We’ve got some monkey business left to attend to, but then it’s time for our favorite part of any case: The trial!

Somehow it completely slipped my mind when preparing to do this case for stream that it contained a love triangle between 21 and 31-year old men and a 16-year old girl with a clear developmental disorder of some kind. If this is the reason, or one of the reasons, why people dislike Turnabout Big Top, then I’m firmly on their side. The way so many people fawn over Regina in this scenario makes me uncomfortable the more I think about it.

At least we have a murder to distract us from that.

It’s been some time since we’ve last streamed Ace Attorney on account of my illness and vacation plans, but now I’ve recovered and we are back. When we last left off, we were still investigating… Turnabout Big Top!?

Oh boy…

In any other murder mystery series, if a murder ever happened at a carnival or circus, the odds are high that each of the performers, as suspects in the case, would be wacky or eclectic in some way. And while that does hold true here in Ace Attorney as well, the odd part is that they don’t feel any more or less strange than the suspects in any other case in the series.

I suspect that has much to do with the fact that almost every case in the game is dominated by bizarre and unusual personalities that chew the scenery at every opportunity. In that context, a band of circus performers is tame by comparison.

Remember that time Edgeworth said “You are not a clown. You are the entire circus.”? Do you think that was all just a setup for Turnabout Big Top?

Apologies for calling it quits early, but at the time of recording (and writing), I was still on the mend from a cold (although it’s getting better). We’ll pick this up as soon as we can, though that might be some time since I’m still a little ill and I have a trip coming up.

Until then, I wish the best for you all. <3

Due to the sheer quality of the writing in most Ace Attorney games, the discussion of which case is the “best” case in the series is usually a contentious one. There are many strong standouts from across the history of the franchise.

And yet, when it comes to which case is the worse Ace Attorney case of all time, that debate is far less contentious. Most will say that their answer is Turnabout Big Top.

We’re here. So let’s find out why.

For what it’s worth, I don’t have the same dislike of Turnabout Big Top that so many other people in the fandom seem to. It has flaws, certainly. Some of its characters aren’t as entertaining as the writing team appear to have believed they were, but nothing stands out enough to make it the clear obvious contender for worst case in the franchise.

But we’re still in the early goings of the case, so perhaps we’ll remember something later that helps us understand why it’s so maligned.

This is it. We’re close to acquitting Maya for the second and final time. All we need to do is break one more set of testimonies before we get lashed too hard.

It’s always satisfying to watch all of the pieces of a case come together in the big finale, and this is no different. But now that we’re done, it’s time to move onto our next caper.

Let’s see. It says here that the next case is “Turnabout Big T-” oh crap.

They think they have us cornered. They think there’s no way we’ll turn this around.

But guess what? We aren’t called the Turnabout Terror for nothing!

We’re so close. We also have Ini Miney and Morgan Fey trapped. Just a few more cross-examinations, and we’ll be able to move onto the next Turnabout. Join me next week as we do exactly that.

As always, we go into the final day of trial with a solid idea of who our true culprits are. The real difference here is that our esteemed colleague in the prosecutor’s chair has a bullwhip and a chip on her shoulder.

And she’s not afraid to use at least one of those things.

We’re closing in on the solution to this case, and just a few more questions and cross-examinations will make all the difference. Next time, Ini Miney will take the stand, and we’ll finally have our chance to expose her.

What do you mean that the extremely passive aggressive old lady is secretly evil!? That can’t be. She drinks tea and everything!

Nothing marks an early 2000s Japanese video game quite like the perverted old man trope. I was almost afraid that we wouldn’t get the chance to see one.

Jests aside, it’s harmless enough that it doesn’t bother me, and it’s unfair to judge this game by modern standards when we’re almost twenty years removed from it. Perhaps I should be more concerned about how spot-on my dirty old man impression is, but we’ll try not to think about it. Or maybe the upcoming trial should concern me.

Nah, definitely the old man impression.

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.