Phoenix Wright wins
This past holiday season was great for gamers, with the next-gen wars in full swing after Sony and Nintendo challenged Microsoft’s Xbox 360 with their own consoles. When the Sixaxis controllers and Wiimotes stopped flying, the dust settled on the battlefield and a surprising winner emerged: The Nintendo DS.
This dark horse outsold even the next-gen consoles on the market over the holidays, and its range of games keeps expanding in response to increasing popularity. Capcom’s recent release, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney — Justice for All was actually converted to the Nintendo DS platform from the Japanese Game Boy Advance title Gyakuten Saiban 2. It comes a year after the series’ first installment, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, made its debut outside Japan. As a Japanese remake, Phoenix comes with all the trappings and joys of anime entertainment — with a bit of decent gaming squeezed in.
It was only a matter of time before courtroom drama made its way into games. The series puts the gamer in the shoes of Phoenix Wright, a defense attorney with a heart of gold who only takes on innocent clients (no, really) and has a vendetta against corrupt prosecutors who will do anything to win a conviction. Considering that most of Phoenix’s clients are either celebrities or personal friends, his squeaky clean conscience seems to bend the very fabric of reality. Then again, this is a game in which the 18-year-old prosecutor’s use of a bull whip can silence the judge and the defense is aided by a lie detector stone furnished to him by a spirit-channeling assistant, who just happens to be an 8-year-old. Law and Order, it is not.
Phoenix highlights four intensely comical cases that send the gamer to investigate grisly murder scenes, interview tight-lipped witnesses and finally match wits against an expert prosecutor in court. For a port from another system, Phoenix effectively uses the DS’s dual-screen layout and touchscreen technology. Story segments appear on the top screen, while the bottom touchscreen contains menu functions to advance dialogue and sift through the court record, which is Phoenix’s collection of evidence for the current case. Innovative functions such as using the stylus to pinpoint critical areas of a piece of evidence or yelling Phoenix’s trademark “Objection!” into the built-in microphone really make this game perfect for the DS. But the controls are flexible enough that traditional button-crunching can substitute seamlessly for the stylus at any time. And thankfully for the true handheld gamer on the go, Phoenix can be saved at any time and picks up in the exact spot it left off.
The narrative-heavy game alternates between the investigation and the court. When investigating a case, Phoenix has free access to the crime scene and surrounding areas to collect evidence and interview witnesses, but the gamer can only advance to court after collecting all of the pieces of evidence available. This is sometimes an infuriating process, since the game forces the gamer to collect evidence in a specific order without providing much direction. To advance, gamers may exasperatedly show the entire contents of the Court Record to every single witness before hitting the right one for a new clue.
If the gamer’s logic is in sync with Phoenix’s, completing the investigation is a very satisfying process. But it is easy to overthink the case and come to conclusions before the game allows. Court proceedings have the same flaw: While the gamer’s job is to expose contradictions in each witness’s testimony, the corresponding evidence is sometimes only related to the witness’s statement by Phoenix’s photographic memory and convoluted logic. Although wild guesses have no penalty during the investigation phase, too many wrong moves in court will put Phoenix out of favor with the judge and land his client in jail.
Play mechanics aside, enjoyment of this game will ultimately correspond to one’s penchant for anime comedy. Overblown facial expressions, wacky character design and an awkwardly translated script cheese up the courtroom scene like only anime can. The girls are ditzy — except for the dominatrix prosecutor, the guys have huge shoulders and no one thinks twice about letting a magician in drag marry a 16-year-old circus heiress. The innovative DS gameplay seems a little before its time. Still, Phoenix is worth trying out for a dose of handheld fun.
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