Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Review - DS

7

Gameplay: 7
Graphics: 7
Audio: 7
Innovation: 4

Introduction

Apollo Justice continues on from the Phoenix Wright series of text-based adventure games. Wright, having been forcibly retired from his attorney duties now acts as a background character (or does he), leaving the mantle open to new-comer, Apollo. Here's the thing I'll say right away: do you like text-based adventure games? [Yes/No] - If you selected 'No', then leave this review. If you bought the game, go take it back for a refund and pretend this game never existed in any way, shape or form. Go and buy Dogz or something.

Clearly from that, you can tell what we're dealing with here. Text-based adventures have a wonderful 'Never say die!' attitude about them, disappearing off the radar for extended periods of time before making reprisals every now and then (ah Sam & Max, you lovable duo of love) to great acclaim from the starved community of eager gamers. Depending on what you're looking for within a game like Apollo Justice, it will either disappoint you or reward you: therein lies the crux of looking at text-based adventures in general. This review does not contain spoilers by the way, so feel free to read on if that concerns you.

Gameplay

First up, we'll get the gameplay junk out of the way. As mentioned, Apollo Justice sees you playing as a defence attorney. It is your job to find clues, analyse them and use the results of the analysis to win your case in court. You also have to find flaws in the testimony of witnesses and stay one step ahead of the prosecutor. Controls are handled via the touch screen or the buttons, depending on your preference. A couple of DS specific mini-games have been thrown into the game at various points, usually involving rubbing or blowing to reveal things about certain clues and objects.

That's essentially it. This is a text-based adventure keep in mind, not the next Phantom Hourglass. There's no real need to overload the gameplay at all. What matters here is the story and its progression, as we all know. Fans of the Phoenix Wright games will love Apollo Justice that much is certain, as it extends the Wright story beyond what was offered in the previous games. As for the rest of us, what can we expect for something out of Japanacom? I mean, Capcom. Surprisingly, a story that refrains from following the usual, innuendo-driven style of a lot of Japanese produced games. There are some rather suspect elements of the story, mind you, including a panty-stealing University student and a rather creepy doctor that salivates over your 15-year-old partner, Trucy (who happens to be Phoenix Wright's 'daughter'), but for the most part, the game doesn't bear any obvious indications that it's come straight out of Japan. Even the art style, while anime-esque, is restrained and quite clean. The writing (well, in our localised version) actually does contain some moments of humour, which gave me the odd chuckle surprisingly. Towards the end, the story defiantly steps up a notch as all the previous cases, as well as Wright's back-story come together beautifully to its final climax. It was, by far, the best part of the story.

Apollo has a couple of tools at his disposal. He can check out clues, examine areas and crime scenes, talk to people, cross-examine witnesses, as well as perform a move called 'perceive'. The reasoning behind this power is given in the game's story so I won't spoil it, but essentially, he's given the power to analyse each part of a witness’s testimony in detail. Apollo uses this power to look for a 'tell' (anyone play poker here?) in the witness: be it a twitch, a timely bead of sweat, and so on. Once you 'perceive' it, Apollo will push the cross-examination further by revealing the tell to the witness, thus forcing them to unveil new information. Somehow, I doubt that this would actually work in a court of law, but it's fun nonetheless: a bit of a Where's Wally? moment as you carefully inspect their body for changes (erm...).

As for the gameplay itself, it suffers from the same problems that all text-based adventures do: attempting to figure out the developer’s logic. I didn't have any real trouble playing through the game, but there were quite a few moments where your logic concerning the progression of a case fails completely, leaving you to wonder exactly what the hell the developer was thinking in order to progress forward. These moments essentially become a case of trial and error: presenting everything you have in your court record (your inventory, essentially) to another person in order to (hopefully) spur a reaction that will enable you to move forward in the story. A lot of the time, the game will stop entirely until you present a single a piece of evidence to one person. While this particular procedure has no negative effects outside of the courtroom setting, if you're in court, any objections you present that aren't relevant or incorrect will incur a penalty. Earn enough penalties and it's game over. The way around this is to save just before you're about to raise an objection, so if you screw it up, you can just reload from the exact same point. Saving the game also quits it, an arbitrary way of distancing the player from this tactic. It got rather irritating to say the least, particularly during the harder cases. Having said that, the game offers more than its fair share of clues and hints, so you just need to stay sharp and be prepared to read your ass off.

So it has the pitfalls of most text-based adventures. Grim Fandango and Sam & Max, both highly acclaimed adventures in their own right, suffered from the exact same problems. Does that make Apollo Justice a bad game? As I said earlier, it really does depend on your viewpoint. If you wish to be overly critical, you could assert that Apollo Justice makes no attempt to better the genre in any way, aside from the sporadic addition of a few, cute, DS-flavoured gimmicks. If, however, you enjoy a good story and a bit of thinking, you'll find Apollo Justice to be thoroughly entertaining. Personally, I find myself in the latter rationale. Sure, the developers logic is twisted at times, but there are times when you are thinking exactly what the game is 'thinking' and present the correct clue to an obscure question. This is what the genre is all about: there is nothing endearingly 'wrong' with this game, it's just a game that caters well to its target audience.

Graphics

2D-tastic, sprinkled with the occasional pre-rendered animation. The animation in the 2D sections is minimal, but there's enough there to make it interesting. One thing that warrants a mention is that you're given the ability to physically examine clues. You're given the clue in a 3D space, which you can turn and rotate to check. This is necessary for a lot of the clues in the game, as you'll find fingerprints and tonnes of other information which is used later on. Aside from that, the art style is serviceable and not overly exaggerated: clean and clear. Again, if you wish to be critical, the relative minimalistic nature of the 2D animation is a little disappointing, but you really should be spending most of your time reading the text in the game rather than looking at the graphics.

Sound

Seemingly generic music is contained within this game, but if you take the team to listen to it, you'll hear some fairly catchy pieces. A lot of this music has actually been remixed and re-recorded by a variety of artists, including a fantastic symphonic orchestration. In terms of the game, you can pretty much play it muted for the entire duration (aside from parts of one case which require you to analyse a bit of music). I'd spend a bit of time listening to the sound before writing it off though: it's highly entertaining to hear "OBJECTION!" in the courtroom for some reason (to the point where I and a couple of others at Uni were able to amuse ourselves for a while by reciting it. Yep, we're intelligent Uni students alright). It's quite easy to get caught up in the 'feel' of the sound: if it doesn't grab you, then it definitely won't infuriate you. If it does, then you probably shouldn't be playing these types of games at all.

Overall

It's tricky to sum up this game without being biased in some way. If you hate text-based adventures, then this game won't do anything to change your mind: in fact, it'll probably just make you hate them more, in a "WHY IS THIS BEING PUT ON THE DS" kind of way. If you like text-based adventures, then you'll inevitably try to compare them against other titles you like and even then it's tricky as it just comes down to personal taste in story. At a crunch point though, while this game doesn't push the text-based adventure forward, what it does do is offer an entertaining and engrossing story, which is exactly what we all want in a good adventure. If you're up for putting up with the game's fickle logic at times, then you'll find a very rich world here, with some memorable characters. Having been the first time I was introduced to the world of Phoenix Wright and Apollo Justice, I enjoyed the experience: it certainly makes for a change from the piles of shovelware currently doing the rounds on the DS.