Board 8 > great ace attorney playthrough topic

(+) Yeah! (+)

Paratroopa1 posted...

Capcom did a good job in this game, imo, of only changing that which would really benefit from needing to be changed. I think leaving (most of) the Japanese names unchanged is a good call and shows some faith in the audience (especially with a name like Ryunosuke!), there might be meaning to their names that I'm missing but that's fine. The rest of the names they only really changed them if they weren't working in English at all. The key to good localization is preserving the feeling of seeing a name, imo, not the precise meaning.

I think the localization process has come a long way since the original in that you can trust the English audience with a lot more Japanese culture than before. It makes me wonder what they'd do differently if PW1 came out today.

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Sorry, I realize this is really sidetracking things, but are there any examples of games that are explicitly set in Tokyo but where the names are localized? I feel like they wouldn't have set PW1 in LA today, but then I think about how the names would have all been left Japanese and I'm not so sure. PW1 has a pretty universal and not distinctly Japanese flavor to it, so setting it in any part of the world works, at least until the more distinctly Japanese-flavored cases happen but none of those are in PW1

it's kinda crazy that the literal first case of the whole series forced the localization team to determine an actual location for the PW universe because of the thinker contradiction

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Paratroopa1 posted...

Sorry, I realize this is really sidetracking things, but are there any examples of games that are explicitly set in Tokyo but where the names are localized? I feel like they wouldn't have set PW1 in LA today, but then I think about how the names would have all been left Japanese and I'm not so sure. PW1 has a pretty universal and not distinctly Japanese flavor to it, so setting it in any part of the world works, at least until the more distinctly Japanese-flavored cases happen but none of those are in PW1

I guess they always could've localized it with Japanese sounding names that have a pun that makes sense in English, like what they did with Nosa and Korekuta.

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Im not much of a localization snob unless its doing stupid stuff like rheel neemu. at first I was a little worried about the japanese names because theyre hard for me to remember, but as I play more im finding that differentiating the japanese names from the other nationalities is really important since this game has you going to a lot of different places. I like what theyve done so far but like I said, not too picky about it.

I did catch that the omnibus in my evidence has Phoenixs name on it!

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Phoenix Wright Omnibus is hilarious because I'm sure it was like "oh, cool reference!" in Japan for those who caught it, but for us it's like "WHAT DOES THIS MEAN???"

maybe Naruhodo saw it and thought to himself "some day when my descendants leave Japan and settle in the English speaking world, my one wish is for them to name their son Phoenix Wright"

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SSBM_Guy posted...

it's kinda crazy that the literal first case of the whole series forced the localization team to determine an actual location for the PW universe because of the thinker contradiction

which means this is all Larry's fault when you think about it

the old saying is true both in universe and out

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Case 3, rest of trial part 1

things go a little better for us after the summation examination. we slowly chip away at the witnesses - one bloody glove to two bloody gloves to two bloody hands - and eventually suggest that there was a third person in the seat. anyone familiar with ace attorney knows that this couldn't have been the accused because the series lives on these kinds of inconsistencies, whether it's one hand vs. two, left handed vs. right handed, or anything it can grasp onto that's concrete.

we call McGilded to the stand only for him to say that a third person, a girl, was on the omnibus. after he suggests that she might be in the court room, we get SMOKE BOMBED and evacuated from the court room. sure, I guess?

the details aren't what caught my imagination while I was going through this. let's talk about the prosecution. Van Zieks is.. not exactly intimidating. I actually had to look back to find out what his name even was, because he's just that passive. dude hasn't really made his presence known yet at all. some prosecutors, like Blackquill or Nahyuta or whatever, really leave an impression. this guy?

I'm not asking for him to badger the witnesses like von Karma or anything, but at least make your presence known? this case is different in that you're just kinda thrown into it, but when I think back to 5-2 or 6-2, I think of how the prosecutor is the star of the first day of trial. this guy? he was built up strong before we walked in, but boy, he hasn't seemed notable yet. maybe he becomes moreso in part 2, but so far I'm basically running this trial solo.

