Deja Vu (0:00 to 16:30):

• We start talking about former GameCola writer Neal Iannone.
• The plan to get cool, matching GameCola jerseys fell through.
• It’s somewhat amazing that Deja Vu was released for the NES, given its M-rated content.
• Walkthroughs often contain spoilers, believe it or not.
• Paul lists all the various death scenes in testgame.
• Is the Game Boy Color version of the game better than the NES version? We conclude the PC version must be best.
• Neal Iannone, GameCola misses you.

Phoenix Wright, Case 3 (16:30 to end):

• We start by getting off-topic and discussing scenes that aren’t actually in the game.
• We talk about anime, despite our complete lack of knowledge about it.
• Oddly enough, Maya does not have fun defending her idol from false charges.
• Naming all the characters a pun—a good idea or a bad idea? Paul doesn’t like it; Michael’s OK with it.
• Michael blatantly plugs his latest Phoenix Wright fanfic, “Pearl Saves the Future.”
• This case blatantly rips off of The Gates of Life with its leet-speak characters.
• The localizers did an awesome job with the Phoenix Wright series. The people who translated the manga books? Not such a good job.
• We return to discussing the plot of the case, which is what we’re supposed to be doing, by the way.
• Does Phoenix secretly bear a grudge against Mia?
• We talk about the upcoming WiiWare Phoenix Wright releases, and the possibility that this is leading up to the release of some new Phoenix Wright material.
• Paul does not like Apollo Justice.
• Michael attempts to explain Nathaniel Hoover’s comments on Case 1-3, even though he doesn’t completely remember what Nathaniel said.
• Edgeworth’s change-of-heart near the end of the case is an example of character development.
• Paul still does not like Apollo Justice. He also has never played it, by the way.
• Paul likes how Phoenix never defends guilty people.
• Phoenix Wright 3 lost Game of the Year to Bioshock in the GameCola end of year awards for 2007. In fact, Best Portable for that year is the only award we’ve given a Phoenix Wright game.
• Professor Layton didn’t win a Game of the Year.
• Paul misses Matt Wright, Sprite Monkey, and Travis Combs.
• Do people want us to make a theme song for “The GameCola Podcast?”

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Reasons Why I Like Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney

1. Prosecutor Payne’s New Hairdo

This game takes place seven years after the third Phoenix Wright game, and it’s obvious that Prosecutor Payne has been visiting the salon.

Oh yeah. Look at him flip that hair! Such sheen! Such body! Winston, you may be bald, but you clearly know how to treat your hair right!

2. 3D Models and Animation

After ignoring the DS’s capabilities for the past two games, Capcom remembered that the Ace Attorney games are, in fact, DS games. So this game contains new, cool DS-style things like video animation. And 3D models of crime scenes that you can manipulate! Awesome!

3. The Return of Gemini Man

Our feminist gamer friends have pointed out that Apollo Justice used to be Gemini Man from Mega Man 3. It’s good to see that Capcom is reusing the old Mega Man characters, rather than letting them die, forgotten.

4. The Return of Luminol

OK, maybe it’s just me, but I cheered when Ema Skye pulled out a bottle of Luminol during a trial so Apollo could check to see if blood had been left anywhere.

Now that I think about it, I know why it was so awesome. Ema was acting in character. And given the fact that Phoenix Wright is ridiculously out-of-character in this game (much, much more on that later), seeing at least someone act in character was like a breath a fresh air.

5. Funny Conversations

Yay for Harry Potter references!

Like it or not, Apollo Justice is one of the Ace Attorney games. That means it has funny conversations and jokes and that sort of stuff. Here are some I liked:

Reasons Why I Don’t Like Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney

6. Phoenix Wright Disbarred

No. No. NO NO NO NO NO!

CAPCOM, HOW COULD YOU????!!!!

This is NOT what’s supposed to happen! Phoenix does NOT get disbarred! He continues his career as a successful attorney, surrounded by his friends and colleagues, and he eventually marries his partner Maya Fey. To suggest that Phoenix does anything else is laughable, but to change things around so that Phoenix’s life becomes the complete opposite is unforgivable.

OK, OK. I’m confusing people who haven’t played this game. Let me start over.

For those of you who don’t know, 2008 was a sad, sad year. The Indiana Jones series got resurrected, and everyone was excited because Indiana Jones is awesome. But it turned out to be a horrible addition to the series, where they tried to replace everyone’s beloved Indy with newcomer Shia LeBeouf.

…The exact same thing happened with the Ace Attorney series. The first new Ace Attorney game in seven years, and they tried to replace the main character with newcomer Shia LeBeouf Apollo Justice.

I suppose we all should have seen this coming. After all, it was foretold in the Bible:

And there was in that land a man named Phoenix Wright. He was an upright and honest man, and he secured Justice for All, despite the harshest of circumstances. The Lord God looked upon this Phoenix, and saw that he was good, and so blessed him.

But lo, an evil horned beast appeared to usurp Phoenix’s place of honor. Using fake evidence, the beast had Phoenix ejected from the halls of justice. The horned beast then attempted to secure Phoenix’s place as his own, but yea, he was stupid and lame, and we want Phoenix Wright back, dammit. Nobody wanted to see him get replaced. Whoever came up with the idea should be beaten by angry lawyers with briefcases.

