More GBA to DS nonsense from Capcom

Phoenix Wright is unusual as far as game protagonists go. He doesn't wear a ninja costume or command a platoon of leathernecks. He's not an acrobat, nor can he materialize fireballs in the palms of his hands. Hell, the schmuck can't even wield a single weapon, much less a second.

Contrary to all your expectations of what a video game hero should be, Phoenix Wright dares to be an attorney. And not a gun-slinging, ferrari-driving action attorney either. Just a particularly talented, albeit mystifyingly pointy-haired, young defense lawyer.

His debut, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, is a schizophrenic graphic adventure game that was released in Japan in 2001 for Game Boy Advance-- in fact there have already been two Japan-only GBA sequels. Similar to Capcom's other miserly GBA-to-DS non-effort, Mega Man Battle Network 5 Double Team DS, Phoenix Wright is basically a sheepish, inexpensive port job designed to gauge the DS's amenability to third party success. Because few people in North America have played this game previously, however, the franchise manages to assume the illusion of freshness, despite its aged aesthetics.

When I call this game schizophrenic, I refer to its unevenly-paced, split-concept approach-- a confabulation of plodding detective adventure with roller coaster courtroom hyperbole, Ace Attorney manages to soar at times, but mostly it just kind of wriggles around and then sets in for decomposition.

Phoenix begins with a courtroom segment, so it would be contemptuous to start elsewhere. In front of the bench, Ace Attorney is furious, clever, and addictive. Though with its bombastic dialogue, indeterminately-produced evidence, and stupefyingly-incompetent judge, the game is far from an authentic representation of true-to-life jurisprudence, it manages to suspend the player's disbelief just enough to maintain scant shreds of respectability.

In these segments, it is the player's responsibility to follow the arguments offered by the opposing sides, consider the testimony of witnesses, and launch objections to contradictory information.

Now all of us, Mr. Wizard and the Video Professor excluded, "misrepresent" the truth at certain times in our lives. Parallel to this, every witness in Ace Attorney lies about everything, all the time. Even if they don't intend to lie, they forget enough about what they saw to tell you the wrong information anyway. Perhaps I'm being overdramatic, but nine out of ten times, the witness on the stand WILL have made some contradictory statement-- it's your job to examine the testimony piece by piece and expose the inaccuracies.

You do this by not falling asleep during the story parts and by not completely ignoring evidence entered into the court record. This evidence, which is typically found by the player during the "investigative" portions of the game, usually takes the form of things like autopsy reports, murder weapons, photographs, and the like. Sometimes, the defense, or even the witnesses, will blindside you with random bits of evidence during the trial. Pursuant to common video game law, this evidence will under all circumstances be admitted, regardless of ambiguousness or irrelevancy. Was the prosecuting attorney's cousin-in-law recently served an undercooked quesadilla at the drive-thru window of a local Taco Ted's? The court will likely admit that as evidence that your client murdered a fry cook.

Also adding a tiny bit of complexity to the game is the fact that occasionally, the "contradictory" portions of testimony aren't necessarily present initially and the player must "press" the witness on certain statements to make inadequacies appear. The "advantage" of pressing is that it nearly always encourages further revelation, regardless of its utility to your case. Some of the characters in this game are so loathsomely stupid, however, that the less you're forced to hear them say, the better.

Once you find something objectionable, you need to... well... object to it. You're then prompted to cite the appropriate "evidence" among the assortment of baubles which have been entered into the record. If you're correct, the game lavishly awards you by proceeding as scripted. If you're wrong, the judge assumes a constipated expression and telekinetically destroys one of the five magical exclamation points floating above his head. If all five are destroyed, the judge, an ironical conservationist of superfluous hovering punctuation, totally wigs out, rules against your client, and quickly vacates the bench to go on a wild binge of hookers and fiber supplements.

Beyond the cross-examination of witnesses, there isn't much to the courtroom portions besides pressing the A button to reach the next text box. Occasionally, you're given the "choice" to object to something or to continue a particular line of inquiry, but the correct decision is nearly always to go through with whatever the game is suggesting. For example, if the prosecutor says something peculiar in reference to the repairwork which is being performed on his car's automatic transmission, Phoenix mumbles to himself "broken transmission... where have I heard about that before?" and the game gives you the option to "ask about the transmission" or (paraphrasing here) "twiddle around and jerk off," the choice is usually quite clear, notwithstanding the game's robust assortment of chesty cartoon women. What's worse is, even if you make the incorrect choice in these situations, the game usually forces you onto the correct path anyways, so there's virtually no way to deviate from the anticipated avenue of play.