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I feel like a big part of that was the jury taking up so much oxygen, which was obviously not for the better in my opinion because I absolutely fucking hate the jury in this trial, I am pulling no punches here, easily my least favorite characters in the franchise so far

Yeah, I think they put more effort into establishing the jury system than they do with Van Zieks at the beginning, which is probably necessary because it's a big change from how the series normally does trials.

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Plus, Van Zieks not talking at all during the summation examination doesn't help things. That happens super early in the case and he's basically absent for the whole thing.

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Mewtwo59 posted...

Plus, Van Zieks not talking at all during the summation examination doesn't help things. That happens super early in the case and he's basically absent for the whole thing.

for what it's worth, Godot is essentially as useless for most of 3-2's first day!

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I played the first case last night and holy shit I'm fucking dying when Not-Nick slowly raises his hand.

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well, I finished case 3

that sure was a set of events at the end

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Case 3, trial part 2

I don't really want to talk about the case details. part 2 is all about McGilded. he produces a random girl who just happens to be in the stands, and gives her the perfect alibi: hiding under his butt while he sat on the seat. Van Zieks tries to bring up objections, but it just... doesn't work. it's rare that a prosecutor raises an objection that just kinda goes nowhere, but this does.

as the trial goes on, McGilded gets a little more forceful in his commentary. at first he was happy to have Ryunosuke do the work for him, but as we go, he gets to be more and more of a puppet master, pulling the strings. he gets a couple of new animations as Van Zieks tries to tell me that this isn't right. I go along with his objections and it eventually turns into a total Engarde situation.

when I first showed up at the beginning of case 3, my initial thoughts were how counter to the ace attorney mythos it was that I was defending this random dude. AA games always serve you a good sense of believe in your clients, and here was this rich guy just throwing money at me without knowing a single detail. it was fishy for sure, but this was a new character and a new game, so maybe this just wasn't Phoenix Wright. but no, as the case goes on, you start to really doubt what this dude is all about.

by the end, we're uncovering decisive evidence all over. Ryunosuke is coming up with all the off the wall theories, but there's evidence that just wasn't there before, like the blood on the floor. I noticed this in the moment but thought that maybe you just didn't have the view of the floor to see it. turns out that, nope, all of this stuff is just fabricated. McGilded pulls a slight heel turn at this point and is just laughing maniacally. the case ends in a really strange way - with both the prosecution and the defense objecting to the evidence being used and the judge scolding the prosecution for not securing the evidence properly. in a world where cases don't end until we find out culprit, this one ends on what feels like a technicality.

I'm left unsure of how to feel about this. I like that it's a new angle, I think, and I'm sure we'll get this rich moron later in the game. it was an interesting way to go about it. but it also just felt phony the whole way through? this game is making it hard to feel like it's sincere, first with the cat thing in case 2 and now just throwing a sham trial with a mastermind pulling the strings only when needed. if McGilded is truly a mastermind then I'm in on it, I think. but I need to see more.

the last two scenes sure are something. we are introduced to an as of yet unnamed character, a young girl that's younger than Gina and is apparently the inventor of all her wonderful toys. the last scene is kind of shocking: a massive fire in the courtroom that consumes the omnibus, along with what seems to be a person stuck inside. it's a pretty grim sight, and I would assume the target of my next case.

one last note: I noticed that Susato seemed all too happy to get away with the W, even at the expense of the truth. that's an interesting dynamic. our protagonists have always been pure good, in search of the truth at all costs, but Susato seems to be a little more interested in winning than I'm used to. I wonder if the game explores this more or if it's just my perception.

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I loved case 3 because it subverts your expectations in pretty interesting ways. They present Van Zieks as this Grim Reaper type dude. He even looks like Miles Edgeworth cosplaying as Manfred von Karma (there was a part of me immediately wondering if he's von Karma's ancestor), but he doesn't feel like a bad guy by the end of it to me. He's almost like Blackquill in that regard to me.

On the other hand, you're used to getting good defendants, and in the couple of occasions you do have to defend a guilty dude, you get to nail them in the end. Instead, he gets away with it in a super sketchy way, and like you said, Susato doesn't seem to mind. It feels inherently unsatisfying if you're a veteran Ace Attorney fan because it isn't supposed to go like this, but it was a super memorable experience for me.