So, yeah. In this game, Phoenix Wright is nothing at all like he was in the other games. He’s no longer an attorney. No, he got disbarred on trumped-up charges. Because, apparently, the fact that he’s a world-class attorney and so would be able to, I dunno, defend himself from these false charges never crossed the minds of the game’s producers.

Oh, it gets worse. Phoenix has lots of friends who would gladly help him out if he ever did get in a tough situation like being disbarred. This game pretends that they don’t exist.

That’s right. You’re not going to hear anything about the Feys or Edgeworth or Gumshoe or anyone else in this game. You’re left to believe they all completely abandoned Phoenix, because he is now a penniless bum who spends his nights playing poker and getting drunk off wine (sure, the game says it’s grape juice, but let’s be honest: grape juice doesn’t come in wine bottles or in wine crates). The only way he makes ends meet is by getting money from having his daughter go onstage and show off her panties to everyone.

Yes, truly, Phoenix has hit rock bottom.

Look, I can understand wanting to change things. Phoenix Wright was in a good place after the third game, and it would have been hard to come up with new, life-altering cases for him to handle. I understand the game’s development team deciding to move past Phoenix Wright and start again with a new lawyer.

But the way they moved onto a new lawyer—by completely ruining Phoenix’s life—is just plain wrong.

Come on, Capcom! I know you can change things around with the next installment of the series! Arthur Conan Doyle continued the Sherlock Holmes series after killing the main character! L. Frank Baum restarted the Oz series after he ended it for good! Capcom, you can do the exact same thing! You can keep the Phoenix Wright series going, even if you already finished it!

Here, let me help you! There are plenty of ways to take a step backwards and continue the series with Phoenix in his rightful place as main character. You could have Phoenix retake the bar exam and get his attorney’s badge back! You could say that the Phoenix in Apollo Justice was just an impersonator, and the real Phoenix was elsewhere! I’d even be willing to accept the “it was all a dream” cop-out at this point! PLEASE!

7. Klavier and Kristoph Gavin

Klavier and Kristoph are the two new lawyer characters in this game, brought in to replace the various lawyers that Phoenix Wright knew. I don’t want to sound like a Negative Nellie here, but I don’t really like either one of them.

Kristoph creeps me out. He’s got a stalker grin, with the kinda freaky Japanese-style upside-down closed eyes. And what the heck kind of hairdo does he have going on? It’s like he has a ponytail, only it’s out in the front and hangs there like a deformed lollipop stick. I dunno. I was too busy being disturbed by the way Kristoph looked to be able to accept him as a good character.

Klavier, his brother, is a little better. The game decided to try something new by having a friendly prosecutor character, but unfortunately, it doesn’t really work out all that well. Sure, Klavier’s a nice guy, but he’s also…really kind of boring. Plus, he has the same scary hairdo as Kristoph. What the heck IS that thing? Clearly, he curls it in a circle because there’s no other way he could have diagonal lines going across it.

I am sorry. That hairdo creeps me out big time. Get a haircut, Gavins.

8. Ugly Apollo

Speaking of things that creep me out, check out this animation for Apollo. Ew. Keep that thing away from me.

9. Decisive Evidence

I know the Ace Attorney series likes to make things dramatic by making it seem like the trial could end at any moment, but this game takes it a bit too far. Near the end of every trial, right when you’ve got the killer cornered, he/she says something like “You can’t convict me! You don’t have decisive evidence!”

The Judge immediately agrees with the killer. Never mind the fact that you’ve just proved who the killer is, how the murder was performed, and what the motive was. No, the killer will now get off scot-free because you didn’t have “decisive evidence.”

It’s just a completely ridiculous ploy done to up the dramatic tension and to slightly lengthen the trials. I can understand using this ploy once or twice, but it gets used in every trial. It’s just so overdone in this game, and it’s such a bad line of thought to begin with that I reached the point where I wanted to break my DS whenever the phrase “decisive evidence” came up.

Plus, Phoenix Wright gets disbarred because Klavier makes a demand for (totally irrelevant) “decisive evidence.” That’s enough reason to dislike decisive evidence in itself.

10. Courtroom and Lobby Discrepancy

This is probably just me, but I noticed that for every single trial, the courtroom number never matched the courtroom lobby number. That bugged me.

Bonus Eleventh Reason: Stolen Panties

When I learned that Apollo’s first detective case was to find a pair of stolen panties, I was immensely disappointed. Has the quality of the cases gone downhill? Yeah. It’s gone downhill big time.

True, about ten minutes later, the panties storyline ended up becoming hilarious, not disappointing. But still. I don’t think our feminist gamer friends approve of this rather perverted storyline.

I’m going to be very sad if your AJ review is positive. Anything in which Phoenix Wright is (SPOILER ALERT!!!) some piano bum (END SPOILER ALERT!)¹ is NOT CANNON.

