After watching the trailer for the upcoming Miles Edgeworth game, there are three things about this game that strike me.
1. Switch from First Person to Third Person
One of the reasons I like the Phoenix Wright series is that it’s a callback to the old-school style of point-and-click games, such as Deja Vu. Those games are more text-based, and half the fun of the game is examining everything and reading the humorous narration describing what you clicked on. Nowdays, however, point-and-click games tend to rely more on puzzles and using various items everywhere.
This new game is switching to third person, which makes me think it’ll work more like newer point-and-click games. Edgeworth will have the ability to walk around and choose who to talk to (whereas in the other games, who you talk to is pre-determined). He’ll probably also have a magic Mary Poppins bag so he can have fifty different items with him at all times, even though some of them are about the size of a TV so there’s no way he could carry them around all the time.
He will also carry around a dog named Pep and talk to Mr. Firebird, and go back in time to meet dinosaurs and medieval princess-carriages…no wait, that’s Putt-Putt Travels Through Time. In any case, it’ll be interesting to see how much the gameplay mechanics change with the shift to third person. Will they go whole-hog and make it like a third person point-and-click game that happens to have Miles Edgeworth in it? Or will it be an Ace Attorney game that just happens to be third person?
Time will tell, but I’m optimistic. Nobody seems to have any complaints about how the Ace Attorney series switches from first person investigation to third person courtroom drama. So because we have seen decent third person gameplay from the series before, there’s a good chance it can happen again.
2. The Title
I’m not sure what the title of this game is supposed to be. Actually, this is a problem I have with the entire Ace Attorney series, because their titles are convoluted. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Justice For All is one too many colons for me—I always think of that game as Phoenix Wright: Justice for All. I mean, if you simply must put the series name in the title of a videogame, follow proper English grammar and put the series title first, as in Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin.
But for this game, we’ve given Ace Attorney, Miles Edgeworth and Investigations. Is it Miles Edgeworth: Ace Attorney: Investigations? Or, is it Miles Edgeworth: Ace Attorney Investigations? My money is on the former, but personally, I don’t think “Investigations” is a very good title for a game. I still would like to see Miles Edgeworth: The Perfect Prosecutor, although we have yet to see Edgeworth inside an actual courtroom in this game.
Edgeworth will appear in court sometime during this game, though…right?
3. Edgeworth’s New Sidekick
The trailer promotes a new character, the mysterious thief Kay Faraday. She looks like she’s going to be Edgeworth’s partner/sidekick person for this game, even though Edgeworth is destined to be paired with Franziska seeing as she’s the only female prosecutor we know of.
One thing that’s kind of disappointing about the Ace Attorney series is the similarity between the various non-lawyer sidekicks: Maya Fey, Pearl Fey, Ema Skye, Maggey Byrde and Trucy Wright. They’re all pretty much the same—quirky but cute. And they overreact to pretty much everything, especially if it involves getting mad at Phoenix/Apollo.
I hope the series will switch things up a bit, but I’m not so sure that this Kay Faraday will be too much of a change. After all, the trailer ends with a “Ha ha! Kay’s getting mad at Edgeworth for saying her scarf is too long!” joke, which is similar to “Ha ha! Maya’s getting mad at Phoenix for calling the Steel Samaurai a kids’ show!”, “Ha ha! Pearl’s getting mad at Phoenix for talking to another woman!” and “Ha ha! Trucy’s getting mad at Apollo for saying ‘magic undies’ instead of ‘magic panties’!” It’s kind of a stock joke at this point.
Gumshoe is apparently in the game, too, so I wonder how it’s going to work out. Will Edgeworth get TWO sidekicks? That could be interesting. After all, it worked pretty well in the other games when Phoenix has Pearl and Maya as his sidekicks.
