Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney / Gyakuten Saiban Yomigaeru Gyakuten
Adventure - Nintendo DS
Battery Backup - 1 save, 1 quicksave
1 player

Capcom's Gyakuten Saiban is a series that started out on the GBA and has an enormous following. It's an adventure game in lawyer's clothing. Your role is a defense attourney and not only will you be conducting investigations outside of the courtroom, but you'll have to poke holes into witness testimony in the courtroom to win cases. This DS outing is a port of the first game, with the inclusion of a 5th case specific to the DS. A fourth GyakuSai game will be released soon for the DS as well. An interesting thing to note is that the Japanese version of the DS game comes with an English option, so importers actually get both languages.

But is the game any good? I'd say it depends on whether you could enjoy a text adventure game. You can't get around that structure. Sometimes you'll have the option to examine a crime scene using a point and click interface. Sometimes you'll need to figure out what to show people in order to get them to help you. But by and large, you'll be reading tons of text with little interactivity. If you can get past that, Phoenix Wright is quite an interesting game.

What I like most about it is that there's a logical component. In the courtroom, you are presented with testimonies from witnesses and using only what they say, you have to find ways to disprove their version of events. You'll have to know every piece of evidence you have inside-out and point out contradictions. Many are not immediately obvious, but the clues are there. You just have to pay attention to detail. It's in this logical aspect that differentiates Phoenix Wright from other games of the genre.

What's also great about the game is its continuity of story and depth of characterization. There are 5 total cases here and while they could easily be 5 unconnected court cases in the life of an attourney, Phoenix Wright takes great care in its characters. Characters are affected by outcomes of previous court cases. There are consequences to each case that shape who the main characters become. The characters are not simply static roles, but rather people with their own motivations, their own goals, their own beliefs, and all of these things change as time progresses. Care was also taken in its English translation, which is much appreciated. It's obvious from the references that they did not literally translate the dialog from the Japanese version. All of the important bits, yes, but all the names are changed, and many of the jokes were also changed to read more fluidly. The dialog made me laugh on many an occasion.

The entire time I was playing it, I couldn't put the game down. It's not perfect - the second case was kinda hokey, the game structure is really strict as to when you present evidence to advance the story, there are typos and spelling errors throughout the fifth case, etc - but Phoenix Wright stands out for its use of logic, its great translation, and its realistic portrayal of characters. At about 35 hrs length, it's pretty meaty for an adventure game. I can't wait to see what's next. With that, I couldn't be happier that a port of GyakuSai 2 was recently announced for the English DS audience.