- Paul

When I told him I was going to do the review anyway, I found this reply:

YOU ARE FIRED. THIS GAME ISN’T REAL! PHOENIX CONTINUES TO BE A VERY SUCCESSFUL LAWYER WITH LOTS AND LOTS OF FRIENDS AFTER THE END OF THE THIRD GAME, AND THAT’S IT. THAT. IS IT!

- PAUL

I bet there’s no such thing as Guitar Hero: Aerosmith either, EH, PAUL?

Now, let me move onto the game in hand. Apollo Justice is the fourth title in the Ace Attorney series, in which players take the role of a defense attorney defending a client from the cold, hard, right arm of the law. So far, this series has had a cult following amongst DS owners and GameCola writers alike², and, for the most part, Apollo’s first chapter follows suit, aside for some minor (or major, depending on who you are), differences.

In case the title didn’t give it away, Phoenix Wright is not the main character of the series anymore. It appears that in the seven years between Trials & Tribulations and now, Phoenix has been stripped of his badge and is now some piano bum a mentor to the new main character. Apollo is a young man who would remind anyone who played the first game³ how it feels to be a young defense attorney in your first case. The change in perspective is nice, though I can’t help but feel like I’m playing as the same character, only a few years younger, all over again. Like Phoenix, it seems everyone is out to get Apollo at one point or another, whether it’s because he put his brother behind bars or because his hair is just a little too pointy.

The supporting cast consists almost entirely of new characters. The one you’ll be seeing the most is Apollo’s assistant, Trucy Wright, who is the 15-year-old⁴ daughter of Phoenix. I couldn’t help but notice how familiar of a role she plays to Maya Fey in the previous games, except that her form of magic, that of a stage magician, is acknowledged as fake. There’ll be no bringing back the dead this time around. The other important new guy you’ll meet is Klavier Galvin, who serves as the main prosecutor this time out. The thing about this guy is that he’s a rock star as well as a prosecutor, which becomes a major plot point in the game.

It’s funny, ’cause he’s a rock star, but he’s also a prosecutor, so he’s always ready to rock and roll whether he’s on stage or in the courtroom. And he’s German, too! I bet there’s a joke about German people that I can cook up before this review closes!⁵

Off the top of my head, I can only think of four major characters from the previous games that make an appearance this time out. Phoenix and the Judge make themselves apparent in the first five seconds, and Gumshoe makes a small appearance late in the game, but the returning character who actually makes in impact on the gameplay is Ema Skye, who takes over Gumshoe’s role as the detective who nobody likes. Ema brings forensic science into the game by analyzing finger and toe prints, locating trace remains of poisons, and doing other things that take full advantage of the DS’s capabilities.⁶

My only issue with these processes is that you’ll be doing them maybe five times total throughout the game, and if you forget how to do them later on, well, you’ll be doing a lot of trial and error to figure out what to do, ’cause the game explains the instructions to you once and only once. I can only blame my own masculinity, as I was staring at Ema’s chest the whole time. Whoops.⁷

Similar to the Magatama in the second and third games, there’s a bracelet that Apollo sports in this game that alerts him to when witnesses are lying in testimony. When this occurs, you need to perceive a certain habit they perform when they’re lying. I didn’t particularly enjoy this challenge, because there comes a point where you have to be so nitpicky with the habit that sometimes you don’t even know it’s occurring. I prefer my Psyche-Locks to this, a lot, and you don’t get to see any of those until very late in the game.

Have I mentioned that Klavier is really dreamy?⁸

Beyond that, there’s not really all that’s really new in this installment of the series. The four episodes are introduced with short movies that are a nice upgrade to the production value of the series.⁹ You’ll do all the examining, moving, talking, and presenting like you did before, and although the faces and the names change, the soul is still right there. It’s more of the same for the franchise, and while innovation drives our industry, it’s nice to enjoy a good book story-driven game once in a while.¹⁰

P.S. By the way, did you read Versus Mode this month? Man, that Sprite Monkey sure is (a really funny writer/the father of my children/Zach in disguise/Jeddy in disguise. Choose one!), isn’t he? He just (cracks me up/wouldn’t stop badgering me for sex/really wanted to argue with himself/really wants to win Writer of the Year again. Choose one!), you know?¹¹

1. In the actual e-mail, there were like 70-to-80 spaces between SPOILER ALERT and END SPOILER ALERT. I paraphrase for you, the readers, because Paul Franzen wouldn’t.

2. Contender for Game of the Year? Are we high?

3. Or the third game, in Mia’s case.

4. And no pretending she’s 18 on my part. You want to be like Papa Zach? Then no pretending she’s 18 for you, too.

5. What do you call a man with blue hair and blond eyes? Find out next month!

6. AJ is the first Ace Attorney game built from the ground up for the DS. The first three are ports of the original GBA versions that were Japan-only releases.

7. By the way, are you single, by chance?

8. Klaver is really dreamy.

9. Though there’s one cutscene you’ll watch…I don’t know, 10, 20 times?

10.  It’s funny ’cause it goes against what I said in Versus Mode. WHAT IS THE TRUTH, ZACH?! WHAT IS THE TRUTH!?

11.  I chose the second one, myself.