonish characters that demand little of you other than an ear to talk off, I steadfastly and wholeheartedly find the Ace Attorney games to be the ultimate and perfect series to settle you into a cozy comfort that you can dreamily drift in and out of.

The Ace Attorney Investigations Collection only continues this trend, playing in the muck of an eccentric crime-ridden world that’s been touched by a dab of the surreal. While covered in a different wrapper, a heavy departure from the series norm, the Investigations games still deliver that same giddy dose of absurdist somnial fervor in service as the perfect signature bedtime games.

Ace Attorney Investigations Collection: A Pair of Forgotten Classics Dragged Into the Modern Era

Ace Attorney Investigations Collection is the culmination of publisher Capcom’s recent efforts to steadily release the entire Ace Attorney library of games on modern hardware and finally round out the complete Ace Attorney experience. Comprising Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth and Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor’s Gambit, the collection is a skillful HD remaster and port of the two Nintendo DS games released back in 2009 and 2011, and they come with a few quality-of-life changes to boot, including a History function for you to look back on previous dialogue text and a Story Mode that you can enable to have the game play itself out for you, useful for when you’re ever feeling particularly stuck or mentally spent. In addition, the collection boasts revamped artwork and rearranged music, both of which have been cleaned up to be less crunchy, and both of which can be swapped and toggled from the title menu to return to the look and feel of the original games, if that’s what you prefer.

The new artwork in particular is a complete overhaul, replacing the original pixel sprites with smooth, flat 2D chibi sprites by original character designer Tatsuro Iwamoto. And they look excellent here, better matching the bright, static portraiture that pops up during character dialogue and capturing much more nuanced details and expressions. As someone with a deep love for the pixelated days of yore, I would typically opt for the old pixel sprites myself, but I have to admit that in this remastered collection, they can feel overly chunky and rather jarring against the cleaner backdrop of everything else. The fresh coat of paint on the new sprites provides clear and vivid colors that simply fit the game better for a more cohesive and enjoyable look.

Beyond those additions, any other changes to the pair of games will have gone completely over my head. I never actually got my hands on the original games — the only Ace Attorney games I never got around to — so I can’t exactly go over them with a fine-toothed comb for a comparative breakdown between the old and the new … though I doubt there’s all that much new to see here for any veteran Investigations players, considering the conservative approach Capcom has taken for previous Ace Attorney remasters.

No, I instead approached the Ace Attorney Investigations duology as a completely new experience. And I was surprised to find that they’re a bit of a black sheep — completely broken away from the series in terms of gameplay, yet a surprisingly retrofitted and apt evolution for the series as a whole.

All-New, All-Different Ace Attorney

For the uninitiated, Ace Attorney games typically play out primarily as visual novels, segmented by chunks of environmental sleuthing, colorful conversations, and courtroom logic puzzles that have you poking and prodding at witness testimonies to find discrepancies that will break their claims apart. The essence of those games has been carefully preserved in the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection with a deep sense of familiarity, but never has Ace Attorney broken away from the mold so heavily as it has here.

Unlike the sliding panel frames that define the rest of the Phoenix Wright series, Ace Attorney Investigations has you directly control the once complicated rival, now-protagonist Miles Edgeworth as a 2D character running around side-scrolling 2D environments. Walk up to observable objects marked by a little magnifying glass icon and interact with them to either learn more about the object through text or take a closer look, having you enter one of those classic first-person Phoenix Wright panel frames that give you control over a cursor you can use to poke around the panel for clues. Thoroughly observe the environment, and you’ll come out of it with a slew of new evidence filed away in your organizer, which you can then pull out and use against characters when interrogating their faulty testimonies.

But, most surprising of all, Ace Attorney Investigations largely leaves the courtroom setting behind. You won’t ever find yourself in a trial presided over by a judge in these games. Instead, all of the action takes place at actual crime scenes. As a result, the experience as a whole wibble-wobbles away from the visual novel format and strays into something more akin to a classic point-and-click adventure like Tim Schafer’s Monkey Island games or Grim Fandango, albeit with a heavier emphasis on dialogue and rhetorically heated tête-à-têtes.

Don’t Just Play as Edgeworth. Be the Edgeworth.

