It’s a strange crossover, but not the strangest. Certainly makes more sense than Kingdom Hearts. Also, is it just me or is this the first time Ryuuichi/Phoenix and his Not Love Interest appear fully voiced and animated? I’ve played all the games including Gyakuten Kenji, but maybe I’m missing some spin-offs.

The general idea is intriguing enough, but I worry the more serious-looking storytelling and art directions may undermine Gyakuten‘s good old 16-bit charm and quirky humour. I just hope it doesn’t get raped the way Front Mission did. Get off my lawn and all.

The fifth entry in the Ace Attorney (Gyakuten Saiban) series of GBA and NDS games has the player take on the role of Miles Edgeworth (Reiji Mitsurugi), the public prosecutor with an ice-cold exterior and a boyish heart.

Ace Attorney has always been one of the sole reasons why my DS Lite is not yet lost forever in the jungle death trap that is my storeroom. But having played through Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth, which I shall refer to as Gyakuten Kenji because its Japanese title is so much shorter and more sensible, I am starting to question the future of this franchise. This is indeed foreshadowing.

Story

Miles returns from America (or whatever other country the English translation has him going to) and enters his office to be faced with a burglar and a dead body. Through his investigations, a larger conspiracy unfolds and what not. Along the way, he is aided by “trusty” sidekick Detective Dick Gumshoe (Keisuke Itonokogiri), fellow prosecutor Franziska von Karma (Mei Karuma), and Kay Faraday (Mikumo Ichijō), a young girl who claims to be a legendary thief but dresses more like a kunoichi. And of course, some old-time supporting characters also make their re-appearances because the developers are too lazy to come up with new ones.

Plenty of familiar faces

Similar to previous games, each of the five cases in the game is a piece of the overall puzzle. However, the writing and plot logic are of a noticeably shoddier quality than the previous games and as a whole the overarching story is nowhere close being suspenseful and does a pretty poor job of uniting the five cases.

There is also no true “turnabout” moment in the game, character motivations are mostly left unexplained and Miles’ involvement in the story is rather superficial.

Gameplay

One would imagine that there ought to be a huge difference in gameplay now that you are the prosecutor instead of the defence attorney, but one would be wrong. The same basic gameplay structure applies: go to the scene of the crime, talk to people, gather evidence and jam said pieces of evidence into the face of every breathing soul you come across in hopes of eliciting a reaction — things that real-life lawyers and prosecutors don’t do.

When it comes to unique gameplay mechanism, Justice for All has its supernatural “Psyche-Lock” system and Apollo Justice has a “Perceive” system that lets you look for tells when the witness is lying. In Gyakuten Kenji, we have a new mechanism called… “Logic”. It’s ground-breaking, really.

DA POWA OF ROJIKKU

Logic System

Occasionally during your investigations, you receive little snippets of information which you can combine to reach a deduction and progress in the game. This sounds great on paper but unfortunately suffers from a really shitty implementation. You rarely get these pieces of information (usually three at a time max) so the correct way of combining them is often so blindingly obvious that a retarded hamster limping across the DS touch screen could get it right. Gee, “this knife is covered with blood” and “the dead guy has a goddamn knife-shaped hole in his chest”… I wonder what that means?

This would have worked much better if the system were implemented on top of the existing evidence screen, i.e. letting the player figure out how pieces of evidences are related to one another. Unfortunately, it isn’t and as a result it feels redundant and tacked on.

Fortunately, the Logic system is so bad that most of the time the developers forget to do anything with it.

Investigation

Beyond the new half-baked gameplay mechanism, there are also some minor changes to the investigation process. Instead of navigating to different screens to talk to different characters and examine different locations like in the previous four games, you are pretty much restricted to one single location at a time. Everything you need to examine and every person you need to talk to in order to proceed to the next story event is stuck in this tiny box.

Also, you can now control a little sprite persona and walk around the scene of the crime to examine objects, but this adds absolutely nothing to the old method of directly tapping on the part of the room you wish to examine. It is in fact, simply more tedious. Don’t fix what isn’t broken.

