The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles
A fish and chips off the old bailey
Typical. You spend years waiting for an attorney and then two come along at once. For us, anyway, as Chronicles collects together two games that were originally only released in Japan. Set long before the events of the main Ace Attorney series, you play as an ancestor of Phoenix Wright, Ryunosuke Naruhodo, who takes a trip to London to learn about British law.
Naruhodo is a law student to the extreme, being thrust into handling his own defence at home in Japan in the first case you take on. It’s not until you tackle the third case, having made your way all the way to Victorian London, that Naruhodo actually commits to practicing law professionally, inspired by his best friend Kazuma Asogi. Behind every great lawyer is a judicial assistant, in this case Susato Mikotoba, who bears more than a passing similarity to series mainstay Mia Fey.
Tutorials come thick and fast. In part, because there are quite a few mechanical differences that set Great Ace Attorney apart from its predecessors. Three of the five episodes in the first game are primarily concerned with walking you through new types of activity, and while they have intriguing mysteries of their own, they’re hard to get too immersed in. Only the final two cases of the first game combine both investigation and trial sections.
SCANDAL IN BRITAIN
Like a heated courtroom debate, you spend most of your time bouncing between investigation and trial sequences. In the former, you navigate between areas, talking to characters and clicking around the screen to examine environments until you’ve picked up all the evidence you need.
This is a version of London straight out of the pulps, right down to the great detective himself… Herlock Sholmes? The deerstalkered investigator is
While as observant as ever, this version of Sholmes is like an excitable golden retriever.
the main reason the games took so long to leave Japan. Over there, he is called Sherlock Holmes, without the cute, legally distinct retitling. As you’d expect, his Sholmesian deduction provides an extra twist to your standard investigations.
While as observant as ever, this version of Sholmes is like an excitable golden retriever, his deductions just missing the mark. After meeting Naruhodo, the two discover they work well together. Sholmes provides an outlandish chain of reasoning, then Naruhodo nudges the mistakes in the right direction to find the truth. These Dances Of Deduction are charmingly animated in a theatrical style, with the reasoning monologues pausing to allow you to look around a scene in order to zero in and present your corrections.
HIS FIRST BOW
Plenty of cases feel quite different to the modernday adventures by virtue of being historical. You need to puzzle through things like incorrect autopsy results, and won’t be able to rely on the likes of blood analysis or fingerprinting. More than one case uses the lack of colour in black-andwhite photographic evidence to add complexity.
However, Sholmes and his Watson analogue, ten-year-old genius inventor Iris Wilson, are a little ahead of their time, adding a steampunk-adjacent science flavour to proceedings, helping out here and there with gadgets that are often gunshaped, goggle-shaped, or a combination of both.
For the most part it’s a nice mix that makes the series feel fresh again, the proto-modern tech (such as a makeshift CCTV that’s just a camera that goes off every 30 minutes, or a colour-coding blood analysis spray) adding fun twists to the otherwise more basic puzzle box mysteries. That said, sometimes the weird science can go a little far – one case’s climax strays into pure deus ex machina not once but twice in a row.
It’s visually gorgeous. While the devs have stuck to the limited animations the series is known for, 3D’s been used to add to the way characters move.
The environments, too, are packed with things you’ll want to look at just to get some commentary on them. This is a hyper-stylised London, where the Lord Chief’s Justice’s Office is in a giant clock, run-down houses have bricked-up windows as relics of the window tax, and balloons soar above a world’s fair with a crystal tower at the centre.
COURTING DANGER
Trials feature new mechanics too, though they’re structurally familiar. You read witnesses’ testimonies, cross-examine them by pressing them for more details, and use evidence to find contradictions in their statements. Testimonies are often an evolved form of mob trials (from 3DS exclusive Professor Layton Vs Phoenix Wright), meaning that you deal with multiple witnesses simultaneously, such as two people who saw a murder. These play the same, only sometimes you’re able to press one witness
You often deal with multiple witnesses at once, such as two people who saw a murder.
once they’ve had a reaction to the other. There are a couple of interesting uses of this mechanic, but more often than not it makes testimonies feel unfocussed compared to tearing one person’s testimony apart.
Similarly, you need to deal with juries. As each trial is a fixed series of puzzles, this doesn’t come into play outside scripted moments, where the jury arbitrarily decides to declare your defendant guilty, prompting a summation examination. This plays out like a crossexamination, except each statement is a jury member’s reason for their verdict. Pitting contradictory reasons against each other or presenting evidence at the right time can change their mind, allowing the trial to progress. These feel even less focussed, with many of their reasons having little to do with the case. It’s telling that this concept is dropped entirely from the final two episodes.
You spend a lot of time reading through text – the script and localisation are as sharp as ever, with many reasons to laugh out loud. Each of the colourful cast of characters feels unique, with dialogue written to reflect their European accents, from a Cockney girl pickpocket to a hardened Scottish prison warden. It could easily be annoying, but Capcom pulls it off. It’s just a shame that the new mechanics result in a game and narrative that feels spread too thinly. The second of the two games comes out ahead, but barely. As fun a romp as it may be, only the dedicated will manage to stick it out over the long running time.