I love talking about character design and I love Ace Attorney. This was a natural conclusion, especially since the board has been doing an Ace Attorney retrospective leading up to Great Ace Attorney. I don't really have enough interesting comments to justify a ranking thread, so I just put together a tier list. The original idea for doing this is looking at how Ace Attorney's character design really changed from game to game and it made me think which game's cast I enjoyed the most in terms of design.
The results? Ace Attorney has really good character designs. For such a large cast, most of the characters are hits as opposed to misses. The bad character designs I think are pretty universally agreed upon, but I don't think we really appreciate the solid design work of most of the characters. I think my favorite is still PW1 because of how natural it looks. I'd say PW2 is also fairly natural, just with some unique settings giving us more unique designs (Kurain Village, Big Berry Circus). PW3 is really where the design begins to really...stand out and get more wacky with character designs. AAI kind of brings it back to normalcy for a short while but everything kinda gets out of hand until SOJ. It was just really interesting to do this project.
A few notes before going to the ranking.
Each character is ranked on a scale according to their placement (main character, one-time character, unimportant victim/background, important victim/background). A badly-designed main character is going to be tiered lowly compared to a well-designed main character. Likewise, a well-designed victim is going to be tiered highly compared to a badly-designed victim.
Some things I considered when ranking for character design: colors, clothes, overall concept, some sprites/animations, iconic (main character-only).
Some characters go through transformations. To make things less messy, I only included one "version" of each character (with the only exception being Phoenix vs. Hobonix since it's such a radical departure). I kept transformations and alt versions in mind when ranking the characters.
I can't remember PLvPW for the life of me, so I kept it to strictly characters that show up in the 4 court cases.
I'd be happy to explain my reasoning for any character!
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Bitto I feel completely refreshed. Like I just put on fresh underwear on New Year's Day.