It may seem a bit odd to boot the lawyer doing all his lawyerly duties out of the courtroom and onto the streets, but Capcom has handled this tactfully, and all of the logic puzzles, witness testimonies, and other court-based game mechanics that have defined the series have made the transition over to the new format intact. However, these features have been recontextualized for the more detective-oriented gameplay to become more integrated into the investigative work itself. While previous Ace Attorney games often didn’t give you all the pieces of a case to work through before thrusting you into the role of defense attorney, Investigations is far more focused on collecting evidence and finding all the little details, often placing you into Edgeworth’s mind through a “Logic” mechanic that has you match together collected clues to deduce new info and create new leads.

It all comes together to make for a more cohesive and better-paced game at the end of the day, as all the disparate interactive functions play off each other to make you feel as if you’re puzzling all the pieces together yourself. And once you nail down a case’s culprit and paint them into a corner with your hard work and fancy words, it’s all the more satisfying.

In fact, it all makes quite a bit of sense, and Edgeworth’s status as a preexisting character and genius prosecutor fit the reworked gameplay exceedingly well. Whereas previous Ace Attorney protagonists Phoenix Wright, Apollo Justice, and Ryunosuke Naruhodo have all been primarily milquetoast blank slates for the player to project themselves onto (by necessity and with some fluctuation — Phoenix certainly has his own brand of wit and eccentricities attached to him), Miles Edgeworth has the distinct privilege of having had entire narrative arcs built around him, and he comes into the fray with all of his baggage and personality in tow.

It’s only sensical that you would directly control Edgeworth rather than adopt the first-person viewpoint that constrains other protagonists. Edgeworth is his own man, and his primary characteristics are appropriately reflected in the gameplay, as if the game was built for him rather than around him. After all, he’s a seasoned prosecutor, not a rookie defense attorney — of course he’s going to take a more active and aggressive approach to his work.

The Old Adventures of New Ace Attorney

Narratively, the Investigations duology takes place between the third and fourth games in the Ace Attorney series. It’s an immediate continuation of the character developments found in the first Phoenix Wright trilogy, and if you’re familiar with those games, you’ll see a lot of returning faces. However, many of the major plot beats from the first three games are largely irrelevant. So if this is your first Ace Attorney game, you won’t come in lost. 

With that said, familiarity does provide for a much richer experience. The Ace Attorney Investigations Collection may not be the worst entry point for newcomers, but it’s chock-full of references, and you may miss some of the nuance and the rewarding payoff in seeing Miles Edgeworth truly grow as a character. He’s come a long way since his initial introduction in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, after all.

And now that our distinguished cravat-clad prosecutor has become the star of his own show, he’s never been more likable. Normally a stringent and overly confident perfectionist, we now get to see Edgeworth as a haughty intellectual having to interact with the bright and looney world around him, allowing us a peek at his composure cracking under the plethora of absurd situations and accusations across 10 separate cases between the two games.

Cases are contained to each “episode” of the narrative, with both games split into five episodes each. These episodes are technically standalone and nonlinear, always involving an elaborate murder of some kind that needs to be solved. But all episodes contain a narrative throughline, and cases build on top of each other to culminate in a couple of bombastic endings that tackle larger-scale conspiratorial mysteries at the heart of them. These cases feel far more complex than past Phoenix Wright games, and you’ll need some deft deductive skills to unravel them.

But the games’ narratives largely come second fiddle to the revolving cast of series mainstays and newcomers. At the heart of it all, the games are mostly character-driven, and your mileage on narrative enjoyment will likely hinge on your feelings toward the game’s cast of oddball characters. Ace Attorney Investigations Collection may be comprised of pseudo-visual novels but their kookiness, from the costumed Blue Badger mascot kidnappers to the wig-throwing jailbird in a zoo-like prison, is the real selling point here.

Some of those characters along for the ride include Detective Gumshoe, Edgeworth’s poverty-stricken subordinate detective who simps hard after the prosecutor’s approval like a needy puppy; Franziska von Karma, fellow prosecutor and pseudo-sister who likes to freely crack a whip at anyone who makes her irate, with a likeminded and viscous perfectionist attitude that constantly butts against her adopted brother’s; and newcomer Kay Faraday, a bubbly young aspirational thief who wants to “steal the truth,” with a personality that serves as complete opposition to Edgeworth’s.

If you couldn’t tell, Edgeworth truly is the beating heart of Investigations, and seeing his personality clash, take shape, and gain new life against a perfectly composed supporting cast in his own series of mishaps is a real joy.

