FE9 - Up to Chapter 26. Playthrough has gotten very challenging due to the crazy low levels, a few mediocre units (SHINON), and few supports. Good fun.
Phoenix Wright - Finished this at last.
Mmm. Well let's see. I completed the first three cases in a week or so, then took a month to do the last two, which is a testament both to the increasing length and declining quality of the later cases.
Overall review... hmm.
Gameplay - Honestly, the less this got in the way, the better. Investigations I found pretty silly, either they were a fetchquest chain or they were an annoying list of things you had to do and you couldn't advance the game until you completed them all. Nothing is more fun than having the game stalled as you try to find that one part of the background you forgot to examine. Fortunately FAQs exist, without them I would like this game much less.
This isn't to say investigations are without value, because they give a chance for the writers to add some good plot/character stuff in there with the dialog. Just they are bad for gameplay.
Court stuff is much better, you actually have to puzzle things out in a reasonable way. Still not the reason I play the game, but it's not a chore. Though occasionally the game got a bit silly, like that one time you had to purposefully get held in contempt of court because THERE WERE NO CONTRADICTIONS even though I could think of several reasonable ones. Also I sometimes presented something for the wrong reason, or presented the wrong thing for the right reason (e.g. when they want you to present a certain weapon in case 5, I presented the broken weapon itself, when they want you to present the photo of the weapon from before it was broken. I can kinda see this, but shouldn't they clue you in if you're so obviously on the right track?).
Basically the game doesn't win any points here, but it's not the focus, so that's all right!
Music - I like the music that plays when you have someone cornered. Because it's very satisfying psychologically. Overall, though, very little with actual value that I expect to listen to outside the game.
Visuals - Pretty solid actually. PW is all about its characters, and for the most part they had pretty vibrant designs which helped make them memorable. Also a crazy number of poses, and the last few poses used by the villains are always needlessly over-the-top. <_< Good times.
Okay, stuff that matters. ***SPOILER WARNING*** from here on.
Characters - The game freaking rules at these. Almost everyone is quirky, memorable. As mentioned earlier, the art helps, but the majority of it's in the writing. Both the core cast and the case-specific witnesses were, in general, excellent. In particular, some examples:
Phoenix himself is pretty much written as a self-insert, but he's amusing and charming enough. I liked how, despite him being a bit of a SI, he still gets owned on a fairly regularly basis. Besides that, bounces off the other characters well and always has amusing internal dialogue. Being about the only person who notices how bananas the other characters in his world are helps.
Maya's probably a bit of a weak link, and she's not bad. Sometimes very amusing, even. Gets tossed into a bit of a damsel role a bit too often though.
Edgeworth starts out as a bit of a generic loser. This only makes his transformation into the repeated butt of jokes ("YOUR NAME. PLEASE." "It's that... that... THING!") in later cases ingenious. After that he settles down as a reasonable serious character whose straight-laced demeanor contrasts nicely with most of the side characters, and who is generally able to keep the serious plot moving otherwise, since once you learn more about him his motivations generally make sense.
Gumshoe was also pretty consistently great. I'm not sure how they managed to keep him a fresh and funny fall guy through the duration of four cases, but it worked. I guess it helps that his relationship with Phoenix generally changed a few times over the course of the game, from a hindrance to... well, no, I'd never call what Gumshoe does helping, precisely. But darned if he doesn't try. Also "Hey! That's MY endearing personality trait, pal!" is one of the few lines that got me to laugh out loud. (Not that there weren't plenty of chuckles elsewhere.)
On the subject of complete cluelessness, the Judge was also pretty good. Not Gumshoe level, mind, largely because he had to be that way so that you would do all that work. On a serious note it's kinda scary that this guy gets to choose who lives and who dies, but that's far from the most fucked up thing about the PW justice system anyway. <_<
For more case-specific people... Larry Butz is foppishly amusing and a neat counterpoint to both Phoenix and Edgeworth. Jake Marshall is win with the constant cowboy references. Ema I generally found an improvement over Maya ("Note: The judge had to think about it first.") in her raw nerdishness, though she too got a little too damsely towards the end? And pretty much the entire cast of Case 3 ruled - Cody Hackins the fanboy who brings his samurai sword to court, Wendy Oldbag and her delightful combination of Grandpa Simpsonesque old person caricature and venomous surliness, Sal Manella the living internet reference, and Dee Vasquez' precisely aimed belittling of those around her (poor Edgeworth).
Plot - Also generally worked very well. For all that the games are largely comic, they spin a good yarn overall, and untangling it is a lot of fun. The game provided me with a lot of "Oh, THAT explains it!" moments which you'd expect out of a good mystery novel, so getting them in a light-hearted game like this was an unexpected perk.
My one objection to the game's plot is it got a slight bit... hmm. The last two cases got convoluted to the point where the motives of the villains just... didn't make much sense. I'm still a bit baffled by Case 5. (Spoiler warning again.) The villain... killed someone so that he could make it look like a 14-year old girl killed him accidentally and use blackmail to exploit her sister with this? It's too large a stretch to be plausible, which kinda ruined the "aha!" effect when the truth came out, see above. (The whole plot would have made more sense if Ema actually had killed Marshall, I think - felt like the writers just didn't have the guts to go through with that.) Case 4 similarly suffered from von Karma's attempts to frame nine-year old Edgeworth as a major plot point (like who fucking cares?) and the whole last-second case at the end felt somewhat tacked on.
But yeah, despite the longer paragraph on the bad than the good there, I have to praise the game in this department. Certainly beats most RPGs!
Writing - Rules and is win. Largely touched on already, but the snappiness of the dialogue was just terrific. The game benefits immensely from being translated by someone who knew what he/she/they were doing - the game is very in touch with pop culture and makes you believe there are actually real people talking. Except for the part where they are impossibly quirky, but that's part of the charm!
Not sure what I think of the game overall. 7-8/10 area? Lots of fun, but needed to take some extra steps to really wow me. Better gameplay? An execution of its storytelling that is flawless rather than very good? I'm not sure. Regardless, looking forward to more of this when I get around to it.
