For the folks complaining about Athena seeming to get sidelined or how helpless she seems, I agreed with this to an extent, but it pays to keep in mind that she's also starting off her official law career at a markedly younger age than Phoenix or Apollo did. Apollo was already younger than Phoenix was at 22, and in AA6 Athena's still only 19. Additional inexperience on her part compared to either of them should be kind of expected.
It likely gets lost in the shuffle considering that the series has already had a history of "young genius" folks cropping up, particularly in the prosecutor's department with the likes of Edgeworth, Franziska, and Klavier, but aside from her ability to use the Mood Matrix, Athena was never really billed with that same level of expectations. I assume that an eventual AA7 will (hopefully) end up seeing a good deal of growth in her.
I actually finished this game last night, but it was so late that I didn't want to take the time to put my thoughts down before getting to sleep. Overall, I'd say I enjoyed this more than I expected to from the outset, as I felt pretty dubious about the inclusion of Khura'in and the doubling down on the mystical/spiritual aspects of things. Maybe my impressions of things are just mistaken, but I feel like this game overall suffered from kind of a lack of witnesses overall, especially in the later cases where the list of potential suspects never seems to grow to larger than one or two. And that's a shame, because a number of the new faces to show up I happened to wind up liking a lot. Tons of spirit and humor were packed into the animations this time around. Seances worked well enough as a new courtroom mechanic, but honestly I think thematically I still preferred the Japanifornia cases over the Khura'in ones, if only because the general tone in those trials got really exasperating as more and more happened.
This carried into what I still think is probably the weakest single component of the game: Prosecutor Sahdmadhi. Easily my least favorite prosecutor of the series. His schtick made sense within the context of the Khura'in court, where blatantly insulting defense attorneys would be common practice and he wouldn't even need to argue cases very strongly since the presumption of guilt from seances was there, but as soon as you take him out of that and throw him into the Japanifornia cases it all just falls apart. He sure doesn't have much of an international attitude for being such a renowned "international prosecutor," and most of the third-party talk meant to build him up (particularly his ability to read the flow of trials, and mentioning how diligent he is in his pre-trial studies on topics the case relates to) never seems to come to fruition in any meaningful way. He slams beads, he claps, he calls you putrid...and that seems to be the entirety of his game plan. He never feels like a genuine threat, nor does he ever come off as particularly interesting.
There are a lot of directions a potential AA7 can go now. A lot will come down to what elements of the series the team is willing to leave behind, and what they want to stick with moving forward. I suppose the question of whether Divination Seances return will have a big impact on that decision.
