Thanks Capcom, now localize Ace Attorney Investigations 2 next pls

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles (TGAAC) is an amazing two-part journey of murder mysteries and courtroom encounters with some of the best characters & musical soundtrack in the Ace Attorney franchise. It was a pleasure to finally get to play this game localized, and I dare say it might be my favorite overall Ace Attorney story even though it is a spin-off from the mainline games.

Visual novel, point-and-click investigations, murder mystery

TGAAC, like the mainline Ace Attorney games, largely (for most cases but not all) takes place in two halves: one half being about story exposition with sections of gathering evidence/talking to witnesses, and the other half being the courtroom battles where you take the defense attorney bench and pursue the truth in order to prove that your client is not guilty of the crime they are being charged with. Of course, in the courtroom it is your job to debunk witness statements & claims made by the prosecution by presenting evidence that contradicts their statements and in doing so, it is up to you to figure out who is actually responsible.

New gameplay elements that were not present in the previous mainline Ace Attorney series come in the form of summation examinations and the Dance of Deduction. The summation examination occurs in court where you need to convince the new jury to change their stance away from guilty, and the Dance of Deduction is where you need to "fix" Herlock Sholmes's brilliant deductions by observing the environment and replacing some of his keywords with ones that make more sense.

TGAAC was originally a 3DS/Mobile game so it retains much of the 3DS-era Ace Attorney games appearances, but with options like upscaled resolution and anti-aliasing available on PC. In fact, the 3D animations are very well done as many of the characters have a variety of idle poses/animations that they smoothly run through.

TGAAC is set in late 19th century Japan & Great Britain and follows the story of Ryunosuke Naruhodo, an ancestor of the mainline Ace Attorney series's protagonist, Phoenix Wright. Without spoiling anything, Ryunosuke finds himself traveling from Japan to Britain on a study tour with an assigned judicial assistant, Susato Mikotaba, as a means to better immerse himself in the legal system of the most powerful nation in the world at the time. On this study tour, the pair of foreigners encounter many eccentric characters that they often befriend/defend in court.

The story is told in a total of ten cases throughout the two games within, and as opposed to the story of the mainline series in the past, every case in TGAAC is largely interwoven with each other to form an overarching plot.

•The localisation is excellent; I only encountered one singular (obvious) typo in the entire game (not counting the instances of choppy text to symbolize various European accents).

•The game doesn't stray away from addressing issues of xenophobia felt in the game's time period by deliberately including various British negative preconceptions about the Japanese. In a time of political tension where countries were beginning to open up and form alliances, it only made sense to keep such tension intact in the dialogue of the game.

•TGAAC introduces some of my new favorite Ace Attorney characters. Many characters tend to stick around for more than one case which gives them ample time to develop, and a lot of the character development is just amazing. Watching the protagonist, Ryunosuke, grow from being unsure of his ideals to being a resolute defense attorney is quite inspiring over the course of his adventure.

•The overall story payoff by the end of TGAA2 beautifully ties up the ends of all the interwoven cases together into one singular narrative. A lot of anticipation is built up after every individual case as new mysteries keep popping up and becoming forcibly unexplained by the characters. In the finale, everything comes out and you finally understand why something happened previously and why that event was so significant to so many characters.

•The music is phenomenal and rivals, or dare I say bests, the soundtracks of the other Ace Attorney games. The upbeat character leitmotifs are very cheerful and the downtrodden, melancholy reverberations of sad memories feel very foreboding and uncomfortable. I find myself listening to them on repeat in my free time because of how catchy they are.

•There is a "story mode" option available to new players who just want to experience the story without being prompted to input "correct" responses. This option lets the game play out as a movie where every correct option is chosen for them (so it is also useful when you get stuck on one problem for a long time).

•The game's voiced audio moments can be toggled between English and Japanese.

•The game comes with DLC in the form of viewable key/concept art, various unreleased music tracks, supplemental unrelated story chronicles, and more. Most of the DLC comes with developer comments too and it was fun to read the designers' thoughts about scrapped ideas and concepts that didn't make it to the game's release.

•Like most Ace Attorney games, there is a toss up between amazing, mind-blowing cases and mundane, slow-burn cases. The great cases make you persist towards the end to find out what happened, and the alright cases are the ones where you figured out what happened already and want the game to acknowledge your intelligence already.

