In just over a month's time, the entire mainline Ace Attorney series will finally be playable on PC with the arrival of the Apollo Justice Trilogy. Launching on January 25th 2024, this collection bundles together the fourth, fifth and sixth games in Capcom's excellent lawyer 'em up - Apollo Justice, Dual Destinies and Spirit Of Justice - which originally launched on the Nintendo DS and 3DS across a ten year period between 2007 and 2016. It's been funny revisiting the earlier cases of these games after so much time has passed. Apollo's name may be the one on the box, but the series' original cover star Phoenix Wright is never far from the front lines - not only does he get tangled up on the wrong side of the law in Apollo's own debut outing, but he's back as a full-time defence attorney on the (w)right side of the legal bench in the other two.
At the time, poor old Apollo always felt like he got the short end of the stick as Capcom tried to figure out what to do with the series, and to some extent, he still does - for he never quite gets out from under Phoenix's shadow to completely hold court on his own two feet. But now, after 2021's excellent Great Ace Attorney Chronicles proved that neither time, setting or its lead defence need to be set in stone for the series to carry on, the pressure does feel ever so slightly less intense on a second visit. There's no denying Apollo still has a bit of an uphill climb on his hands, but if, like me, you've been waiting for these games to be freed from their Nintendo-bound prison, this is arguably the best glow-up Capcom's done to the series to date.
There is, of course, the obvious spruce up to each game's visuals, which have never looked lovelier when blown up to 4K. If I didn't know any better, I'd be hard-pressed to say they'd been originally confined to Nintendo handhelds, as all three of them look like the modern-day visual novels you'd expect them to be. Indeed, the only visible piece of evidence that these haven't just arrived as a simultaneous three-pack of releases is the fact that Apollo Justice still retains its original 2D artwork while the others benefit from fully 3D character models. The perils of launching on both inferior hardware and with a six-year gap between entries, eh? Still, while I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a teensy bit disappointed that Apollo Justice hadn't been remade to look part and parcel with the rest of the trilogy, it really doesn't make a jot of difference when you're actually playing the damn thing. Apollo Justice is every bit as characterful as every other Ace Attorney game, and I found its animation to be just as expressive and personality driven as its 3D successors.
The heart of this trilogy is the same as it ever was. Regardless of who happens to be the one standing behind the bar, this trio of games is about defending your clients and finding out the truth through a mixture of detective work, questioning suspects, and presenting your case in court. Each case begins with gathering evidence - often by visiting the crime scene, picking up clues and talking to its colourful cast of characters to try and find out what happened. You only get so much rope afforded to you in these sections - you aren't detectives, after all, but a gradually growing legal team, and the limits placed on you by both the police and prosecution often mean the meat of your deductive work will inevitably play out back in the courtroom. Here, you'll need to use the evidence you've gathered to unearth contradictions in witness testimonies, pressing them harder and harder until finally the truth is uncovered.
In many ways, the rollercoaster ride each case takes you on is just as thrilling and exciting as any other episode in the Ace Attorney series - and after playing the first two cases of each game as part of a new preview build, the plotting feels just as tight as it did all those years ago. But the early cases always have a certain zip to them as a matter of course - they've got to get you fully invested in both these characters and the idea of its court battles as quickly as possible, and their relative brevity continues to cast a powerful spell on how they're initially perceived.
I say this because, for some, there's a reason why Apollo's tenure isn't as well regarded in certain fan circles, and it's got nothing to do with its art, or its choice of protagonist. Rather, it's all down to the series' increasing reliance on gimmicks and magical tomfoolery to make breaks in your casework rather than good old-fashioned deduction. Sure, it's not like previous Ace Attorney games didn't also dabble in the supernatural - Justice For All and Trials And Tribulations both saw players use Phoenix's special magatama beads in conjunction with specific pieces of evidence to break through invisible 'psyche-locks' on particularly tight-lipped suspects - but Ace Attorneys 4-6 really doubled down on all this.
For example, Apollo Justice introduces a new Perception technique, allowing Apollo to zone in on telling twitches to make witnesses crack under pressure when they're lying. Dual Destinies, meanwhile, adds legal rookie Athena Cykes to the mix, whose 'mood matrix' gadget Widget can identify conflicting emotions in a person's testimony. Then there's Spirit Of Justice, which in addition to all three of those previous 'powers', adds Divination Seances to the pile, which lets you play back the final moments of a victim's life alongside key sensory information they see, hear or smell before they're offed. I stand by the notion that Spirit Of Justice is, in fact, one of the better games in the series, despite what I've just said about the gimmicks, but it's not exactly hard to see why, toward the end at least, it started to feel like the series had gotten away from what made Ace Attorney so great in the first place.
Indeed, it's partly why The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles felt so refreshing when it came to PC in 2021. By setting the game in Victorian England, it had to dispose of all its magical gubbins as a matter of course, and in my books, returning to a simpler style of investigation ended up doing it the world of good. Whether Apollo's trilogy will continue to pass muster beyond each game's initial case pairings remains to be seen, of course - it's been quite some time since I revisited Dual Destinies and Spirit Of Justice, and Apollo's first outing will be a completely fresh experience for me, too, as I only properly got into the series on 3DS. Nostalgia may have ended up becoming a bit of a ball and chain for these latter Ace Attorney games, but you'll be able to read my full thoughts on the trilogy closer to its release on January 25th.
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December 11, 2023 at 10:00PM
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Apollo Justice Trilogy is an even better glow-up than the original Ace Attorney Trilogy - Rock Paper Shotgun
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