It’s been over a month and I’m still working my way through Ace Attorney: Trials & Tribulations… At least I can say that I’m about halfway through the last case and by the time I do finish it, it’s long not until Apollo Justice is released.

One thing I gotta comment on about the Ace Attorney games is the challenge factor in the gameplay. Other than the investigation mode where you gather clues, the main theme is taking those clues and pitting them against what characters tell you in order to expose lies. In the past two games, this was was incredibly painful. Many times I’d get stuck and when I looked up the answer in a guide, I was still left asking, “How the fuck are those two things connected?” In fact, most criticism I’ve heard from my peers against the game series is that you’re not playing a game as much as you’re really just following a walkthrough.

Not only that, but the game tries to create a challenge by using a penalty system. This being if you guess the wrong piece of evidence to find a contradiction, you take damage from a life meter. However, because of the long-winded nature of the game, they’ve designed it so that you can save at any time. This makes the penalty system completely meaningless, since all you have to do is save your game every single time you’re about to make an objection. If you guess wrong, just restart the game from your save point and you can survive the entire game with a complete penalty meter.

In Trials & Tribulations, they’ve made it much less frustrating. In fact, I’ve only had to look up a solution once and even then I felt like an idiot for not realizing it before. What’s helped most is that unlike the previous games where you’d get a prompt along the lines of, “There’s a contradiction here…find it,” they do a better job of nudging you in the right direction. You might get, “This is the statement that I think there’s a contradiction” or even something like, “The key here is to show what proves that this person couldn’t have been at the crime scene at the time of the murder”.

That along with the previous paragraph might make you think that T&T is way too easy… But there is one challenge left. The most basic challenge of all, in fact, and it’s that you cannot progress through the story unless you solve the puzzle. Thankfully, the mysteries themselves are intriguing enough to compel me to continue playing. Being able to progress through the stories is rewarding enough for me to want to solve the puzzles.

I’m really looking forward to the next game. Now that all these Game Boy Advance ports are through, I’m eager to see how they implement the functionality of the DS. If it’s anything like the bonus fifth case in the first Phoenix Wright game, then I know this could be awesome…

This entry was posted on Monday, December 10th, 2007 at 5:54 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.