Athena's analytical psychology helped Wright catch a lot of the murderers on each case

AA1 is IMO the best game of the series, simply because, not only is it realistic and grounded, but because it is tight. Its very hard to find something which happened in the game where a character's actions or motivation feels odd or forced, something very difficult to achieve in a mystery style game. However, AA1 is also the most grounded in reality. The only fantastic element is the spirit channeling, and besides the DL-6 stuff, where it was really only important because of how it effected the Feys and possibly Yani (its been awhile), it never really impacts the events the game deals with in the courtrooms. This is because the spirit channeling serves a purpose, and that purpose is to give Phoenix a mentor character to talk to, who knew more than he did and could help him out (to a diminishing degree because she was actually the victim and therefore intimately involved in the first case). This is because, in a classic detective piece, there needs to be a detective and sidekick. The sidekick (Maya here) needs to be a little less aware than the detective, so that we can learn of the pertinent facts without being told the correct solution to the mystery, from the genius detective's eyes. But since Phoenix is supposed to be the genius detective, and we're phoenix, we need a third character who's better than us to help us out sometimes. The whole spirit medium thing really just let's them keep Mia around to act as mentor to Phoenix.

The later games start to become increasingly "unhinged" as they go, with more and more fantastical elements being introduced. For the earlier games, it was for a purpose: although JFA introduces spirit channeling mattering to a small degree in a case, its an excuse to make maya the defendant, which accomplishes a number of goals, from giving a good setting to explore maya's back story for new players, and to introduce the magatama, which fills a vital role. The magatama makes investigations more interesting by shorting the time between solving puzzles and gathering information, something the first game suffered from. Although I think this was handled best in AAI, the magatama really did a good job of this as well. Still, the magatama never features in court, and has a clear purpose to fill in making investigations more interesting, though it suffers from making them harder and less clear. JFA introduces our first prosecutor gimmick: franzy uses a whip. I don't really have much of a problem with this, because its a little silly, but doesn't really dominate her personality or define her. Its just a quirk that she features, so its endearing.

T and T is very similar to JFA. Its the only game thus far where nothing major has been added or removed. T and T introduces the awesome godot, who also has a non-defining gimmick: godot drinks coffee, but godot isn't just a prosecutor who drinks coffee, Godot is still primarily a prosecutor, who just happens to have a quirk where he drinks lots of coffee.

AJ is where things really started to fly off the rails. Because the magatama was linked to phoenix, and probably because it was making investigations complicated it was removed. But then they took it a step further, which was weird, rather than trying to solve a problem, Apollo was given a gimmick, for the sake of having a gimmick And that's where, in my mind, you're supposed to draw the line: gimmicks are fun, but its better when there's underlying character, and major gameplay elements should not be introduced for the sake of giving characters gimmicks. Still Apollo's gimmick was worked in believably, his harassment of witnesses could be explained in universe by just him vaguely mentioning something, then presenting evidence or something else (in the case of Kristoph, exploiting the jury system), to properly establish what he was saying with evidence. However, the thing AJ does that I find more problematic for the realism, is it introduces the first gimmick dominated prosecutor. Klavier may have his fans, but his rockstar status is part of his persona, rather than a quirk about him.

And so now we're at DD, and we've added another lawyer. Athena's whole mood matrix thing feels like a gimmick for the sake of having a gimmick again, and also bothers me because I feel that its not really justified in the story.
Frankly, Manfred Von Karma would have eaten Athena and her mood matrix alive, and tied up several of the DD cases with a guilty verdict in a few minutes. I could maybe see Apollo's perceptions making it past MVK, but not Athena's analtic psych, and that really bothers me. Why isn't Blackquill complaining about this obvious badgering of the witness, and vague speculations about why the witness feels the way they do? MVK would complain that this is all a pointless charade to be thrown out immediately, and the trial ended! And on the subject of Blackquill, we now have a prosecutor who is a samurai, and a criminal, once again this being the dominating feature of his persona.

Finally, the DD cases also have unbelievably convoluted setups for convolution's sake. I can now ask, "why did you do that?" about character's actions, and the only response seems to be, "because it would make the murderer even HARDER to find, because I added yet another level of fabrication, with no regard to risk:reward cost of doing so!" The actions no longer seem as tight or as well grounded.

tl;dr: MVK would've pwned Athena and her mood matrix in court. Major characters, esp. prosecutors, now seem defined by quirks rather than merely possessing them. Fantastical elements used to serve a purpose to make the game play of working through the case interesting, but now seem added for the sake of having them, and they are more critical to figuring out the case and thus the immersion breaking is greater.


All this isn't to say I didn't enjoy DD, I just enjoyed AA1 more, and feel people complaining about the game feeling less realistic are justified.
(Also, I'd like to point out that I don't dislike Athena, by the end of the game, I felt like she fit in with the rest of the Anything Agency gang.)
I still enjoyed the game and would like to play more, too bad the other DLC case isn't being released in NA. Darn capcom seems always to be holding out on us.

Was it just me or was the last case after recess badly handled? I did not feel in mood of taking down the phantom, I actually felt just weird. We had everyone ganged up against Fulbright and even though he was still a villain not worth much of our sympathy... it just did not feel like there was a fair trial actually handled there.

When we progressed, I felt it wasn't our progress at all. It was just the phantom screwing up his facade for no apparent reason other than having storyline pushed forward

"How can you say that? It's obvious he's the phantom!"... Was it really? His story was believable and it would be, had he not suddenly made that serious face. Plus, this line should have never gotten out from the mouth of experienced lawyer...

Speaking of experience, let's return to the earlier part of the trial, the one regarding UR-1. I had read some comments on how Phoenix was more nervous during that trial than when he was a rookie that had no idea what he was doing and I can't help but agree. I'm not sure if it's exactly that experience with Edgeworth that made him like that?...

I can't also get my head around the way perceiving and mood matrix are used in this last case. Again, it's basing claims on nervous ticks and emotions, rather than on evidence. It was fine in the earlier cases, when we had perceiving used during investigations, where we do not evidence to have people answer honestly, or during trials with Athena where we had witnesses genuinely confused, unable to give proper testimony, overwhelmed by emotions.

I'd always wondered why Blackquill let it slide as well. He'd already shown himself awareness of when Apollo was using his power and objects to it. That makes no sense as it is because Apollo is simply looking at the witness and examining nervous tics. Sure he's got super magic eyesight but no one can tell that, Apollo's power is essentially just derived from reading body language which some folks actually do.

Athena on the other hand actively says "STOP EVERYTHING! I AM GOING TO DO COUNSELLING!" Boots up her projector and engages her own little kind of cross-examination. Not that I don't like the mood matrix, hell I thought the bit in the finale where you could use both Mood examination and Cross examination side by side was pretty cool (though they should have had Apollo's perception in there for the mega-trinity).

As far as it goes it seems easy to stop Athena from ever using the Mood Matrix in Court simply by saying "This is a waste of time," since it's hardly an established legal practice. I agree Manfred would probably crush her for it. The only reason I can think of Blackquill letting it slide is because of their connection when Athena was a baby android child. Even then that seems tenuous at best "She was my bosses' daughter who was in the lab sometimes but mostly ran off to play with robots, I will die for her." I tell you if I'd found a blood-soaked Athena with the body of her mother with the same kind of relationship as Blackquill's I'd probably just back away slowly and call the police.