Regardless of design limitations, the courtroom segments are generally interesting enough to encourage further indulgence. There's nothing too taxing here, the tone of the game being informal and rather silly. Though I occasionally received a "penalty," I never saw the game over screen until the final episode. While most of the game's solutions take at least some thought, all will be attainable even by the least adept of prospective attorneys.

With the exception of the opening chapter, however, each episode actually begins with a "detective" portion. In these segments, Phoenix must probe the scenes, people, and objects associated with the murder(they're ALL murder cases, naturally). The makeup of these segments is similar to that of old-school Japanese graphic adventure titles, most notably Nintendo's languid Famicom Detective Club. You mechanically float from locale to locale, clicking on objects and asking predetermined questions until you've performed all the essential actions and the game decides to let you move on. There's absolutely no way to die here, no danger or tension involved, and only trivial impedance-- the "gameplay" being a poorly-wrought device for unspooling the game's story.

These sections, depending on how many days each trial is scripted to go, alternate with the court portions-- you'll start with the investigation and then go into day one of the trial, then investigate further, then proceed to day two of the trial, and so on. The result is a jerky melange of the provocative and the pointless. And since around 3/4 of the game takes place in detective mode, you'll often find yourself struggling to make it to the next courtroom scene.

Though largely irrelevant to North American players, the game's DS enhancements I suppose warrant some elaboration. There is, predictably, touchscreen support, which is actually somewhat helpful for all the menu navigation, but is by no means a necessary substitute for a few meager button presses-- I found myself switching between the two methods of play based purely on whim. Additionally, there is wholly superfluous voice recognition support which allows you to object in trials by holding down the Y button and uttering something that sounds vaguely like "objection" into the microphone. Furthermore, you also possess the ability to press witnesses by ejaculating the phrase "Hold It!," or even something that sounds remotely similar to "Hold It!," like "Cold Cut!" or "Old Ip!" The alternative to all this syntactical silliness, arduously, is merely to hit the X button, but I'm sure many people will have a blast rummaging for a variety of ways to flummox Capcom's shoddy programming. I know I did.

Towering over both of these "improvements," however, is the addition of the progressive, if not agonizingly-long fifth episode. The now totally inadequate GBA original had only four episodes-- in fact, in the Japanese DS game, players who own the GBA version can proudly insert it into the GBA slot and skip directly to the new episode. This fifth stanza gives an impression of what's to come from this series on DS. Evidence is rendered triumphantly in 3D, so that you can now use the touch screen to zoom in and out and rotate or revolve items There's also an extremely slick-looking, real-time 3D "security" video that figures prominently in the trial. A couple of mildly original sidegames for the touchscreen are included as well-- "luminol testing," where you dab sprays of some nebulous goop onto the background in search of blood remnants, as well as fingerprinting, where you spill bits of dust on a surface with your stylus and then blow them away with the microphone. Both of these activities are about as simple as they sound, and really add little more to the game than the fact that they're something else you have to do.

Beyond the peculiarities of this fifth episode, then, there is sparse evidence towards the conviction of Ace Attorney as an attractive Nintendo DS property. The graphics are done in a bland anime style which does little to distinguish this game from anything that could have been done fifteen years ago. Furthermore, animation is at a premium, as there is nothing more visually-intensive than some mostly static sprites overlaying a collection of lifeless backdrops. And there's even less to love about the game's musical tracks. Retaining that eerie GBA mix of sampled midi instruments with NES-style blooping, Ace Attorney's aural presentation is noticeably raw and unimpressive.

Further, if you're looking for things like lastability or replay value, these concepts simply don't exist in the twisted world of Phoenix Wright. The game's lone "unlockable" is the aforementioned fifth episode, which you receive upon completion of the original four episodes. Altogether, this brings the game to about roughly seven to eight hours of playtime. And though there are few games that can make such a claim, I actually believe Phoenix Wright to be one of those rare games absolutely bereft of a solitary atom of replay value. I have no motivation to pick the game up again now that I've finished it. Its sheer linearity is such that it's impossible to progress a different way the second time around. You end up tapping the same menu buttons to induce the same things to happen so that you can finish in the same way you did before. Oh, you could present, say, an autopsy report in a trial when you're actually supposed to be presenting a murder weapon, but what's the point when all that happens is the judge gets angry at you, slaughters an exclamation point, and tells you to try again? It's like rereading a hack mystery novel-- you know what's going to happen already, there's nothing you can do to change it, and the plot lacks anything approaching the depth to merit actual scrutiny.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is, at the very least, a curious anachronism. The only other graphic adventure game currently out for DS is Nintendo and Cing's Trace Memory, which is a marginal game in its own right. If you were weaned back in the day on classic adventures like Zork, Maniac Mansion, and Deja Vu, and are desperate for a fix, you may want to pick this one up. Otherwise, you'd be well advised to put Phoenix Wright on indefinite probation.