The Good, The Bad, & The Objectionable

That’s not to say everything works especially well in the Ace Attorney Investigations duology. As a collection, Ace Attorney Investigations is a mixed bag of some high highs and low lows, with the first Investigations game especially being a bit of a mess and a particular low point for the series. It’s not a bad game by any means, but it has quite a few stumbles and fumbles in its roughly 30-hour runtime.

As you might expect, a logic game lives and dies by its ability to present itself clearly and succinctly so that you, the player, have all the information necessary to accurately identify the pieces that don’t fit. If the game insists there’s a contradiction where there perceptively isn’t, that’s a problem. And if the game behaves like a contradiction doesn’t exist when one seemingly does, that’s also a problem.

Ace Attorney Investigations is pretty good at laying itself out — it’s easy enough to follow. But unfortunately, the game doesn’t always hit the right logic queues, and you’ll have to learn how the game thinks in order to get by. Luckily, the game is also quite good at telegraphing itself. Character dialogue in witness testimonies tend to signpost what you should be paying attention to and questioning, and checkmarks appear next to magnifying glass icons to make it clear what does and doesn’t need further investigating.

The biggest problems appear when contradictions aren’t always clear in the evidence compiled, and some guesswork is sometimes necessary to figure out which evidence the game wants you to use. This only gets worse as the game progresses, and it’s exacerbated in instances when characters make some rather bold assumptions or treat supposition as if it’s proof positive. These problems are never so egregious that the game feels obtuse, misleading, or unsolvable, and if you ever get stuck, you can always use Story Mode to help yourself out of any unfair jams. But they’re problems all the same, and they can get downright frustrating when they’re at their worst.

But my one major complaint against Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth is that the game frequently refuses to move on. It’s a robust and beefy game with every episode taking many hours to complete (In total, the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection has around 70-80 hours of content. That’s a lot of reading!), and too often does it want you to hammer out every tiny detail when a case is at its precipice and all but solved. So too will it trap you in stubborn debates and circular arguments where characters fall back on rehashed ground, forcing you to repeatedly present the same evidence against their claims to move forward. Much of the game feels like it can be trimmed down or truncated to make for a better overall experience.

But for all that the first Ace Attorney Investigations does wrong, Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor’s Gambit course corrects, and it’s where the Investigations Collection really shines.

While many of the first Investigations game’s faults and blemishes extend to its sequel, Prosecutor’s Gambit still manages to correct many of its wrongs and stay its course. Funny enough, Prosecutor’s Gambit’s episodes are actually longer than its predecessor’s, with the complete game clocking in at around 40 hours, and yet they maintain a steady momentum that’s sorely lacking in the first game. Rather than a tireless slog, Prosecutor’s Gambit always had me on my toes, genuinely immersed and excited to discover the many twists and turns each case had boiling underneath its surface.

And it’s all held together by case scenarios that feel more dynamic, emotionally charged, and formidably testing for our flawed protagonist as he connects to his past, especially with his late father. On top of this, Prosecutor’s Gambit introduces the Mind Chess mechanic which ratchets up tension by having you engage in intense rhetorical tear-downs under a time limit, elegantly and appropriately reflecting Edgeworth’s prosecutorial role and displaying his full skills.

Otherwise, the two Investigations games are mere extensions of each other, playing, feeling, and looking the same. The second game’s narrative even picks up almost immediately where the first’s left off. But Prosecutor’s Gambit is Ace Attorney at its most exciting, most heart-wrenching, and most narratively rewarding, making for one of the best games in the series — and visual novel format —  that shouldn’t be missed.

Verdict: Highly Recommended

For all of Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth’s missteps, Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor’s Gambit picks the series up to incredible heights and makes the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection a must-play. (However, if you’re new to the series, I’d maybe suggest playing through Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy first, then come back around.)

For the purposes of my review, I had to speed through Ace Attorney Investigations Collection in one tireless fell swoop, but I highly recommend taking the affair slowly. If anything, my time spent with the game only reinforces my belief that Ace Attorney, in all of its forms, is best digested piecemeal. And I’m adamant that they make for the best bedtime games. So grab a blanket, get cozy, and allow yourself to dreamily linger with this delightfully offbeat collection.

Ace Attorney Investigations Collection is out on Sept. 6, 2024, for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and PC. Reviewed on PC. A code was provided by the publisher for the sake of review.