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Ace Attorney: Danger! Danger! High voltage!

5 (29.4%)

Justice For All: I love translations errors and bel air gags???

0 (0%)

Trials and Tribulations: Godot is the greatest video-game character of all time

11 (64.7%)

Apollo Justice: Straight shota can only take a game so far

1 (5.9%)

Attorney Investigations: Edgey's my main man

0 (0%)

Total Members Voted: 17

[Frocto]

I voted Trials and Tribulations, for the reason listed above.

[Niku]

It's a tough call between the first and the third, but T&T edges out on account of Godot, yes.

[Smiler]

Always bet on Godot.

[François]

now that i finally broke down and got a ds on account of some dirt-cheap roguelikes and dq4 i am looking into this series that i heard so much about and iesus cristo those are some expensive-ass games

(and by expensive i mean more than what I can convince myself to spend on a game which will give me finger/wrist cramps and possibly headaches)

though i hear they are probably worth it so

[Bongo Bill]

I mean, I like Investigations, but Godot.

[Zach]

Three has more varied gameplay and Godot, but Ace Attorney has Rise from the Ashes.

[teg]

I would love to finish this series but that case in the second game that introduced Pearl was so frustrating I couldn't bring myself to bother finishing with it.

[Esperath]

[Kayma]

I voted for Apollo Justice because of Hobo Phoenix.

And not at all because I've got a weird fetish for underage magicians.

[jsnlxndrlv]

I replayed these a little while ago!

ACE ATTORNEY: It's the high watermark for music, and Rise From The Ashes is better than any two cases from the rest of the franchise, combined¹. It also establishes the formula and therefore gets to use that formula without coming across as formulaic (as the sequels sometimes do), but that's kind of undermined by the fact that it's establishing the groundwork later games will build upon. (Psyche Locks do improve the sequels.)
FINAL SCORE: Second place!
CASE SCORES: D, B, B-, A-, A+

JUSTICE FOR ALL: I'm going to pay this game a challenging compliment: I don't like the music, and I love the game for that. Franziska's a good character, but I don't like her very much, particularly here. The franchise is all about Phoenix and Miles, and Franzy's really a third wheel; Edgeworth's out of the picture most of the time, and the music reflects that appropriately. (Cornered actually plays when Phoenix is reminiscing about going up against Edgeworth.) It's almost like Capcom knew they were making a middle chapter, and decided to just embrace the middle chapter-ness. Farewell, My Turnabout is fucking gripping, and Reunion, And Turnabout is what enables the third game to be so excellent. I don't have a problem disregarding the translation errors.
FINAL SCORE: Not last place!
CASE SCORES: D, A+, C, A-

TRIALS & TRIBULATIONS: Story complexity reaches the high watermark, and music's just as good as the first game (or rather, a point behind because the first game has the strength of nostalgia behind it now). Godot is the best character to take on the mantle of prosecutor, although as a villain Gant almost has him beat. The rest of the characters are kind of a mixed bag: they're as gimmicky as they ever get, but nobody's just out-and-out unbearable in the way of, say, Wendy Oldbag. Except for Oldbag herself, naturally. This is the point in the franchise where I first really noticed myself disappointed with the dialogue writing, though, particularly during The Stolen Turnabout and Recipe For Turnabout. Man, Recipe For Turnabout might be my least-favorite case, but I can't give it a bad score, because it's at least interesting, even if I don't like it. Bridge To The Turnabout redeems all, though: as a case, it isn't as adversarially as challenging as Rise From The Ashes, but the way so many of the franchise's conventions and history come together to make a single powerful story push this to the brink. Trials & Tribulations really wins on the strength of not having a single stinker among the five cases.
FINAL SCORE: First place!
CASE SCORES: B, B, C, B, A+

APOLLO JUSTICE: I respect a franchise that's not afraid to retire a protagonist at the top of his game rather than let him coast into irrelevancy on the back of inferior sequels. I'm sad that so many things disappointed me about this game; I really wanted to like it. Apollo's truth-finding trick was an interesting idea that was frustrating in practice, and the way the game strong-armed you into using it at the only times it could possibly work felt like a missed opportunity. This was the low watermark for fieldwork, too, with particularly undirected exploration and poor use of hotspots when searching for evidence. Trucy's marionette and Klavier go a long way toward soothing these frustrations, but Trucy herself just made me kind of uncomfortable, and the game's undone in the 11th hour by a fucking illogical villain. Still, a lot of solid characters, and it makes me sorry to have to do this.
FINAL SCORE: ...last place....
CASE SCORES: B, C, C+, B

MILES EDGEWORTH INVESTIGATES: Again, another interesting take on the formula. Suffers from the lack of any court-time or Phoenix whatsoever (silent cameos don't count). Haven't played this one twice, yet, and it's too fresh to see what holds up over time. Didn't particularly feel one way or the other about the game.
FINAL SCORE: Not last place!
CASE SCORES: C, B, B+, B, A

Pluses awarded to the case that I personally liked the most. Minuses are a penalty for having that woman present.

¹ The combination of Reunion, And Turnabout with Bridge To The Turnabout being the one exception to this rule.

[Rosencrantz]

I'm surprised you liked the final case in Investigations so much. I've played every other game in the series at least twice so far, but the final Investigations case is just so boring to me that I haven't even finished it once yet. I really need to just power through it, I guess. The funny thing (to me) is that I tend to play these games in bed to help me fall asleep, but that case would just keep knocking me out after five minutes so I wasn't making any progress.

[Rico]

Investigations' final case really pushed up hard against pretty much the biggest problem with the series: Having to jump through bullshit hoops instead of the game actually letting you win it when you've figured it out.  It's bad enough when Phoenix starts floundering completely inexplicably and you have to get a Deus Ex Pearls-as-Mia-gets-us-all-banned-from-having-a-porn-board to progress the case, but when it happens to Edgeworth it's even worse.

[jsnlxndrlv]

...in all honesty, that last case should be a D or a C, on account of I haven't finished it yet, either. I read a spoiler and was like "aw, man, that's so cool!" and awarded it the score it would have had, if it hadn't bored me to sleep.

[Bongo Bill]

Investigations was just too chatty. You've got two sidekicks and they both seem to want to interject at every opportunity. However, for being able to play as Edgeworth, I'm willing to overlook quite a lot.