Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor's Path
Extremely belated review! It took me like 3 years from start to finish, but so it goes.
Anyway, NotMiki was mostly right: case 5 was pretty good. Not perfect, and I dunno if it redeems the rest of the game, but I'll take it. This is good because case 4 was awful… surely one of my least favorite cases in the entire series. The idea of some threat so bad that it forces Edgeworth to relinquish his prosecutor status and walk his own path is fine, but the implemtation was completely nonsensical, and the villain was horrible. Basically Manfred von Karma if he was a complete dumbass but nobody called him on it.
Anyway, the good:
* Sebastien was pretty rad. Da Best indeed, ends up a better Franziska type arc.
* Courtney… well, it doesn't explain her extreme hostility to Edgeworth and inane contradictoriness earlier, nor really sell how exactly she was allegedly fighting the bad guys from the inside, but she was fine in Case 5, which was good.
* And hey, for once, the policy of "eh let the lawyers keep the evidence, whatever" has the predictable effects.
* A few times in this case, the bad guys commit massive unforced errors, and the plot owns this, which is also something I like! I'm fine with weird evidence left over and doing blatantly the wrong thing if you need to give the player an in, it makes more sense than the "I HAVE PLANNED EVERYTHING WITH LUDICROUS PRECISION" types that luck out by having no civilians observe their evil deeds. (Not really sure why the real blackmailer was unable to tell the blackmail victim to do exactly the reverse of what the other would-be blackmailers wanted…)
* The mastermind was pretty cool, too. I like the idea of a mostly indirect villain with a reasonably sympathetic cause. As usual, Ace Attorney games insist on having them do some dumb incriminating shit directly when there was no need to, as well as some pointlessly complex tricks for no apparent gain, but whatevs.
* Oh hey this case remembered Gumshoe exists. (Although didn't the "hey we're the new Yatagarus now" scene already happen at the end of AAI1…?)
The bad:
* Sheesh, did some people fail their Perception checks HARD "two nights ago". It was a freaking party at the Grand Tower that night, with the auction, the Conductor, Kay, Crane, the Prez, Courtney, the mastermind, and Lotta all there. Complete with a gunshot and a dude getting crushed when either the mastermind decided to go for an extra bit of revenge-on-behalf-of-another, or the prez decided that he should open fire at night on suspicious balloons, also while Courtney is oblivious in the lobby or something, and there's a masked party going on a mere 2 floors below, and Lotta 1 floor below. (And remember, Kay was awake enough to remember the Man in the Red Hood "flying" later, which was presumably AFTER the gunshot and crushing.) That said, I'll give 'em a pass on this, it doesn't REALLY work but it's interesting I suppose.
* What's up with even more pointless amnesia? This is some FF7-level "totally bonkers due to Mako poisoning" shit. Why on earth not omit amnesia for the boys, omit remembering who-was-who when one kid tied the other up complete with memories of this happening, and give the Culprit an authentic motive to kill his friend Knightley?! Just have "the police screwed up identifying Pierre Houquet's kid" to explain why Our Heroes get confused as to which kid was which. I really don't get the dad-swap plotline they came up with.
* I'm willing to give this one a bit more of a pass because CRAZY IDENTITY SWITCHING is something that many people, including me, love, but… the president of Zheng-Fa plot twist was half-baked. Especially since the existing plot it replaced was perfectly fine and dramatically interesting. The president growing bitter and estranged from his allies after a mistake that led to him getting kidnapped makes perfect sense. (This is, incidentally, exactly what happens to Aerys Targaryen in the backstory of A Game of Thrones… he becomes a paranoid and vengeful leader after being held captive for a ransom.) Very much an "unneeded" twist for the sake of twists. It raises more questions than it answers… we get the impression that family is very important in Zheng-Fa, so did the president really have no family, even extended family, who could immediately notice a swap? How about the unnamed double's family? Hell, how about the unnamed double's friends and coworkers? Did he just mysteriously disappear from their life? Also, the "evidence" to prove this even happened at all is pretty weak-ass. A dead witness maybe said the prez was still at the embassy… at MIDNIGHT. First off, if this was a scandalous secret liaison with a foreigner, of course the bodyguards would be covering for it by lying and claiming he wasn't off to see his sekrit son. Second, even if they were straight-up not lying, you kinda don't expect super-specific times that late at night, when people are asleep or at the hotel bar. This is the kind of present in other Phoenix Wrights where fine, you made your point, then opposing counsel just says "yeah but maybe that dude was mistaken" and you move on.