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With the disclaimer that I haven't beaten the game yet, I really did not like case 3 and I think it's one of my least favorites in the series, it seemed like it was going to go somewhere super interesting with McGilded's ambiguity and then it just turned into a meaningless anticlimax, I was super frustrated by it

Yeah, I totally get if someone doesn't enjoy it. Cases 2 and 3 do kinda feel like Takumi's yanking your chain if you're a fan of the series, or he's just trying a bit too hard to be different. I appreciate the effort at times, but it doesn't always work.

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I really wanted to like it, I was really excited to see where things were going, but it just sort of ends with little to show for it but unanswered questions. I'm sure some of them have to be answered at some point, but at the moment all I'm left with was kind of an unsatisfying mystery full of characters I hated

Yeah, it kinda gets sacrificed on the altar of the greater narrative, and the series generally doesn't do that. Probably the closest you get to it otherwise is 3-4 or 5-4, but it feels like Takumi's trying to write a Sherlock Holmes novel and the mystery has to keep thickening until the end.

And I'm with you on generally hating the jury. Takumi bewilders me with what he thinks a jury is across two different games (well, three, I guess).

I do love the Summation Examination music though. So good.

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Case 3 is a top 5 case in the series for me, and absolute best non-finale case. That said, it hit extra hard for me because I was checking that cart a lot over the course of the trial, and I noticed the new blood on the floor and the empty underbin before the game pointed out that those things had changed, and I was so confused. Like, I specifically remembered there was no blood on the floor, and when they started talking about the body falling on the floor, I was like "that can't be right, there'd be a big pool of blood there" and then I looked and there was. I kinda thought I was losing my mind.

I was enamored with the final half hour of that trial. I was so fucking into it, just leaning forward in my chair with the biggest grin on my face. It plays against the AA fan's expectations so well. It's emphatically anti-AA and I was allllll for it.

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I played through the first case and it's honestly the worst first case of the series.

It took the game almost an hour to get to the point where the steaks were swapped when the player should know immeditatly you find the coin underneath the soldier's steak. I kept screaming how incompetent the detective was.

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Lord Ephraim posted...

I played through the first case and it's honestly the worst first case of the series.

It took the game almost an hour to get to the point where the steaks were swapped when the player should know immeditatly you find the coin underneath the soldier's steak. I kept screaming how incompetent the detective was.

Yeah, that was pretty blatant padding. There didn't really need to be a 3rd chapter for the first case. Overall I liked it though. Thought her breakdown would involve showing her eyes though. I like how her mask changes expression though.
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I need to see the next step after case 3 to fully judge it. right now, it feels incomplete. 3-4 is a top 5 case in my book but it might not be top 5 without 3-5. my initial thought is that I don't hate it, and it's an interesting take. it does kinda feel like you've been yanked around by going through all this effort for nothing, but it felt off when you went to talk to Stronghart so I'm not really feeling like I was blindsided here. nothing felt right the whole time here.

I will say though that it's real weird to have this new jury mechanic only for it to ultimately not matter in the first case it was introduced. the judge calls them off like they're optional. I don't *hate* the mechanic like others here seem to, but I don't really see the point. I'd rather they didn't exist but it isn't ruining the game.

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GiftedACIII posted...

Yeah, that was pretty blatant padding. There didn't really need to be a 3rd chapter for the first case. Overall I liked it though. Thought her breakdown would involve showing her eyes though. I like how her mask changes expression though.

It felt more like they really wanted to implement the teeth marks vs knife cut idea because it is kind of a neat difference but they didn't know of a good way to get to that point.

Also did anyone else find it unnatural how everyone just straight up ignores the possibility that she could have poisoned the cup instead of the bottle. Like it's fine that she didn't but you need to at least address why she couldn't have done that in the story because it feels like a logical hole to straight up go the bottle wasn't poisoned=no poison at all. I swear the fact that she conveniently removed her glass from the scene was like one giant red herring to mislead the player in that direction too but they don't ever explain why that path is a dead end.

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I don't think the jury ruins the game, but it doesn't enhance it either because most of the jurors just come across as trigger happy morons. It'd be nice if there was some more subtlety or nuance to it.

