Zephyranthes
Member
After years of hearing how great these games were, I picked up the double trilogy collection….finished the first game.
TLDR: I like it overall, but I'm not blown away by it, mostly because of how wildly inconsistent it is with its own rules, and how it just kind of expects the player to ignore it.
I really struggled to suspend my disbelief with this game. To be clear, my contention here is not with the zaniness of it….I'm cool with how every witness is an over-the-top weirdo, how bizarre all of the cases are, or having to cross-examine a parrot. The issue is more with how it pretends and then doesn't pretend that legal procedure matters at all.
Witnesses constantly commit perjury without penalty and are allowed to "revise" their testimony as many times as they want…..but then one witness's testimony is thrown out because they lied one time too many. Wright and Edgeworth both routinely ambush witnesses and each other with undisclosed evidence….but then the final resolution of one case is only made possible by playing rules lawyer about admissibility. In one case, a suspect decides in the middle of questioning that they won't answer any more questions, and it is made clear that this means forfeiting the right to make further statements in court….but then they come back later anyway to plead their case and the judge just kind of lets it happen. Being outlandish is one thing, but storytelling which operates on self-contradictory nonsense is not good storytelling.
I also got annoyed at times with the "investigation" sections, because the things you need to do to make progress are sometimes very obscure and unintuitive. The whole visual novel problem of "I need to make this specific dialogue trigger happen before I can do anything else" rears its ugly head quite a few times.
Do later games improve on this, or is this pretty much the way it is with all of them?
TLDR: I like it overall, but I'm not blown away by it, mostly because of how wildly inconsistent it is with its own rules, and how it just kind of expects the player to ignore it.
I really struggled to suspend my disbelief with this game. To be clear, my contention here is not with the zaniness of it….I'm cool with how every witness is an over-the-top weirdo, how bizarre all of the cases are, or having to cross-examine a parrot. The issue is more with how it pretends and then doesn't pretend that legal procedure matters at all.
Witnesses constantly commit perjury without penalty and are allowed to "revise" their testimony as many times as they want…..but then one witness's testimony is thrown out because they lied one time too many. Wright and Edgeworth both routinely ambush witnesses and each other with undisclosed evidence….but then the final resolution of one case is only made possible by playing rules lawyer about admissibility. In one case, a suspect decides in the middle of questioning that they won't answer any more questions, and it is made clear that this means forfeiting the right to make further statements in court….but then they come back later anyway to plead their case and the judge just kind of lets it happen. Being outlandish is one thing, but storytelling which operates on self-contradictory nonsense is not good storytelling.
I also got annoyed at times with the "investigation" sections, because the things you need to do to make progress are sometimes very obscure and unintuitive. The whole visual novel problem of "I need to make this specific dialogue trigger happen before I can do anything else" rears its ugly head quite a few times.
Do later games improve on this, or is this pretty much the way it is with all of them?
Last edited:
