With a dummy and a clown for witnesses, it’s no wonder that the trial was a joke, but we still managed to heckle our way out of it for another day of investigations. We just need to explain the… everything with Turnabout Big Top.
When looking for criticisms regarding Turnabout Big Top, one of the major issues that was brought up time and again was that Acro isn’t introduced until this act (and we won’t even see him until our next episode in 6-2). In a traditional whodunnit structure, one of the cardinal rules is that all of the suspects for the crime need to be introduced within roughly the first third of the mystery. This gives the audience a framework they can use when thinking about the clues being gathered over the course of the mystery.
Now that we’re in the last stages of Turnabout Big Top, and we’re only just being introduced to Acro now (even if he’s been mentioned in passing before), it would be unfair to expect the audience to reasonably peg him as the murder during the initial investigation.
Even in a story like this, where the Why and How are just as important as the Who, I would still say this is a problem because without knowing about Acro, we can’t even guess how or why he would commit a crime like this. The game needs to spend most of this second Investigation segment feeding us all of these relevant details because it couldn’t in the first. It doesn’t invalidate the initial setup, because the information established in the first half of the case comes into play with the resolution. But in a series that’s otherwise so careful about seeding details ahead of time so that they can have impactful payoffs, it’s a noticeable oversight.
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