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I love juror #3 in case 3, this total bernie bro who wants to eat the rich. how did ace attorney come to this

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Hahahaha hell yeah that guy rules.

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as it turns out, he was totally right!

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Then00bAvenger posted...

It felt more like they really wanted to implement the teeth marks vs knife cut idea because it is kind of a neat difference but they didn't know of a good way to get to that point.

Also did anyone else find it unnatural how everyone just straight up ignores the possibility that she could have poisoned the cup instead of the bottle. Like it's fine that she didn't but you need to at least address why she couldn't have done that in the story because it feels like a logical hole to straight up go the bottle wasn't poisoned=no poison at all. I swear the fact that she conveniently removed her glass from the scene was like one giant red herring to mislead the player in that direction too but they don't ever explain why that path is a dead end.

That's true. I think there definitely could've been a better way than a whole half hour segment though.

And yeah, I was thinking that too. The whole thing about the unknown poison also made me wonder if she would've had a much better chance if she just acted like the doctor collapsed all of a sudden and pretended she was trying to help him rather than try to frame Ryunosuke.

Anyway, I'm on EP 2 and Ryu going "life is so unfair" because Susato doesn't flip Sholmes over for reading the diary when she flipped Ryu made me laugh. I'm honestly really enjoying Ryu's interaction with Kazuma and Susato a lot more than Phoenix with Mia and Maya. It's just the cases themselves are a bit more dragged out whereas the original AA cases were a lot faster-paced.
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transience posted...

I love juror #3 in case 3, this total bernie bro who wants to eat the rich. how did ace attorney come to this

I feel like we had an "alternative facts" reference in Spirit of Justice!

But yeah, there's usually one juror per case who's just totally off the wall.

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lol speaking of off the wall, getting the wrong answers during the deduction dances are fucking hilarious. They put in unique dialogue for each one .
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I keep thinking about how McGilded is this puppet master and how incongruous it is with the rest of the case. near the beginning, he's immediately cast as guilty by all the jurors and it takes some unconventional tactics to keep him from being declared guilty. and yet, throughout all that McGilded doesn't say a word. he hadn't met Ryunosuke before and doesn't even know who is, really. the end result makes him look like this genius, but it's only because we were able to twist the case to a point where any of it mattered.

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Case 4, Beginning

our trip back to Stronghart goes as expected -- we won a not guilty verdict, that's all that matters, and hey, I'm a lawyer now. Ryunosuke objects about not finding the truth but that's brushed aside. I have a new case that they'd like me to take on immediately.

what wasn't expected -- though it would have been if I thought about it -- is that the person who died in the omnibus was McGilded. what a dead end! at first I didn't believe it, because rich people always have a way to get out of things, and because it's an extremely unsatisfying end for what felt like such a major player only moments ago. but as I went, I realized that this is a very loud way to make a point about our prosecutor, van Zieks.

he's the reaper of the.. whatever the court name/locale's name is, but that doesn't actually mean that he always wins his cases. the game implies that van Zieks is likely behind the omnibus setting on fire. this game has a habit of building something up only to kill it off soon thereafter, often off-screen, and it feels very insincere as a result. I get the feeling this isn't the last we'll hear about this, even if it doesn't relate to our new case.

our new case is about a woman who's been stabbed in the back. our defendant is a japanese man named Natsume who is immediately annoying. he loves to rhyme and yell in obnoxious ways. I don't have any good details about it, but Holmes is the one who identified him as being at the crime soon after the fact, so you know there's going to be some deduction nonsense going on here.

I had to stop here. my thoughts aren't with the new case at all, but rather what happened in the last one. hopefully we don't just have to put those thoughts on hold until the end of this new mystery!

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Natsume Souseki was a real person, in case you didn't know. He was a Japanese author who spent several years in Great Britain.

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yeah, no idea. I also know next to nothing about Sherlock Holmes so all these references fly past me. fortunately the game wants to call it out at me repeatedly.

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I didn't know anything about the stories when I watched the LPs either, but it actually got me interested in them and now I've read them all. It'll be fun to replay and actually understand the references.