Taking the “Trial” out of “Turnabout Trial”

Jarringly, there is not a single courtroom battle in the whole game. Instead, every cross examination takes place at the scene of the crime, either as part of the investigation process or during the final confrontation with the criminal. The lack of a clear separation between the investigation and courtroom portions is important for the story which takes place over just a few days, but it also takes away a familiar part of the franchise: the courtroom antics with the silly old judge. This can either be a good or bad thing.

In terms of gameplay, the cross examination process still works just like the previous games so I guess the change is really not a big deal. Still, if a lawyer conducting field forensics wasn’t weird enough, now we have a prosecutor confronting and trying criminals on the spot like some kind of legal vigilante.

Conclusion

An Ace Attorney game is only as good as its story. All the gimmicky investigation techniques are nothing on their own without an adequately intelligent piece of deductive narration laced with the franchise’s trademark brand of exaggerated humour. Minor complaints aside, the latest addition to the franchise does not deliver on that one single thing that gives life to its predecessors. The story is poor and the thinking process is rife with bad logic and lazy writing.

The pros and the cons in brief.

• You get to see Franziska back in her teens.

• Miles’ character does not fit the protagonist role well.
• Gameplay has been significantly dumbed down and is very guided and unchallenging compared to previous titles.
• The new investigation mechanics are tedious and/or boring.
• The background conspiracy story is weak and unsatisfying.

Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth is a game I can recommend only to existing fans of the series, and only for 13-year-old Franziska who is oh-so-adorable even when she swings her whip.

P.S. Apollo Justice is still the best Gyakuten in my book.

Those of you who played the 4th Ace Attorney (逆転裁判) game would be aware of the new jury system being implemented in Japan, first proposed in cabinet review committee in 2001 and subsequently passed into law in 2004.

After five years of policy fine-tuning and mock trials, Japan held its first post-war jury trial on Monday. The system consists of a hybrid of six layman jury members (裁判員) and three professional judges (裁判官) and is reserved for serious crimes such as murder. A majority opinion has to be supported by at least one of the three judges in order to stand.

I am on the fence about this whole “democratizing the justice system” movement. The idea that judges in ivory towers often do not possess the necessary life experiences to understand the social context of the crimes they judge has some merits. On the other hand, it’s hard to believe that a handful of randomly selected voters possess the technical expertise to understand the law and how it should be applied.

For example, in a case that involves minority rights, there is little guarantee that individual members of the jury understand the implications of such abstract issues on society at large, hence risking a judgement that stems from narrow first-hand experiences. A judge is also liable to make the same mistakes, but the very fact that he/she is (supposed to be) a learnt legal scholar with a wealth of relevant experience mitigates the risk of unilateralism greatly. That is to say, in a court of law, the legal experience of a judge is likely to present more relevance to any given case than the range of expertises possessed by the jury, an important point that should not be overlooked in the structuring of the system.

As with most things in life, the most important rule of thumb is of course to seek the right balance between the two so as to avoid dogmatic inflexible rulings that have no grounding in reality and at the same time prevent the law from being completely reinterpreted with each new batch of juries. In that regard, I’m not sure if letting the jury decide the punishment is such a good idea. The fine line between justice and retribution is further blurred when professional judges are replaced by the everyman who is expected to bring personal experiences into play. It’s good that the judges can veto blatant abuses in Japan’s case, but it does not completely wash away the lingering stench of mob justice.

And while US opinions are almost universally favourable, the fact that the system is somewhat controversial in Japan also indicates a difference in mindset when it comes to legal justice. Many English-speaking commentators see this as an issue of democracy, when it really should not be. At the end of the day, the value of any jury system should be the varied perspectives and expertises it brings to a trial, and not some abstract idea of democracy. A small selected group of pre-screened voters is no more representative of society at large than a group of judges. If anything, general elections of judges would make more sense if democracy were the ultimate intend, which incidentally is a really bad idea if elected politicians are anything to go by. (Then again, the lack of judicial independence from the political organs of government is already an existing situation in many countries.)

Personally, I would prefer to see public oversight in the judicial system take the form of an auditing role instead. Oh well, as long as it works out.

And at the very least, this has very real implications on future Ace Attorney games. Will the bald and confused judge still be there? Or will he be sidelined by a group of nervous salarymen and loud gyarus? (Hurray for stereotypes.)

P.S. Yes, I’ve been playing Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth.