As a huge Ace Attorney person this game has been in the back of my mind for a good couple years now. I never really expected it to hit me the same and for the duration of the first case that seemed to hold true, but in the end it did and more! It does lack a lot of the small touches and polish that help the AA series feel as good as it does on a basic level; namely it's a lack of animations, you don't get to present as much for extra dialogue, stuff like that. Sometimes the dialogue you get for presenting things shouldn't be a thing yet or not anymore by the time you do it and character profiles rarely update to fit when they should, even across cases. It just feels more cheaply made in general, which is fair, but yeah.
What let me look past all of that in the and is that it more than made up to me for all of my lil gripes with its world and characters though. I'm someone that is easily taken in by characters having a design I like so grain of salt and all I guess, but I can maybe count a total of five characters across the entire game off the top of the head that didn't do much for me in one way or another. The prosecution is unfortunately mostly pretty weak as far as them being an opponent goes, they never really feel like a threat. Despite that though, I loved the prosecutor as a character so so much. She is so precious. I think what really helps here is that you get to interact with her a lot more outside of court than your average AA prosecutor. She and some white-haired people (to keep it vague cause there's a lot of those) were definitely my favorite characters overall, besides one other I can think of. I really can't stress enough how good the character designers on this game did though, like I don't know if there are many games that hit my tastes more consistently than this one did. Tyrion himself is actually kinda whatever in the sea of characters that I find a lot more interesting than him, but I did come around on him regardless. He is Fine. He is very much his own character separate from his inspirations and that can be said about everyone in here really, so that's cool.
If there's one thing I wish for character-wise it's that I would have liked more yuri. I get what they were going for romance-wise and I think it works well for the story and is cute, I just saw opportunities for yuri. i like girls kissing. Make some polycules or something i don't know. It would make the game better okay.
The whole setting also just really appeals to me and the game consistently got better with every case! I really liked the mysteries and even if the culprit is often obvious or at least fairly easy to guess, I stayed engaged in seeing how everything unfolded and did actually end up being surprised a lot. The game does actually do a good bunch of things that I don't think the AA games have done before that I thought were pretty cool. Tyrion's ability is also pretty fun and I enjoyed the additional mechanics that they thought up for this particular game a lot. The finale of the game is also cool as hell. They really nailed the landing for me.
Also the soundtrack is great aside from a few not so good tracks. I know the cross examination theme is grating on some people; I didn't quite feel that way but it is one of the weakest bits of it for sure. Outside of those, I really enjoyed it though. If anything, I wanted more of it. All the objection and adjacent themes are great, as they should be in an AA-like game and I really love lil' Miss Prosecutor's theme. Makes me happy whenever she's around just so I get to hear it :3
Honestly I never thought I'd say this going in, but I do think I would rank the game above at least some Ace Attorney games, which is HUGE praise coming from me because I love even the worst of those very very much.
The game did receive an update that basically seems to have overhauled the entirety of it at the start of this year. I hadn't played it beforehand and after trying out a bit of every case on the recently released classic version, I'm pretty glad I didn't because from what I can tell, I do actually feel like it's a pretty big improvement! Backgrounds look better, they did actually add animation(s? I noticed one) and the writing seems to have gotten an upgrade in some aspects where I could easily have seen myself actually bouncing off for some of the pre-update writing's quirks. I still think it's weird that all the narration is done in past tense, even when it's supposed to be Tyrion's thoughts, but it only bothered me a lot at the start and then it just stuck out as weird on occasion. Most of the time it worked and it's much better than the pre-update version narrating everything Tyrion does in second person.
The UI is also just a lot better, though the text post-update seems smaller and that is one thing that I definitely felt should be adjusted a bit, or at least adjustable as an option, when I started the game, but I got used to it. I did play on a Steam Deck the entire way, so maybe a PC screen helps with that. There were also some story additions and the bits that I know were added I did like a lot, so I think the effort's been very worth it.
Very excited for the sequel, whenever it may happen!
