The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles – Zero Punctuation

In that there’s actual gameplay that it’s possible to lose and puzzles you have to think about and you’re not just hammering the skip dialog button with one hand and rubbing your little hairy chapstick with the other. And with that masterful setting of tone, we press on. Ace Attorney is a long running series of wholesome courtroom adventures about finding just enough of a hole in the seemingly watertight prosecution to cram in the destructive dildo of defense and blow the case apart. But they’ve always had the same problem pre-Like A Dragon Yakuza games had in that you only really need to play one of them. Little details change but the broad strokes are always the same – you’re a wide-eyed young lawyer who’s clumsy and innocent but with a good heart and faith in humanity who spends a slightly untoward amount of time around underage girls, and you’re up against a higher-status prosecutor who’s way overconfident for someone with no clearer idea of how legal systems actually work than anyone else in the plot. And the only strategy the developers have ever had for mixing up the formula is to swap out the main characters for new ones who are precisely the fucking same.

Hence The Great Ace Attorney Adventures, an only recently officially translated prequel to Ace Attorney starring Phoenix Wright’s Japanese ancestor at the dawn of the 20th century. Now why would Phoenix Wright have a Japanese ancestor? Cough. Surely the Phoenix Wright games all take place in America? Cough cough, droll look to camera. Ryunosuke Naruhodo – no I will not attempt a Japanese accent – is a wide-eyed clumsy innocent good-hearted law student who’s forced to defend himself against a murder charge and through a contrived series of events ends up travelling to Victorian London on a cultural exchange, befriending several underage girls and matching wits with a higher-status prosecutor who’s way overconfident for etc, but lest you think this is just Ace Attorney with top hats and Cockney rhyming slang, they also put Sherlock Holmes in it. Fun fact: Sherlock Holmes meets my original character and they become best friends and solve mysteries together is arguably the world’s oldest sub genre of fan fiction. I’m pretty sure Queen Victoria was writing her own version of that whenever she was demurely fingering herself in a Westminster tearoom. And that’s what this is. Only with Doctor Watson replaced with another underage girl but that’s par for the fucking course, isn’t it.

Now, I do like Ace Attorney games, and I fucking hate Ace Attorney games. But I like them. But ooh how I hate them. I love how expressive they are in the character design and animation. I like it when you call out a simpering smugfuck with a face like the unbesmirched top on a new jar of peanut butter and mess it up with your butter knife of justice until they’re hopping around banging their head on things like they just found a lioness creeping through their pubes. And with that, I also love the satisfaction of solving the puzzles. As I believe I’ve talked about before, my one major ask of a detective puzzle game is that it should make me feel clever, and there are plenty of moments in Ace Attorney that do that when the accused thief is weirdly okay with our suggestion that we search his pockets for the missing diamond buttplug, and then I remember that he was caught pinching the bums of court officials ten minutes ago and that we actually need to be searching the bailiff’s rectum. But as for why I also hate Ace Attorney games – OOH I HATE ‘EM – part of it’s the sameyness. I wanna say every fucking defendant in every game inexplicably hides information from you until you can crowbar it out of them mid-trial. Even when the main character’s the defendant, actually.

And afterwards the same conversation always ensues. “I’m so sorry that I lied, protagonist, I expect you want to resign as my lawyer now and leave me to be falsely executed.” “No, client, I will not resign as your lawyer.” “Gwuh? But why?” “Because it’s a lawyer’s job to have faith in their client, and I don’t believe lying should carry the death penalty because I’m just that bloody great.” Which brings me to the main reason why I hate Ace Attorney games, it’s the same reason I hate most visual novels, that they never use ten words where ninety thousand billion will do. Getting to the point feels like pulling teeth while you and your dental patient are riding different escalators. “I believe we should search the bailiff’s rectum!” “Whuh?” “But the bailiff didn’t steal the diamond butt plug! Ha ha ha my learned friend has clearly forgotten who is on trial here, smug smug.” Smash hands on desk like a short-tempered DJ who’s just seen a cockroach. “Not at all!” “Huh?” “I submit that it is perfectly possible for the diamond butt plug to be in the bailiff’s rectum WITHOUT them being the one who stole it!” “Whuh?” “But how?” Jesus Christ, if they’d just let me bend the fucker over the witness stand and yank his trousers down we could all be at lunch by now.

And this hurts the all important making me feel clever factor because I did feel clever nine hundred text boxes ago but now the game’s dropped so many obvious hints a fucking sealion with dropsy could’ve figured it out. Games like this need more than just a fast text option which incidentally doesn’t even make the text go by THAT much faster but that’s a different niggle entirely – it needs a fucking fast BRAIN option that replaces half the dialogue with meaningful eyebrow wiggles. Still, I suppose it’s all pacing. My favourite parts of these games are when you’re nailing a lying witness to the wall and the cool music’s playing and everyone’s reacting like they’re getting slapped with wet trouts again and again and we’re speedily descending the slopes of mount justice on our truth toboggan, and that wouldn’t be as satisfying without a long and arduous climb to the top of mount justice beforehand. And thinking about it since detective games inherently lack replay value it’s not so bad for the games to be formulaic as long as there are new mysteries to explore. Columbo’s formulaic and I love Columbo. That’s what I want out of Ace Attorney – I want to feel like anime Columbo. But that’ll never work ‘cos the raincoat would cover up his miniskirt.