By tradition, almost all games in the series Ace Attorney get to English-speaking users with a big delay. For example, the first three parts were originally released only in Japan on Game boy advance – in 2001, 2002 and 2004, and in 2005-2007 they finally reached the western shores in versions for Nintendo dswhich we all know well. The same thing happened with the project The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures and its sequel The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve – offshoots from the main line, the actions of which do not take place in modern times, but at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. The Japanese release of the first historical spin-off took place in 2015 at 3DS, and only six years later Capcom decided to release in the West both parts at once for the current platforms as part of the collection The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles…
Developed by the author of the original trilogy Xu Takumi, and in terms of gameplay, The Great Ace Attorney’s dilogy is mostly classic in style. Formally, we are faced with games in a specific genre of visual novel, where most of the events are presented exclusively through textual dialogues. There are also elements of point-and-click-quests, while the main phase of the action takes place in the courtroom, where the player must carefully monitor the lines and behavior of the characters, analyze evidence, cross-examine and find inconsistencies in the testimony of witnesses. You have probably seen American films more than once, where the courtroom turns into an epic battlefield between a lawyer, prosecutor, witnesses and a judge – it is in this atmosphere that The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is performed, but, of course, with a certain amount of original humor that has become a hallmark series. Good comedy is rare in the gaming industry, and Ace Attorney is one of the prime examples of how a video game can be funny without the help of ridiculous bugs and fan memes.
Given that the plot of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is set at the end of the 19th century in Meiji Japan and Victorian England, we will not see familiar characters. However, the protagonist, a young Japanese lawyer Ryunosuke Naruhodo, who travels to the UK as an official representative of his country, is apparently the ancestor of everyone’s beloved Phoenix Wright, the protagonist of the main series. Many side characters, such as the judge and the prosecutor, also look suspiciously like their future counterparts, which adds to the charm of the games. The authors very thoroughly approached the reproduction of the realities of the late 19th century, including political relations between states, differences in European and Japanese mentality, the low level of development of jurisprudence, forensic science and society as a whole. Particularly successful were the sharp skirmishes in court with an abundance of caustic chauvinistic insults on national grounds, where the author ridicules arrogant Europeans, fawning Japanese officials, fat-headed soldiers and everyone else, including the protagonist, who sometimes soaks up selective nonsense.
Among the innovations in the gameplay, it should be noted the emergence of the jury, which, by voting by a majority, can directly influence the verdict, while the player will have to look for an approach and convince everyone to change their point of view in order to decide the outcome of the case in their favor. Also in The Great Ace Attorney there will be an analogue of the famous British detective named Herlock Sholmes and his assistant, a ten-year-old child prodigy Iris Wilson. It is curious that in the Japanese version of the game, Holmes’s name and surname were not distorted, and Iris Wilson was called Iris Watson. Following his style, Takumi ironically turned the image of Holmes upside down – during the game, the detective will be able to characterize witnesses using the famous deductive method, but his guesses will often turn out to be hasty and incorrect, so you will have to find contradictions in his observations, independently studying appearance of witnesses.
If you are not familiar with the Ace Attorney series, then be prepared for the unhurried pace of the action, because the genre of visual novel is most reminiscent of reading a book. Take your time, make yourself some tea – some chapters, that is, court sessions, can last for hours, and you must always be focused, because any, even seemingly insignificant information can be useful for solving the case. There is no voice acting in the game, with the exception of some exclamations like the famous “Objection!”
By their structure, the games are absolutely linear, subordinate to a clearly built scenario and do not imply moral choices that can affect the development of the plot, but this does not mean that it is worth relaxing – local puzzles will make your gray cells work, especially in the end.
