Thankk you

My biggest beef is with how the games tend to lead the player through everything. If they had more pieces of evidence to work with, more possible suspects, and just let the player think for him/herself once in a while it'd be a lot more challenging.

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I greatly dislike the fact that you can get ALMOST to the end of a trial, pretty much prove that the murderer did it and how, but fail because you can't PROVE a motive. Even when you've proven that there was no way your client could have done it, and the prosecution doesn't even have a possible motive. (Prominent in 1-3, when you prove that Powers could not have possibly done it, you get tripped up and can lose simply by not providing the real killer's motive. And in 2-1 when there were like 4 reasons it wasn't really Maggey, and the fact that she was dating the victim. That seemed like a counter-motive.)

I know that's just to make it more intense, when you know you can lose at any moment, but they could have at least tried to make it more real. You REALLY don't have to prove who the real killer was just to prove someone innocent.

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Spoilers, I hate spoilers...

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Do you mean like being spoiled by these forums XD or being spoiled in the games as to who the killer is before the defense attorney actually knows? The latter is really just another way that the writers needlessly lead the player through the logic, taking away part of the work the players themselves could easily do :P.

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I mean stuff like spoiling pretty much everything there is to know about Godot by just one comment on Youtube...

Yes, not really something from the series itself, but spoilers are just the most satanically devilish thing ever to exist.

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The thing I like the least about the AA series is the way it is marketed... or lack thereof.

Capcom knows these games are successful, but it does not try to heavily promote them, relying instead on word of mouth. There is a near-complete absence of Phoenix merchandise, and what little there is is fan-made. Instead of making this the next Pokemon-like quirky gameplay revolution, Capcom seems content to be Mega Man and Street Fighter.

What annoyed me most was the fact that I often got penalized for being "ahead" of the game in terms of logic. For example

Holy crap THIS. It seems like every case does this! It drives me nuts

I also think that the game feels like it pretty much runs on rails- No alternate storyline paths, no "Good endings" or "Bad endings" (Except for JFA & AJ, but they were so insignificant they didn't change the story at all)... Not really much of anything except going from point A to point B. I think the games need to be less linear, but that's just me.

This doesn't really have to do with the games, but I also hate it when people bitch about the fanbase... When they're IN the fanbase. Seriously, if you hate it so much, then just leave.

This is part of the DevDiary that I am releasing.

While this applies to the fangames, it would fit pretty well this.


Problem with Good/Bad endings, in my opinion, is that they do detract the story and even possibly divide it to potential confusion. I honestly have not found a game uses it effectively. Games like Bioshock etc. uses levels of it, but, overall, in my opinion makes it "confusing" in what is canon or not. Now, they can be good what-ifs, but that's the most I can think for now, add more to it if you want If anything to expand the story, it would be the vagueness and the room that it allows discussion by the people.

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The obsession with murder isn't unique to Ace Attorney. Most any mystery-crime-oriented fiction aimed at people with a double-digit age has a myopic level of fixation on murder. As early as 1928, a writer insisted that "no lesser crime than murder will suffice" for a novel, and that concept seems to have traveled to every possible medium. Unfortunately, many other worthy high crimes have come to be overlooked as a result. -- Pteryx

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i like the fact that not many people know about it. it makes it kind of cooler. also the games arent produced everywhere (like you can't buy them in the games section of a supermarket) and they are hard to get hold of which makes it cool. i wish you could get phoenix wright bags though. that would be cool

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In my opinion, AlwaysMurder is a justified trope. Stories are about emotions: crimes have to make you care, and no crime makes you care as much as murder because of its inherently personal nature. Besides, killers make for great villains. Killing someone is such a fundamental transgression of morality that the culprit almost leaves the realm of humanity to become a quasi supernatural creature. This forces us to understand the very nature of something that is beyond our comprehension yet has all tempted us one way or another: evil.

I've seen a lot of people complain about this, but I'm close to 100% certain that if they ever made a case that didn't involve any sort of murder (or at least any danger of death), it wouldn't be a fan favourite.

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I did the EXACT same thing.

I've gotten stuck so many times in the games trying to find that ONE action that gets the plot moving again. I once spent 30 minutes presenting every profile and piece of evidence I had to Gumshoe. It's annoying.

I still love the games though.

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Like many others, I hate the fact that sometimes finding a contradiction can be so hard it's frustratring. I used to use walkthroughs all the time until T&T where I forced myself to do it without walkthroughs. Sure, finding the harder contradictions was horrible but when I did find them, I felt sorta cool that I found them thanks to my own smarts instead of just looking them up in a WT XD

I agree with that. It feels like a necessity. And that's what I want to know, is there another way?



That is what I question. And that is what I see is a challenge in itself in making an emotive and creative story. Killers can make great villains, but what is to say that there is not another way? Limiting oneself to be in the "comfortable" position does make it easier, but narrow in that sense. It's a limit on the potential creativity that we can pull. Regardless if cases without murder would not be a fan favorite, it wouldn't undermine the meaning behind such stories depending on their intention. Some are unappreciated and that may be due to our lack of understanding of such intricate things due to following such norms. I could argue, creativity is ahead of society's understanding. So, who's to blame? The creator or the people who look at the creator's work? A quick and classic example: our history in art. Now, I'm playing with redundant questions; they don't need to be necessarily answered.

I see it as creativity vs. comfort (and by societal point-of-view). Maybe I'm just being a "tryhard."

