Tuesday
May112010
Miles Edgeworth Ace Attorney Investigations Review
Tuesday, May 11, 2010 at 11:41AM
Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth is the first Ace Attorney game to take you away from the defense and control the prosecution.
The game stays out of the courtroom though, since in the Ace Attorney universe it's pretty hard for the prosecution to lose. Instead, Ace Attorney Investigations follows Edgeworth as he investigates the crimes beforehand and tries to determine who to prosecute. In true Ace Attorney fashion, even Edgeworth is accused of murder at one point. This means there are now about four characters in the entire series who have never been accused of murder.
Edgeworth investigates with various partners such as Franziska Von Karma, Detective Gumshoe and the obligatory teenage sidekick, Kay Faraday. I wasn't fond of the idea of Edgeworth getting a teenage girl as a sidekick, since it doesn't really fit his personality, but it works out fairly well. She's a good character, not amazing, but she fills her role well and is fun to have around. Her interactions with Gumshoe are particularly funny, and the little team that Edgeworth, Gumshoe, and Kay form has a good banter.
The game has the standard Ace Attorney humor with ridiculous antics and melodramatic movements and dialog, but because Edgeworth's personality is so different from previous protagonists, it has some differences. A lot of the humor comes from other characters flustering Edgeworth with their goofiness and stupidity and from some of the women becoming enamored with him. There are a lot of cameos from previous games--including one incredibly useless one--and at times it feels like fan-service. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it may detract from the experience for newcomers.
Since the game never has you behind the prosecutor's bench, they had to make some changes to the simplistic investigation portions present in the previous games. Now there is the ability to "deduce" during an investigation. When looking at a suspicious object in the environment, you can select "deduce" and then pick evidence that is related to it. This reveals more information and moves the case forward, and it would be a great addition to the main series of Ace Attorney games. The "logic" system is unfortunately not as well designed. The logic system involves connecting vague ideas and information to figure something out. Unfortunately this almost always boils down to "This thing is locked" + "This thing doubles as a key" = "OH MAN, THE KEY MIGHT OPEN THE LOCK."
In addition to the crime scene investigation and logic system, they work in the cross-examination from the other Ace Attorney games. It works exactly the same--witness says something, you press for more information, you present evidence to prove the lies--but they appear in smaller bursts. The game is also much easier than other Ace Attorney games, except the portions where nothing makes any sense at all. The gameplay all works together pretty well, but almost every case feels like it drags on for too long, especially the final case. The final case alone has multiple moments where they could have ended it and made things better, but it just kept on going.
This wouldn't be much of a problem if the game had a more interesting plot. Some of the cases are pretty good and the overall plot has some interesting ideas, but its execution is not wonderful. Still, I loved a lot of the new characters such as Kay and the Interpol agent Lang as well as some minor characters like the goofy Ambassador Palaeno. The character interaction is the best part of the game and make it all worth it as more Detective Gumshoe is always good.
The game is fun despite its flaws, and if you like the Ace Attorney series, you should pick it up. I couldn't recommend it to a newcomer though, mostly because a lot of my enjoyment came from seeing certain characters. Newcomers should go back to the original games (which are appearing on WiiWare in case you can't find the DS version) and pick this one up later. It's a good game, but it could have been better. I look forward to seeing what else they can do with the Investigations sub-series.
Reader Comments (6)
I agree with you, dawg. I felt the "logic" system to be quite goofy, and if anything cumbersome. I'm willing to bet the cameo that annoyed you was ... Manfred von Karma? Or Larry Butz? Come on, let me know. I didn't feel the cameos every detracted from the experience. I mean, having characters that showed up in previous cases come up again is nothing new and to me it felt like that's what they were doing.
I want to say the music isn't great as the previous series either. I loved the first three games soundtrack, and then apollo justice is only okay. I think my experience would have been heightened had the music been as epic as it was for the original titles.
but yeah, some cases did drag on too long ...and that last case goes on forrrrrrrrrrrrever.
I wasn't bothered by any of the cameos, but Ema's was really useless since she didn't really do anything or have a real reason to be there. XD It was nice to see her, but she didn't feel that useful.
Also I always love Larry and I wqould have LIKED to see more Manfred, but I wasn't that broken up to have him be there for only 5 minutes.
also this spoiler-iffic comic is exactly what the last case felt like:
http://www.peachifruit.com/hiimdaisy/alba.png
Oh yeah. I had forgotten about Ema. I guess out of the "cameos" there were hers seemed to be the least interesting.
And nice comic. I feel they could have dragged it on further XD
I agree about Ema's cameo, it was like they were going to use her to do something, but forgot about it half way through. I like some of the new characters though, such as Kay and Badd. I loved the game up until the last case where you could use several pieces of evidence to prove your point, but had to get just the right one for the game to register it.
Way late on this comment, maybe someone will read it? Anyway I'm suprised everyone thought the investigations were too long. I thought they were too short. Now it might have been that the mysteries themselves were of low quality (i could pretty much figure out who was the bad guy within moments of seeing them): for example, the last case dragged on because it wasn't that interesting. But I thought the cases were actually much shorter than others. The fourth case in particular.
Regardless, I was wondering what you thought about taking the whole thing out of the courtroom. I thought it took away much of the series' intensity there being no Doom hanging overhead or nearly as much objections as there should have been. But I guess that is the whole point of calling it "investigations".
I'm more interested in the main series cannibalizing some features and then Investigations adding some new stuff also having better stories.