How in the world could there be a third person in a locked room that only two people entered? We’re not sure yet, but we had better find out soon.

It’s strange to play this case after Rise From the Ashes, because suddenly I have to reacclimate to the faster pace of normal Phoenix Wright cases. I forgot for a moment while recording this that I wasn’t going to somehow spent 10+ hours solving the Doctor’s murder.

We’re going to wrap this mystery in a far shorter time frame.

It’ll be strange to cross-examine witness testimony for events we were party to, and yet here we are. Hopefully this one won’t give us a Lotta trouble.

One of the more interesting tidbits of Ace Attorney development lore was that Larry Butz wasn’t intended to be a witness in the fourth and final case of the original game. However, due to concerns about space on the GBA cartridge, they chose to reuse the asset.

And once it was proven that they could do that without worry, since the audience didn’t care, it opened the door for characters like Lotta to be reused and recycled for multiple cases across multiple game. There’s a reasonable fear that reusing characters like that has the potential to make the world feel “small”, because the same people are regularly getting involved in murders that are completely, totally unrelated to each other.

However, at the same time this allows otherwise one-offs like Lotta to flesh their characters out over multiple games. Sure, each of them still adhere mostly to the stereotypical archetypes of the murder mystery genre, but within that frame work they get to have an inner depth they normally wouldn’t.

And that’s a small, but important factor that enriches and elevates the series ever so slightly higher.

With Edgeworth currently out of the picture, it only stands to reason we have a new prosecutor in town. From what I can tell, she intends to whip the entire courtroom into shape.

Most of the prosecutors in the Ace Attorney games are solid characters all around, but Franziska is one of my favorites. She’s a strong adversary, constantly picking our logic and arguments with every tool at her disposal. The whip gimmick also serves as an apt metaphor for the way she commands the court room, like her father before her, but uniquely separate and independent of that.

Which becomes a through line for her character. She was raised and taught by Manfred Von Karma, but she is her own person separate from that, with moral judgement and a sense of justice that her father lacked. We won’t see that for some time, but the way her character grows and develops over the course the game will let that ultimately shine through.

Maya is in such a terrible situation that we need to learn a whole new mechanic in order to bail her out. Good thing her cousin is here to do just that with Psyche-Locks.

I say it’s a new mechanic, but to be honest it’s more of a logical extension of the mechanics we’re already using in the main game. Through Psyche-Locks, we have a way to systematize the act of extracting information out of NPCs using the contradiction mechanics we already have access to in trials. The only real difference is that we might not have the evidence we need, so we’ll need to learn when to retreat and gather more intel.

As the series goes on, the developers always look at things like this, new ways they can engage the player, in order to keep each entry fresh and exciting. By and large, they consistently succeeded on the front, especially in the Apollo Justice trilogy.

Now that Maya’s trained enough to see us again, and ready to perform her first channeling, it looks like she has nothing to worry about from now on.

Surely, she’ll have no pressing need for an attorney. After all, what could possibly go wrong!?

Luckily for us, this will be last and final time Maya is accused of some horrible crime. Once we eventually get to the bottom of this case, she’ll be all fine and we can proceed with the game as normal.

Our first client seemed to think that she was a magnet for trouble. But clearly, she’s never met Maya Fey. If she had, she’d know that Maya gets into trouble far more frequently.

I explained it in the episode, but the original Ace Attorney was deliberately designed to avoid being overtly set in Japan, so that localization teams could do whatever they needed to to the script in the even it was released in other countries. They didn’t know how successful this franchise would be, so they wanted to be prepared for the best case scenario.

After the first game was complete, the design team began to incorporate more overtly Japanese elements into the story, as you can see with Kurain Village. Now, this poses a problem because the original localization team set the first game in California, and California doesn’t have ancient Japanese villages. Fortunately, a solution was ultimately achieved and it truly doesn’t matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. It’s just one of those weird localization quirks that’s funny to think about it retrospect.

It speaks to the localization team’s talents that despite the awkward situation, they managed to thread the needle well enough that this franchise became such a popular franchise internationally.

I’m sure that witness has a lot of incredible, insightful things to say, but I need to real with you. I’m not reading all of that. I am happy for him though, or sad that it happened.

And with that, we have our first “Not Guilty” verdict of the new game. Now we’re onto new and more distinctly Japanese-Californian pastures.

Don’t question it. Just go with the flow.

Oh no. The victim wrote our defendant’s name in the sand with his finger before he died. I’m sure that unlike the last two times that was the case, this time it means that she’s the true culprit. That has to be the only reasonable explanation.

Out of curiosity, I tried to look up real world examples where a suspect was convicted on the basis that the victim wrote their name down somewhere in the crime scene, and I couldn’t find anything. That can either speak to my growing inability to use a search engine, or the lack of real life cases where it happened. Either way, if you can find something then by all means let me know.

Having said that, I’ve completely talked myself out of the idea that this is bad. In retrospect, it’s a good thing because evidence so easy to refute that it gives new players an on-boarding ramp so that they can grow comfortable with the game’s flow and mechanics before they’re called in later cases to do a bit more thinking. The game never truly gets difficult, but all the same the design team probably wanted to ease players in.

And this accomplishes exact that. So as terrible as it is as far as evidence is concerned, that’s exactly the point.

Ladies and gentlemen of the court, we may have solved one of the most complex mysteries in the Ace Attorney franchise, but our career is far from over. Phoenix Wright returns for more courtroom drama in Justice for All!

Honestly, as a setup, this is a great way to engineer a situation where it makes sense for those of us who didn’t play the original game, or need a refresher, can go through another tutorial. The intelligent, cunning and compassionate lawyer from the last game already did all of the legwork he needed to before the trial. But after that bump in the head, we need to scramble to use what that other guy without amnesia collected to solve the case.

As for gameplay, it’s the same as you remember, except now we can present profiles as evidence during cross-examinations. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The first game established a winning formula, and this game merely needed to refine it.

And as we continue, you’ll see they aren’t done applying new tricks.

At last, our client has been proven innocent, and the true killer of Detective Bruce Goodman has been exposed. The case is over, but we still have just a few loose threads left to tie up.

As a reminder, Rise From the Ashes was written after both Justice for All and Trials and Tribulations had been released in Japan. At the time, the first game had only just come to America via the 3DS, and this was an extra case added to what was already a complete game.

While this case does stand on it’s own, nearly the full length of an entire Ace Attorney game, taken in the context of franchise as a whole it’s fairly awkwardly placed. That’ll be more clear as we start to discuss Justice for All, but for now I’ll simply stop to say that I believe the transition from Turnabout Goodbyes to Justice for All more plausible than the jump from Rise from the Ashes to it.

That said, this expansion had the additional purpose of serving as a testing ground for 3DS touchscreen-based gameplay in the Ace Attorney games. As far as that was concerned, this was a successful proof of concept. The only problem mechanic was arranging the pot to look like the Blue Badger. Aside from that, everything else fit just fine into our investigation segments, adding just a tinge of variety into the proceedings.

And though we won’t see much more of them for some time, they will return if we ever get to the Apollo Justice games.