I May Be Wright; I May Be Crazy

Okay, so maybe I'm a little late with this one (and I don't mean "in span of time since the last entry", though that's true too. Every few days...not so much any more). But I've been playing this series a healthy amount as of late, and it bears talking about.

For those who haven't heard of it, the Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney series - which, with the fourth game not actually starring that character, should probably just be called the Ace Attorney series - is something best called a "visual novel" series - essentially a book told out in video game format, with some interactivity on the player's part.

Now, given that, you may say, "Ayndin, if it's just a book you play through, and everyone hates reading nowadays, why does this series sell like crack-laced pancakes?"

I'll answer that in a bit. First, some background on the games.

In all of them, you play a defense attorney, out to get your (usually) innocent clients off for horrible crimes (ALWAYS MURDER, sometimes with more additional crime). The game is set in something that is supposed to be somewhere in the US (LA is implied, I think, but it could be anywhere), though the judicial system is VERY DIFFERENT - guilty until proven innocent being the most notable change, also no jury (well, until the fourth game, according to my advance reading), and three-day trial limits. Spirit mediums - people who can channel the spirits of the dead - are...not commonplace, but are a semi-valid resource for the police, and you'll be seeing a lot of them.

The characters are the real joy, though. In the first three, you play Phoenix Wright, a somewhat hapless, somewhat straight-man-ish guy who conducts trials (and investigations to prepare for them) by the seat of his pants. The rest of the cast is great - the interplay with his somewhat silly assistant works very well, as does with his boss (and unfortunately I can't go into more details on them, for spoilerish reasons); Gumshoe - yes, many names are horrible puns - is the detective you wind up interacting with most of the time that is called for, and he's memorable as a big loveable goof. Your main "rival" (for much of the game, anyway) - the star prosecutor, Miles Edgeworth, at first just seems like $GENERIC_RIVAL but accumulates development sufficient to make him comparably real and understandable to the player to Wright himself (and, partway through the third game, I can honestly say I find him more interesting than Phoenix). There are lots and lots of plot twists and turns - sometimes absurdly so, but usually it works.

Gameplay itself is pretty simple - choosing things from a menu-like interface, picking answers, etc.; no real action here. You'll be asked to both do investigations - running around locations looking for evidence and facts by examining scenes and talking to people - and (of course) act as the defense in trials, where the goal is mostly to find contradictions in testimony and present evidence to break them. This is where "Objection!" comes from.

The game gives a nice range of options for control - crosspad and buttons, the stylus, and (for calling out objections) the DS mike (which I never use if I can help it, because I feel like a goof). It's mostly very polished - about the worst I can say is that the second game had a bunch of spelling and grammar errors.

So to answer the hypothetical question - well, people like trial stories, and the AA series does a damn good job of telling them.

The Bad:
-Occasional spelling/grammar issues
-Lack of cast variation might bother people: certain minor characters show up a lot, and sometimes you feel like you are defending the same people over and over. On the other hand, most of the characters are pretty neat, so this might not bother you.
-Lack of ability to speed up the text. You can do this if you have seen the text before, but otherwise not at all...a pain if you read fast, as you'll spend as much time waiting for people to finish talking as you will reading.
-sometimes hard to figure out exactly what they want you to present in trial; there was a case where I had actually figured out the entirety of what actually happened and how I'd present it to the court, but couldn't figure out what evidence mapped to that correctly.
-I sometimes found plot flow really inexplicable - "had you said X to Y we'd have been done a game-day earlier"
-Sometimes - notably in the "extra" fifth case on the first game - cases just seem way too long.
-pretty linear, but you might find yourself replaying it to see events in light of things you learn later on

The Good:
-awesome characters. I can't go into detail without lots of spoilers, you'll have to trust me on this.
-usually does a very good job of presenting convoluted, twisty court cases involving plots within plots
-speaking of the plots, on the whole very entertaining
-overall excellent localization/polish. A clown quotes the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air on the witness stand. I am not making this up.
-good choice in what you use to select things - can switch up as you get tired of one input type or another

In short - if you like (court) stories, and don't mind a healthy dose of reading off the DS screen, this series is worth playing. Start from the beginning, though.