It's a classical debate, don't you agree? (And one that is hypocritical, xD)



Haha. It feels good finding a hard contradiction :p.

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Radex > It's certainly a fascinating debate. I'm not arguing on such a general level (it could've been mistaken for that...) though ; I'm merely saying that a great AA case without any murder / danger of death would be extremely hard to pull off.
Making an AA game is largely a genre exercise. You have to work within certain constraints (which can sometimes actually stimulate creativity).
You can (and, if you want to be great, must in order to surprise the player) experiment by departing from one or two traditions, but you have to keep in mind that your experimentation will only work in relation to the other variables that you've kept intact, and that, unless you're Shu Takumi, you haven't chosen (for instance, the fact that you play as a lawyer, that there's a certain legal system, etc.).
My point is that out of all the possible experimentations, removing the "murder" aspect is among the one that would work the least within the basic AA universe as we know it. Even if the case dealt with, say, large scale corruption, it would be much more dramatic if someone died as a result. Case in point: AAI. Would you have cared if the only crime committed was smuggling?

But I'm all for breaking the rules (as long as you know them, and anticipate the consequences of breaking them). I've done it before, and my new game takes it to a whole new level. It's very risky, and I'm pretty sure that after playing it, no one in their right mind would think of accusing me of valuing comfort over creativity.

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I'm guessing that a lot of people have put this, but the fact that it's a fixed story line and fixed choices. Like, even if you pick a different option in court, you'll always end up with the same out come. Kinda boring. I love everything about the game except that...

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This, and only this.

Regardless of how quickly you solved a case mentally, or wished to present a piece of evidence in a certain light, you have to do it exactly the way the game demands you to in order to progress. Even if I wished to point something out in court, the programming of the game would not enable me to do so. This could be frustrating when I was on a different lead then the one I was supposed to be focusing on at that very moment.

What do I dislike the least about Ace Attorney? The fact that I've beaten all them games except for Apollo Justice, and once I beat that one, there will be no more new Ace Attorney games for me to play for a good while.

Edit: Oh, I forgot. I really dislike the concept of Apollo Justice. Not the game or character per say, but what they did in the game. I don't like how all of the major characters except for Phoenix and Ema are missing. A good majority of the major characters in the past games are huge fan favorites, and the fact they don't even get mentioned sucks. I also dislike how the characters in general aren't as memorable. I also think that the whole magician theme with the Gramarye's that the game circulates around was really lame.

Besides that, what else do I dislike? Mike Meekins. The Phoenix/Edgeworth pairing that people insist on. That's about it.

Edit: I just read the first post. Sorry for not reading when I should have, but I still stand by those last two ones.

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After marathoning all the games again there's a few things in particular that really bug me about this series.

Typos. Yeah I know that they were pretty much unavoidable, but COME ON! At first I thought that those ended with Trials and Tribulations but there was even one in AAI. (It was in Case 4 near the beginning and the particular context of that case made the typo even more glaringly terrible). And like I said, I know that this is unavoidable given that this is a majorly text-based game being translated from Japanese but still...I wish they'd release a version with the typos edited into proper english. Even "The miracle never happen."

Another thing that really bugs me about the series is how very few cases start in court. This is good for story reasons but for gameplay it's pretty bad. I personally believe that investigation sequences are the most boring parts of the game. I just wanna play a lawyer game where I'm actually being a lawyer goshdarnit. Investigation sequences are also quite the turnoff when it comes to advertising this game by having friends huddle around one's shoulders. I find that it's when I'm playing the court parts that people actually stick around when they look at what I'm playing. Yes there are a few cases that start out in Court. But all 5 of those cases are flawed in some way. The First case from the first game is too short and thus not too fun. The second game's first case, while more interesting, is sadly plagued by the game's less-than-appealing Cross-Examination music. That theme is so boring I could fall asleep. The third game's first case is long enough, has good court music, and yet it's still not perfect because you play as Mia Fey. Now I have nothing against her or playing as her but her voice clips just can't compare to Phoenix's. The third game's 4th case also starts out in court but it too suffers from not playing as Phoenix. It's also one of the few cases that I always end up getting stuck on somewhere, quite a few of its cross-examinations are annoyingly difficult too. I would say that Apollo Justice has the best 1st case but still. Apollo can't compare to Phoenix when it comes to voices.

I also love/hate presenting profiles. I love presenting them during Investigations because doing so can bring up some amusing dialouge (Like how presenting Morgan Fey to Director Hotti gets the same response as if you presented a man to him). Yet I hate being allowed to present profiles in court as that basically gives you a whole bunch of useless pieces of evidence that are likely to never be used.

So basically a perfect Ace Attorney game to me would be like:

-Great Courtroom music all-around.
-LOUD Voices.
-Obviously good story/characters and whatnot.
-MOST IF NOT ALL CASES START OUT IN THE COURTROOM.
-Few/Short investigation sequences, unless they're like in AAI. Which would be cool.
-Ability to check/examine all evidence like in Rise From the Ashes or Apollo Justice.
-Ability to present profiles during investigation sequences but not during cross-examination.

There. That should do it for me...

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When the game ends.

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That Capcom doesn't think it's important enough to localize GK2.

The lack of replay value. No, that can't be helped and yes, I still do replay them but whether or not it's changeable, the games are so much better the first time around.

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I kind of dislike the fact you get so far in the court and are like THIS close to getting a non-guilty and you've pretty much proved they can't have done it, but, when your life bar runs out they still declare guilty verdict even though you've come so far in the case. They don't do that IRL, right?

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