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transience posted...

he's the reaper of the.. whatever the court name/locale's name is

Old Bailey. Which is a real place!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Bailey

As for Natsume Souseki, he is *the* most prominent Meiji-era author, and his impact on written Japanese is somewhat comparable in influence to Shakespeare's on English.

(edit: okay that's probably an overstatement, but he is held in a similarly lofty position in the Japanese canon)
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I can only imagine Shakespeare being portrayed with ace attorney animations

(Im really terrible at names, and getting worse as I get older, if you havent noticed)

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yeah, starting case 4 felt weird, not just because my mind was still dwelling on case 3, but also because it feels sort of like "i'm starting the fourth case but i feel like i've barely accomplished anything?"

Dels posted...

yeah, starting case 4 felt weird, not just because my mind was still dwelling on case 3, but also because it feels sort of like "i'm starting the fourth case but i feel like i've barely accomplished anything?"

That's what happens when they split the plot across two games, haha
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Mac Arrowny posted...

That's what happens when they split the plot across two games, haha

Yeah, the plot was meant not to be resolved in a single game, so the pacing probably feels a bit strange as a result.

It was actually originally meant to be a trilogy, but apparently the first game did so poorly in Japan that it got shortened to two.

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dowolf posted...

(edit: okay that's probably an overstatement, but he is held in a similarly lofty position in the Japanese canon)

As soon as I learned that he was real (i.e. two days ago), I looked him up on Wikipedia and the guy's face was on money for 20 years. Pretty sure that never happened to Shakespeare.

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Case 4, Investigation part 1-2

so, I just played up through the deduction of the Garridebs. boy, was that uncomfortable! here you've got this disabled military man, his wife dressing up to as a maid to keep their status as a middle class household, and a domestic abuse charge that's bad enough that the dude has a handprint across his face from being slapped so hard. I don't know if this was trying to be funny but it really wasn't. this just seemed like a sad story. the maid burns Garrideb anytime he tries to say anything of substance and he just yells JOAN WHAT THE GODDAMN HELL every time. she probably did it like 15 times!

I've decided that I don't much like deductions. there's not a whole lot to them and they play out twice. first you listen to Holmes do his whole shtick and then you have to replay it a second time all the way through. I'm considering just skipping all the dialogue the first time and playing along with it as I go. on top of that, Sholmes has fun calling the wife a beast and suggesting that she's overweight because she's so miserable keeping up the facade/being disappointed that her husband is disabled. this whole thing was gross. maybe I'm taking it too seriously but I don't think I am.

the rest of the investigation thus far has been a whole lot of nothing. remember when AA investigations were about gathering evidence? this game feels like it's more about setting a tone and then figuring it out in court. I haven't really gotten much of anything here, and you don't even get to examine the crime scene much. heck, they bring it right up to you in court!

this victim, whose name we don't even know yet, is probably alive and going to make an appearance at some point. but to not even have a description of what happened besides 'hey a knife'? I dunno. I'm really down on this game right now. it feels like a lot of dialogue padding and not a lot of substance.

there's other things to talk about - like how we go to 221B and meet Iris Wilson. Iris is an interesting name choice! we don't usually get overlap on AA characters, and I know it's like 100 years inbetween this game and the Wright era, but still. Iris is author of all the books and seems to have Sholmes's deduction ability. maybe we can use her for times when Sholmes isn't around. in fact, I would say that half of this investigation was wandering from place to place looking for Sholmes. not a very exciting investigation.

I'm interested in what's going on here, but it feels like we're just wading in the mud until we get to the trial, when it's all going to come out.

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You're saying it's weird that we have a name overlap on Iris when you've already met two Johns in this game alone?

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The other Iris wasn't named Iris in japanese, and GAA decided to go with no name changes for major characters not mandated by copyright

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Hbthebattle posted...

The other Iris wasn't named Iris in japanese, and GAA decided to go with no name changes for major characters not mandated by copyright

I mean, her name was just the Japanese word for the iris flower, so she basically was.

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The investigations kinda remind me of Apollo Justice, where you're thrust into trials barely knowing anything and you never even get to speak with your client beforehand.

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yeah I guess we have. neither John is particularly notable, though, and we dont call either one by their first name.

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