* While I'm loathe to ask for MORE super-badass awesome assassin action (the game thinks de Killer & Sirhan Dogen are way cooler than I do…), it's a little odd that Dogen's "disciple" is the one who takes up the mantle of vengeance (even if it somehow involves getting Jill Crane killed as well… whatever.). If Dogen is such a badass as to be able to wander out of prison whenever he wants and blackmail Warden Roland, and Body Double Prez / Blaise / Patricia Roland tried to KILL him presumably before even paying him… it seems weird that he didn't bother trying to get them in trouble. Maybe he mellowed out enough to not want revenge and kill them, but merely knowing that the president was dead should have given him enough leverage to ruin all three if he wanted, since uh they did kinda try to kill him. (Of course, it's also wacky that Warden Roland was soooo terrified by him that she didn't dare try to murder him somehow, but whatevs, that's more of a Case 2 concern.)
* Speaking of which, I don't quite get why de Killer is that annoyed at the red-hooded man. He withheld the fact that the president was really the body double? Who gives a rip? The body double IS the president now. As best I can tell, this was a legit assassination attempt; red-hooded man really wanted the president to die for backstabbing Dogen, and he was not directly TRYING to get de Killer in trouble. Maybe I'm misremembering Case 1.
* The game head-faked me a bit by making me assume Nicole Shields is the mastermind by having her recoil after Kay crushes the bug. Okay sure. But don't we learn later that the mastermind turned off the bug during that conversation…? Did crushing it turn it back on again mysteriously? ...whatever.
* Speaking of which. This is a minor whine, because Edgeworth DOES properly treat it as total embarrassing nonsense, but Lotta / Nicole / Penny's insistence on seeing a fictional character is maybe a bit of a stretch even for a silly humorous game like the PW series. This is the kind of thing a 10-year old might do where they insist they saw the Hulk in real-life. You're in your twenties, damnit, you did not see the "real" Moozilla, he is a fictional character.
* This is also more a nitpick than a critical flaw, but… okay so the red-hooded man lured Kay to the Grand Tower so he could set her up as a (very, very weak) suspect for whatever shit went down with Blaise, and so ensure Edgeworth, his chosen tool, would take the case and ruin Blaise. But it seemed way too potentially deadly? Like, it's a miracle Kay didn't just die after cracking her head after her fall. Was the convenient amnesia fall unintentional? (Oh well, more case 4 nonsense.)
* Also more of a nitpick, because the bad guy styling around with ludicrous counter-claims that everyone you like really did it is a PW series staple, buuuut the seeming crime of opportunity in deciding to attempt to frame John Marsh for the president's death doesn't seem to fit with the mastermind's MO, and certainly couldn't have been planned for anyway, so I guess he just likes to inject a little chaos. Given that he did it, it was already pretty well established that even if legit, it would have been a tragic workplace safety accident that would get Global Studios sued out of business maybe, but not really incriminate a 13-year old kid. Reminiscent of case 1-5 where the prosecution threatens to pin the crime on Ema instead even with a theory of the crime that would make it blatantly an accident, even if true. But at least that was an evil police chief trying that; a random guy testifying "hey I totally told a 13-year old he should kill someone, but I have no evidence I did this, and I didn't really say to kill him" compared to two characters testifying "I totally heard the mastermind confess over the telephone, and you can see the cell phone call in the records" seems a little lopsided in the realm of reliability. Like I said, go ahead and have our villain taunt Edgeworth and co., but "hey police arrest this kid" is a bit over-the-top even for PW.
Anyway, it was definitely worth a play. Fan translation & technical localization work was pretty great, too. Still one of the weaker series entries overall, which is a shame, because Edgeworth himself is a great character, and Kay is a solid assistant. Just.. as Elf / NotMiki have noted, the case logic is really convoluted and zany a little too often and to too much an extreme; the cases often don't make tons of sense in retrospect if you imagine writing a side story from the villain's point of view. And as a personal complaint, too much of the game - cases 2, 3, and 4, basically - are a Gregory Edgeworth simulator, not a Miles Edgeworth game. I can already be a defense attorney in your other series, lemme be a prosecutor in this game.