•Also like most Ace Attorney games, you might find yourself in the position where you think you are presenting the right evidence, but in fact you need to be presenting the other one of the same nature that the game is assigned to recognize as the actual "answer" to the question being posed.

(Not particularly a weakness but more of a statement):

•Sherlock Holmes was renamed Herlock Sholmes in order to avoid legal disputes in the English localisation. I see some people trash on the game just because of this, and in my opinion that is such a dumb reason to have for refusing to play a game.

9.5/10

TGAAC is now one of my favorite, if not my favorite, Ace Attorney games even though it is a spin-off. I thoroughly enjoyed my time playing around in a late-Victorian London setting and interacting with many memorable & charming characters. I liked the long story payoff, the music is phenomenal, and overall, this 65 hour adventure was a pleasure to behold. I would fully recommend this game to be played.

Checkbox reviews are lazy copy & paste bullsh*t. ASCII art reviews tell you nothing. "Let's be honest, I only wrote this review for awards" is a waste of everyone's time. If you are interested in genuine & detailed game reviews, feel free to check out my others here (or don't, I don't tell you what to do).

i want to kiss herlock sholmes on the lips

Took them 6 years to change Sherlock Holmes to Herlock Sholmes

To be honest, the question whether you’ll like The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles or not is quite easy to answer - if you’ve already played an Ace Attorney game before, that is. Simply answer the following question: Did you enjoy whichever Ace Attorney game you played?

If the answer to that is yes, chances are very high you’ll enjoy this one too.
If the answer is no, well - The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles might be a spin-off featuring a new setting & characters but the gameplay itself only received few adjustments, so make of that what you will.

However, if the answer is “I never played an Ace Attorney game before”, great news: The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles are an excellent place to start, as they require no previous knowledge of the franchise. Franchise veterans might be able to catch a few references but you’ll never feel like you’re missing anything. But what can you expect of the The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles?

As with the other (mainline) Ace Attorney games, the two games part of the The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles collection are visual novels, which means you’ll mostly read through a lot of dialogues. You’ll accompany protagonist Ryunosuke Naruhodo on his path to become a defense lawyer in a fictionalized version of late 1900s Japan & Great Britain. Both games consist of five story episodes, each offering a case with “investigation” and “trial” sections. As with a TV show, don’t expect these “episodes” to be self-contained however, as findings from a previous case might have a connection to later events.

The best part of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is, without doubt, it’s one-of-a-kind cast of characters. It’s a pleasure to see Ryunosuke Naruhodo, the protagonist, grow into a defense lawyer dedicated to the truth but it’s the many side characters that really make The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles so entertaining. From the trusty judicial assistant Susato to the “great” detective Herlock Sholmes and an abundance of strange/loveable/hateable witnesses, defendants & culprits, there’s a lot of memorable characters to be encountered – as is typical for the franchise.

If it wasn’t for spoilers, I’d gladly recount just a few of the strange (in a good way) side characters that meet in court. In case you haven’t already played an Ace Attorney game, you might think of Professor Layton side characters in terms of how unique/strange they can be (probably one reason why the two franchises had a – surprisingly great - crossover game on the Nintendo 3DS). And it’s important that they are like this, because you’ll encounter them quite often.

As mentioned, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles features “investigation” and “trial” sections. During investigations, you’ll try to collect as much information/evidence as you possibly can before you’ll head to court. This mostly involves talking to witnesses and searching environments, which in practice is mostly about cycling through a few set dialogue options and clicking on things in the environment as if it were an extremely easy hidden object game. And as investigations are requiring you to find everything before entering the courtroom, you basically can’t miss anything.

This is how it used to be in previous Ace Attorney games as well and frankly, I always found the investigation section to be a bit dull – sure, they’re needed to set up the “trial” sections but they’re offering so little actual gameplay that I might’ve actually preferred them to be just dialogues instead. Thankfully, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles add a new gameplay mechanism to the investigation sections, the so called “Dances of Deduction” which involve solving small puzzles through the power of observation – together with Herlock Sholmes.

These “dances” are honestly pretty easy puzzles where you just have to present the right observation at the right time. But they’re delightfully presented, with lots of camera movement, which is quite a change from the static camera angles present throughout the rest of the game. I thought these dances to be a welcome addition to the investigation sections and only really wish there were more of them.

