Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Trials and Tribulations

          I'm not a big fan of alternative control methods. These days, it seems like everyone's going crazy for touch screens and motion controls, but all I really want to do when I'm playing a game is to slump onto my couch with a regular old gamepad. It's part of why I tend to get confused and frustrated when I hear people talking about the iPhone like it's the next great gaming platform; I just can't think of many touchscreen games that I would ever have any interest in playing. Maybe if more developers were making games like the Ace Attorney series, I would have a different opinion on the matter.

           The Ace Attorney games are probably best classified as point-and-click adventures, although being on the DS, calling them point-and-tap is probably a bit more accurate. These games aren't designed to challenge your skill and reflexes so much as your ability to think through situations logically. You're investigating crimes and defending the accused, not fighting off the forces of darkness. It should be noted that while this is technically a review for Trials and Tribulations, the first three games in the Ace Attorney series play essentially identically to one another in almost every way, so if this sounds like it's up your alley, you could pick up pretty much any game in the series and enjoy it.

             

          The gameplay in Trials and Tribulations is divided into two distinct components; investigation and trial. When conducting your investigation, it plays very much like a traditional adventure game. You'll visit a variety of locations and talk to several different characters as you try to gather evidence and build your case. Sometimes, getting the information you need will be as simple as asking a few questions. Other times, you may have to present a specific item to a character in order to get them to comment on it.

          The game mostly does a pretty decent job of letting you know who you should be talking to and what you should be asking. On a few occasions, though, I did find myself stuck somewhere with no real indication as to how I should progress. Most often this was because I'd missed some small action necessary to trigger an event elsewhere. This can be a little frustrating, because the event you trigger may have no apparent connection to the action that triggered it. Luckily, there aren't any consequences for making mistakes in your investigation, so if you get stuck you usually have the option of brute-forcing it by asking everyone every possible question and presenting them with every item in your inventory.

         

          The exception to the rule is when you have to interrogate someone in order to break their psych-locks, a gameplay addition introduced in the second game of the series, Justice for All. Sometimes people will withhold information from you because they're embarrassed or because it could be damaging to them personally if the information was made public. In these instances, their deception will manifest itself visibly as psych-locks, which are quite literally a bunch of locks attached to huge chains. The more locks are visible, the more difficult it will be to break through them. In these segments, you'll have to present evidence that disproves their lies. Up in the right-hand corner of the screen is a meter which empties whenever you misstep. Drain the entire meter and you'll fail, which means starting over from wherever you last saved. The game lets you save at almost any point, and it's a good idea to do so before you enter these interrogation sequences.

          The meter used in interrogation is also present in the other major component of the game; the trial. When in court, the gameplay switches to a more restrictive structure than during investigation. During the trial, your primary function is to listen to and find contradictions in witness testimony. You can press witnesses for more information if you feel you need it, and you will from time to time. Sometimes the original testimony will have no contradictions, and pressing the witness will give you what you need to move forward. Once you've found the contradiction, you present the piece of evidence that disproves the testimony and the trial moves on to the next stage.

          This system works pretty well most of the time, with testimony containing statements that clearly and logically contradict a specific piece of evidence. At several points, though, I encountered contradictions that didn't seem like they could make sense to anyone but the person writing the script for the game. At times, you may be required to press a particular statement more than once for no apparent reason; others, you may present a piece of evidence that seems to clearly contradict a certain statement, only to find that you had the right idea, but not the specific piece of evidence the game was looking for. On several occasions, playing the game felt like banging my head against a wall, and the solutions to the most maddening problems often ended up being pretty baffling. This is especially frustrating because, unlike in the investigation portion of the game, you get penalized every time you make a mistake. This led me to stop and save the game before every major decision, which broke up the game's pacing a bit. Beyond these occasional frustrations with the trial portion, though, I found the mostly logic-based gameplay to be fun and relaxing, and it's all wrapped up in a series of interesting stories, each populated with its own colorful cast of characters.

          As with most Japanese games, there are some things that just couldn't translate perfectly in the localization. The developer's solution to this problem was to change the setting from Tokyo to Los Angeles, which at times actually seems to create more confusion than it prevents. First and foremost, anyone playing this game needs to dispense with notion that the defendant is innocent until proven guilty, and that guilt must be proven beyond the shadow of a doubt. The game is ostensibly set in L.A., but it's based on the Japanese justice system, although even that's not entirely correct; it's really based on an exaggerated anime conceptualization of the Japanese justice system. In the world of Phoenix Wright, courts accept testimony provided by dead people through spirit mediums, and the defendant is considered guilty until his defense attorney not only proves the defendant's innocence, but also proves the guilt of the true criminal. It's tough being

a defense attorney in Tokyo—I mean, Los Angeles.

  

       It may sound like I'm ragging on the game a little bit here, but I'm not; if anything, I think the localization for Phoenix Wright gives the game a lot of personality. This is most prominent in instances where the localization team pretty clearly took some creative license with the translation, using the opportunity to make strange pop culture references. It's not like watching an episode of Family Guy or anything; it only happened very occasionally, but every time I caught one it was so unexpected that it at least got a chuckle out of me.

          The stories the game tells are really solid, too. You're essentially running around solving a series of murder mysteries, and they're all well-told, with plenty of twists and turns. I'll admit that I'm no Columbo. Heck, I'm not even Dick Van Dyke, so you'll probably want to take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt, but I found myself genuinely surprised with the outcome of more than a few cases, and the stories are bolstered by the strength of their characters. Along with the games titular ace attorney and his friends, you'll be introduced to a load of strange and quirky characters. If I wanted to be picky, I could point out that a lot of them engage in pretty stereotypical anime character behavior, but they're all likable and will probably feel unique to anyone not terribly familiar with Japanese television.

          The Ace Attorney is a great example of the kind of games I'd like to see more of on the DS. Ultimately, all of the little problems I had with the gameplay weren't enough to keep me from immensely enjoying my time with Trials and Tribulations, and the weird little cultural foibles only added to the game's already strong personality. If you're into point-and-click games, I definitely recommend this one; and if, like me, you're still not entirely sold on the idea of touchscreen gaming, this one might just make you into a believer.