Grape juice is quite popular, Schloer does red and white grape flavours and J20 does some grape flavour too.

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The other clue comes only from the semi-canonical Phoenix manga, but on several instances, Phoenix is shown drinking alcohol... and is very quickly established to be not a very good drinker. He can't hold his liquor, he is still immensely hung-over the next day, etc. It may be going out on a limb, and it may be just a variant on the "sober hero" anime trope mentioned above, but it could be that Phoenix just knows his limitations, so to speak.

There was definitely a line in case 1-5 in which Gumshoe explicitly says:
This is obviously not a direct quote but it was definitely there.

I'm sure he was just overhyped on organ music rather than anything...

I'm of the belief that alcohol does exist (and is legal) in the AA world, and, as evidenced by the official art, most characters can be assumed to go drinking on occasion, irrelevantly to the gameplay. But when it DOES appear in the game, I think the use of alcohol -- and not-quite-alcohol -- is deliberately used to tell you something about the character in question.








Anyway, after AJ, I think "grape juice" evolved into a cute running gag, as with the guy on the plane in AAI. Although, it is justified, because I agree that it's a good idea not to allow alcohol on the plane. Hey, maybe the guy IS a drunkard, but is making do with grape juice on the flight because he can't have his liquor...


I definitely don't buy that the has anything to do with censorship, because there's no way that minor alcohol references would push a game entirely about CRIME AND MURDERS past the "T" rating it's already earned.

The Harvest Moon series is a good example of how videogames are able to get away with alcohol consumption and an "E" rating...
(Except the one game that redubbed all alcohol as "soda"...
To be fair, that particular game WAS the most apparently child-oriented of the series, from the facade of the graphics, so I assume they had to take extra "precautions" against whatever stupid thing the censors have against alcohol refs...
But PW, which is already aimed at teens and up, is a different story.)

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But Matt never actually DRINKS the brandy.
I like to think he just swirls it around evilly then throws it onto a nearby plant when no one else is looking, "God I HATE brandy!"

Yeah I thought so too. I felt like the first game was wayyy rougher and more..hmm how would I put it..saucy?
Although you gotta admit when this little quote happened, I was a teeny bit surprised:
"Well, now we know who's milkshake brings all the boys to the yard..."

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I always though the lollipop thing was a Kojack reference.

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Maybe it's both, it definitely alludes to a cigarette though. The way he pulls it out from his mouth with it in the valley between fingers is indication of that in my eyes since you wouldn't normally pull a lollypop out that way but you would hold a cigarette that way (I.e. Dee Vasquez)

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I think the 'grape juice' in AJ was indeed juice. I think it's part of Hobo!Phoenix's character to have those little changes that at first make him look less straight-edge than he seemed in the first three games, yet you eventually come to realize that he's the same Phoenix deep down. He liked to do that sort of tricking in AJ. It's not about ratings there.

The lack of alcohol 'censorship' in AA was probably due to, like someone said, the fact that AA was rougher than the other games. It's ten years old and the ratings system was a little slacker then (compare OoT N64 to OoT 3DS- same game, different ratings). AAI, in comparison, is much lighter and fluffier. While still rated T, it has less things in it to warrant said rating and there is little there besides violence to give it such a rating other than Cammy Meele's chest.

So I think the whole grape juice thing in AJ was a joke, but in AAI I think it was honestly a serious attempt at avoiding references to alcohol while still keeping it a running gag type thing.

And I do think the creators meant for Matt's brandy in JFA to appear as brandy. Otherwise they would have said something about it to keep us from thinking the obvious-- it's alcohol.

tl;dr: It's only a censor in AAI.

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All true. Also, I think in AJ, they kinda wanted to make Phoenix into this fatherly sort of guy...which I really don't like but...nonetheless it's there. Anyway, I'm pretty sure the creators guessed that the people playing AA were old enough and mature enough to see that Matt is a bad guy so it's only normal that he carries an odd glass of brandy around with him...just sorta adds to the fact that he's a psychopath, that he's probably an alcoholic. (How else do you think he doesn't feel THAT much pain when he's scratching his face off...)

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