Previously, we took a look at the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney trilogy. Chronologically, it’s Apollo Justice who would receive the spotlight next. In 2007, Capcom introduced a new attorney to loudly yell and point their fingers at people. These games have been remade and ported several times throughout history, and the most recent of such occurrences came just a few short months ago.
Of course, the Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney whole trilogy does have two other full games. However, we will focus simply on the first iteration, as the first Apollo Justice game is quite beefy.
Let’s begin, talking about what the game does well.
Cross-Examinations
Look, Phoenix Wright’s trilogy had a lot of fun, charming, even iconic moments. Cross-examining a parrot was hilarious. Seeing all manner of culprits lose their minds on the stand was great. However, the meat and bones, the actual game to be played was somewhat flawed. Mechanics were, at times, fairly obscure and difficult to work with for a player on their first playthrough.
Apollo Justice’s first game handles cross examination in a much more down-to-earth manner, while keeping it interesting. You don’t need to press five different statements in a random, obscure order in order to avoid getting brick walled for several minutes upon minutes at a single statement. Yet, finding the correct piece of evidence to present or pressing on the right statement is still just as satisfying as before. This makes the game far more accessible to the average player.
Settings
One case, in no particular order, sees the player visit the property of a yakuza-like mob, a surgeon’s office, a noodle stand and involves breaking into a garage. For another case, we spend a lot of time behind the scenes of a rock band’s concert. Finally, in one case, there are constant time skips, where the player visits the same location twice, seven years apart.
While not every single setting was absolutely adored, it was really cool to see Capcom try to freshen the experience with a variety of cases. It really did a great job making sure no two cases felt the same.
Soundtrack
Capcom in general has done a great job releasing banger after banger throughout the Ace Attorney franchise. This game arguably offers the best soundtrack of the series. Helping this cause is the fact that a major character in this game is a leading guitar player for a massively successful rock band. But with or without Klavier Gavin, music when cross-examining, music when discovering something critical and more is really, really catchy. That brings us to our next point…
Prosecutor Gavin (and his band)
The Gavinners are a rock band. Prosecutor Klavier Gavin appears to be their leader, but there’s more – the other members of the band, themselves, also work for the police department. In particular, the player will find themselves cross-examining another guitar player for the band who is a detective.
None of this is mechanically mind-blowing, technically impressive, nor are these the absolute greatest characters ever written in gaming. Yet, the simple novelty of having a large part of a police department get together and start a jammin’ rock band is really cool. It gives Prosecutor Gavin’s character some depth and makes him interesting.
As for Gavin himself, he is arguably the coolest, most well made prosecutor the series has seen. Considering we got Miles Edgeworth and Godot in the Phoenix Wright trilogy, that is a pretty massive claim to make. Gavin is well-versed with the law and is very intelligent, letting him pose competent opposition to the player as you’d expect. However, his background in rock makes him a lot more interesting than the sum of his initial parts. Occasionally, he will play the air guitar loudly and elaborately before he refutes a point the player made. His general demeanor is very stern and serious, while also being playful and casual at the same time.
Sadly, “Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney” isn’t perfect. Let’s discuss what wasn’t so great.
Apollo Justice
Phoenix Wright was and continued to be an amazing character, during and beyond his trilogy. Phoenix received a ton of genuine characterization apart from his role as a defense attorney. He developed meaningful relationships with other characters, had enormous triumphs alongside seeing Phoenix at his absolute lowest and worst. Each individual game of the trilogy has a mountain of character development that makes him seem more and more fleshed out.
…Apollo doesn’t get any of this. He’s just a large, lifeless caricature who, at his best, is a knock-off Phoenix Wright. Apollo’s character isn’t really offensively terrible in any one sense, it’s just his character is devoid of any serious amount of depth or development as the game carries on. As such, tense moments in this game that would’ve had the player at the edge of their seat with Phoenix Wright feel less like a conjoined journey and more like we’re watching a movie.
Turnabout: Succession
This case could and should have been about a third of the length. It just drags and drags and drrrrraaaaaaaaagggggggssss on and on until things actually get interesting towards the very end. However, this case commits the crime of misleading the player. It spends all case long hyping up this “Jurist System” as some kind of a trailblazing new way to handle the law, hinting at a new mechanic or even an entirely new way to play the game as a whole. This is the one thing about this case that’s even remotely engaging until close to the end. Then, when it comes time to finally experience this Jurist System, it’s about five seconds of clicking one button or the other, and then future entries into the franchise essentially pretend it never happened.
This case felt like it was trying to set up cases in the future, only for the rug to be pulled out later. What was the point? Even if this case was a lot shorter, it would’ve been a real chore to play through. This is probably the only genuinely bad thing to come from this game as a whole.
Overall, this game was realistically not quite up to Phoenix Wright’s standard. Having said that, it’s still a really solid, engaging experience with much more user friendly mechanics that can make it friendlier to newer players. As a result, this InReview article finds the first Apollo Justice game…
Guilty!
…of being a perfectly solid game and gathering a B+ for a grade.
InReview: Reviews, Commentary and More 
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