seiberwing

At the risk of being labeled a traditionalist, I have to say that Apollo Justice is far inferior to the Phoenix Wright series. My two main beefs are with gameplay and the story/characters...and since those are pretty much the most important things in a game that's not XBox360 levels of pretty, it doesn't speak well of the game as a whole.

The game does keep the basic talk-investigate/press-present format that worked so well for its forefathers, but for some reason they took away the "present profile" function. It was useful, can't imagine why. Psych-lock detection and the magatama has been largely replaced with Apollo's Percieve abilities (which are total bullshit story-wise, I'll get to that under the cut). The ability to detect lies through small, unconscious twitches is a great idea in theory, but the way it's carried out is that you have to use it during the right section of the testimony, then wait for the right phrase, and then detect the twitch while only seeing a small part of the character at a time. I wound up listening to the wrong section several times while frantically looking for the twitch before the phrase ended. It would have been better if you could see the entire screen during the Percieving, instead of having to dodge around so much.

Bar that, I'd actually complain that the game is a bit too easy. There are a lot more unsubtle hints from the characters, not to mention the constant flashbacks (to things that happened five minutes ago game time and fifteen in real time). Your rival prosecutor doesn't throw you nearly yas many hardballs and doesn't take things that seriously even when he loses; you get the feeling he's only even in the law profession because his brother got him a job there. Unlike the other prosecutors he's not concerned with perfection, revenge, or hating your guts. It's a game to him, he barely knows or cares who you are, and half the time he's helping you out. Manfred von Karma he's not, and you never have that real satisfaction of knowing you've nailed his ass to the wall because nothing Apollo does ever seems to make an impact on him emotionally.

That brings me around to my next point, the characters. Character interaction has always been the Ace Attorney strong point in the midst of (let's face it) plots that occasionally border on ridiculous. The best and most emotionally charged cases of the Phoenix Wright trilogy were the ones that either involved Phoenix directly or those close to him. In Apollo Justice the titular attorney has no emotional connection to anyone else. There's no reason he should be just hanging around the Wright Talent Agency after the first case (the only one, mind you, in which he'd have any emotional involvement at all). He's just kind of there and then hobo!Wright drops Trucy on him as sidekick and sends him off to solve mysteries. They do have a connection to each other, but it's only revealed in the last few minutes of the game and Apollo never finds out about it so it doesn't matter anyway.

(Aside: This, coupled with the rest of the "seven years ago" business, really bothered me. We're generally supposed to discover things right as our character does, taking on his role in solving the case. When you give the player far more information than your player-proxy, that connection is lost. But perhaps this is personal preference.)

With Phoenix, the prosecution is his childhood friend or a member of the perfectionist von Karma clan or a mysterious coffee addict with a personal grudge against him. His plucky young assistant is the daughter of his murdered mentor and later her younger cousin. Apollo has some pseudoGerman (what is it with prosecutors and Germany in this series?) rock star twit whose threadbare connection is that he's your mentor's brother, a fact he barely mentions. Your plucky girl assistant Trucy, who tries and fails to be a replacement Maya, has absolutely no reason to be hanging around with you besides the fact that she's abruptly decided that she wants to. In the PW trilogy Phoenix was abruptly on his own after Mia's death; Apollo has hobo!Wright to nudge him about and give him direction so he's got next to no real independence. And that, I think, pisses me off the most.

Despite being a bit less easily cowed than Phoenix Wright, Apollo is basically a pawn in his own videogame. Rather hacking his way through lies and contradictions to be the triumphant hero through his own strength and cunning, Apollo is constantly manipulated towards the right evidence and conclusions through outside forces. None of his actions are his own, he's just the proxy for the will of his puppeteer and I feel the impact of his actions suffer for it. I don't dislike Apollo, in a better game I'd probably like him a lot, but he never gets to show off any personal strength. It's not his story, he just wanders through it.

It's not a bad game. If you've run out of Phoenix Wright and want more lawyers I'd recommend picking it up, but it's probably the weakest game in the series. Me, I'll be over here waiting for Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth.