burn this down
Banned
WARNING: UNMARKED SPOILERS FOR ALL MAINLINE ACE ATTORNEY GAMES
After putting it off for months and months, I finally got around to playing and beating all of the game.
I guess a bit of background for me and the series. I bought the first game on a whim about 3 years ago and really dug it. Then about a year later I bought Justice for All and Trials and Tribulations and absolutely fell in love with the games. I thought the writing was fun, the characters were memorable and likable, and the cases and twists were cleverly thought out. Late last year I'd decided that I'd give Apollo Justice and Dual Destinies a shot. I'd initially heard some less-than-stellar things about them but was interested enough to bite. To my surprise I actually enjoyed Apollo Justice quite a bit. I didn't think that it was as good as the original trilogy; some characters were grating and forgettable, some twists (like long lost half-siblings? Really?) were kinda odd and out of left field, but overall it was ok and it felt like Ace Attorney.
So, here I am having just finished Dual Destinies last night and boy do I have some Mixed Feelings™. First things first, I did not like Athena. Like, at all. For some reason she just didn't feel right? Like all the other characters I felt had some chemistry with each other, but she just didn't. The best comparison I can make is like when a long running show adds a new member to cast to change things up and boost ratings, but they end up feeling like the odd one out and the viewer doesn't really like them. It was kinda like that. The cases were kind of boring, I didn't connect with any of the characters, I felt like the writing took a dip (there's a bondage joke in Turnabout Academy). I mean, one of the cases was literally just high school drama. Please god no. I just wasn't having a good time. Until the fourth case, Cosmic Turnabout. Suddenly everything clicked. The characters were fun, the writing was tight, the twists were kinda cool. And then it got better in Turnabout for Tomorrow! And there was very little of Athena! It was fun! What a novelty! Coming off of such lackluster cases, I couldn't help but wonder where that kind of writing was the whole game! There were parts I could do without though, like they could stand to say "dark age of the law" a little less. They could have kept it as a concept, that was fine! But they could have kept it without everyone saying the same phrase over. And over. And over. And I'm not sure how I felt about the culprit behind all of it being Fulbright. The bumbling detective was the illusive puppet master behind it all? Yeah, not sure about that. There was no build up towards it, it kind of just comes out of nowhere. It's kind of similar to the twist in the final case of Justice for All, where Matt Engarde goes from clueless pretty boy actor to an evil mastermind. The difference is that with Engarde we got a slow build up to it. The more we found out, the more suspicious he became, so the reveal that he was the culprit was surprising, but you could see how we'd gotten to that point. With Fulbright, it just one little detail and we're immediately thrust into "HE'S THE PHANTOM". Additionally, the "Did Athena kill her mom!?" part felt like a retread of "Did Edgeworth kill his dad!?", but the execution was alright on that, so I give it a pass.
Gameplay was kind of all over the place for me. I wasn't a huge fan of how I was restricted to examining certain things at certain times. The Ace Attorney games were already pretty linear, but putting limits on examining things made the game feel like a straight line. But at the same time it kept me from getting lost, which happened plenty of times in the first four games. I think overall though I preferred the freedom. Additionally, the 3 different gimmicks (Psych-Locks, Perceiving, and the Mood Matrix) all felt lacking. I think part of the problem had to do with you constantly switching between different protagonists. As a result, there wasn't a lot of any of them and they were few and far between. I understand keeping them in for consistency sake, but keeping them so far apart from each, from a player perspective, made them feel more gimmicky than they already were. But overall it was Ace Attorney gameplay. It's a visual novel, the main point isn't really the gameplay, it's more about the story and putting the piece together.
Tl;dr - Dual Destinies was an odd experience of not enjoying myself at all, then enjoying myself a lot. It definitely ranks at the bottom of the series for me. What did everyone else think though?
EDIT: Oh my lord, I'm sorry, I did not mean to write a novel. It just kinda happened.