The “trial” sections of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles on the other hand are where the set-up from the investigation pays off. You’ll have to attain a “non guilty”-verdict for your defendant, which can be done by cross-examining witnesses, pointing out contradictions in their testimony and presenting the right evidence. In terms of gameplay, this amounts to only a few button presses but finding the right solution requires some thinking (and careful examination of your evidence) – or perseverance. The age-old Ace Attorney problem of knowing the right solution but not being able to find out the game wants you to present it remains in this game collection as well – although it only happened like 4 or 5 times in total.

New to The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles compared to the other mainline Ace Attorney games are multiple witnesses that need to be cross-examined at once (= watching out for all witness reactions to other witness statements, then calling them out) as well as a jury system. Throughout most trials, you’ll not only need to convince a judge of your defendants innocence, but a jury of six people as well – which is basically another way of listening to their statements and calling out inconsistencies. A nice change of pace but more of a fresh coat of paint than a major gameplay shake-up, really.

Concluding, in terms of gameplay, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles offers what’s known from the series as well as a few welcome additions, that are more of an enhancement than a big change. It’s a visual novel with minor puzzle elements but the focus remains on the story, as evidenced by the inclusion of a “story mode” that plays the entire game for you – so you don’t even have to engage in any gameplay at all, if you want.

In terms of story, without going into spoilers, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles offers a mystery that only seems to get deeper and deeper during the first game until it slowly gets resolved during the second. You’ll begin to see more connections as the plot unfolds and thanks to the great cast, you don’t really want to stop playing until the last case if finally done.

That said, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is quite long (~70h) and it doesn’t help that it suffers from occasional pacing issues: dialogue drags on sometimes and many events are recalled way too often. Especially the investigation sections can move at a snail’s pace sometimes, compared to how many developments the trials usually offer. Additionally, the first game could've used a bit more "pay-off", it feels like it's mostly setting up the second game in this collection. I also feel like the “final big bad” turned out to be a little bit too predictable in the end, considering how many hints the game drops in that regard.

Anyway, in total The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles makes for a great Ace Attorney experience for franchise veterans and newcomers alike: An interesting central mystery, an amazing casts of characters, a great soundtrack make for a fantastic visual novel. I do wish that more gameplay was involved and that the pacing was a lot tighter at times but overall, this collection offers another two great Ace Attorney games of high quality. Court is adjourned!

i'm glad england isn't real

Please note that The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is a very independent entry in the Ace Attorney series in terms of plot. Even if you have not played any of the Ace Attorney titles before, it will not affect your understanding of the game's plot.

This courtroom text adventure game in late 19th century Japan and British have a lot of features, even with the previous Ace Attorney works are very different. With the detailed character costumes and backgrounds, the strong sense of history and atmosphere, the majestic music, and excellent characterization, along with the game's detailed 3D character animation, players can experience an unprecedented adventure. In the plot, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles presents a layer-by-layer, cocooning type of plot development, each chapter of the story is closely linked, and ambiguous, no chapter is meaningless, and in the final unraveling of all the mystery, the feeling of shock and excitement brought to the player is unprecedented in any text adventure game.

The reviews of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles tend to be polarized, and not without reason. The progression of the plot brings with it an overwhelming lack of tension in the first and middle stages of the game. The design of many of the cases in the game seems rather undisciplined, neither interesting nor deep... The Great Ace Attorney: Adventure, as the first half of the game, though the development of the subsequent plot paved a lot of ambushes, the design of the plot and puzzles makes it less interesting and often difficult to motivate players to continue playing. The climax of the game comes too late, whether the player can persist to this point is a huge problem. At the same time, the Steam version of the game globally locks 30 frames, and can not set the Japanese voice is also a very huge drawback, and very damaging to the player's gaming experience.

The quality of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is actually not that bad. But this can only be concluded after you have experienced the entire game in its entirety... And I think this is actually the biggest drawback of this game because the ability to keep the player until the climax of the plot is the biggest pain point of this work. If you are very patient, love the Ace Attorney series, and love the suspenseful story of players, then The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles will not let you down. If you do not have any of the above elements, perhaps The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles will not give you a memorable experience.

herlock sholmes.

Six years of legal struggles solved by moving a single letter to create "Herlock Sholmes". Absolutely brilliant.

My client was sentenced to death
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