Ace Attorney Investigation Collection is one of Capcom’s most handsome Ace Attorney remakes to date, and it makes welcome improvements to some of the long-standing weaknesses of the series, but its departure from the courtroom setting and structure is its biggest and most fatal flaw.
Ruthless villain, reluctant colleague, and eventual friend and confidant, Edgeworth has played many roles in Capcom’s Ace Attorney series over the years, and with the rediscovery of his Nintendo DS-era investigative spin-off, he can also add budding detective and even assistant defense attorney to the roster. In fact, it’s surprising that Wright and the rest of the defense professionals aren’t currently available, with Edgeworth’s various case files so tight that any potential court trial would be over before it even begins.
Of course, a notable feature of investigation games is that no As with any court trial, the action shifts to the prosecutor’s nominal evidence-gathering phase before those cases are presented to a judge. That’s not to say trials don’t exist in spirit, though, as the primary goal of each case is still to figure out who really did it and why by using evidence to unravel dubious testimonies and witness statements in heated verbal arguments. These “counterarguments” are essentially unofficial trials in name only, and in Investigation 2: The Prosecutor’s Strategy, they’re joined by a Sherlock Holmes-like (or should that be Hermes-like?) game of “mental chess” as you try to wring more information out of particularly stubborn suspects.
Watch on YouTube
Following that logic, the thread that informed the Ace Attorney series remains intact. But in unravelling these mysteries from its courtroom origins, the investigative series also reveals some more serious flaws that are increasingly hard to ignore. Not only do these games contain some of the series’ weakest cases to date – centered around slightly weak incidents of smuggling and corruption, respectively – but it turns out that having a proper judge overseeing your arguments really does do more to bolster the criminals’ credibility than letting them decide for themselves whether you’ve sufficiently proven their guilt. Boy, they’re a slippery bunch, jumping from one obvious lie to the next just to keep you jumping a little longer for their own pleasure.
Even the opposing legal forces you encounter here seem unusually silly, and there’s little joy in repeatedly debunking theories that you know are based entirely on conjecture and assumption. If these arguments were put before a real court, they’d be instantly dismissed, and for a game that repeatedly emphasizes the importance of logic and factual evidence, it doesn’t mind if the actors make things up on the spot just to kill time. In fact, when much of an investigation is spent determining whether the detective sat down for a snack more than he or she spent figuring out the double murder that just happened in the next room, sometimes the mysteries can feel like they’re frantically treading water in an attempt to keep you occupied.
The cases can be extremely irritating, but that’s not to say that all of them are bad. An early airline murder case, for example, takes you from a plush first-class lounge to the cargo hold (with some great passenger banter), while another theme park death and kidnapping case lets its designers flex their muscles with some sly and tricky logic puzzles that erase any lingering trauma from the lengthy circus case in Justice Now (and, to a lesser extent, the slightly more drawn-out magic show murder case in Spirit of Justice). One even recalls the brilliant climax of Dual Destinies, and Investigation 2’s core case admirably attempts to recreate the brilliant twist of Trials and Tribulations — even if its execution and plotting fall a bit short.
But that’s exactly the problem with Investigation. Its best moments often leave you feeling like you’ve seen better ones elsewhere, and while each case is allegedly broken down into distinct beginning, middle, and end sequences, the constant repetition of investigation-debate-investigation-debate means they, too, lack the dramatic climaxes previously provided by the mainline series’ courtroom battles. One thing that’s always a joy, though, is watching its cast of misfits squirm and struggle under the pressure. Their animated expressions are still incredibly entertaining even as they’re constantly spinning you in circles, and with so many argumentative segments to help tighten the screws, the moment they finally snap always feels hard-earned.
The actual process of investigating crime scenes is also more complete than in any other Ace Attorney game. Here, instead of navigating a static diorama from a first-person perspective, you run around as a mini-Q version of Edgeworth from a top-down perspective, allowing Capcom’s art team to really flex their killing abilities. Admittedly, it’s still a bit cumbersome to only be able to approach points of interest from one of eight compass directions (at least using the Steam Deck’s analog stick), but the whole exploration process feels a lot smoother when you have a full and complete understanding of what you’re dealing with. Additionally, when your assistant Kay arrives on the scene, she’s able to simulate the crime scene in VR, allowing you to really enjoy the fine details of the crime scene.
These larger, more complete environments also allow Edgeworth to indulge in something that Wright never quite managed to do—real, honest inferences based on observations of scenes and lingering questions that don’t easily fit into the category of traditional hard evidence. Instead, the investigation files these threads of thought into a separate menu screen, leaving it up to the player to piece them together at the right moment to move the story forward. Like its rebuttals, you can’t force these over, as you’re still punished for any incorrect guesses (though why the game lets you punish yourself this way is anyone’s guess—another downside of not having a judge on hand to accuse you of wasting your time).
But despite the slightly arbitrary nature of its presentation, it’s undeniable that its reasoning does a better job of deepening your understanding of the scenario than anything Ace Attorney has attempted before. Indeed, Wright’s pre-trial investigations always felt a bit perfunctory, to put it mildly, and you often walked into court with only a vague understanding of the relevant facts. Here, however, Edgeworth is able to fully tap into his legal acumen, making the proceedings move with a greater sense of confidence.
Sadly, the same can’t be said for the endless games of “mind chess” introduced in Investigation 2. In theory, they work like the mind locks in Ace Attorney, unlocking crucial information from silent suspects who refuse to speak. But in practice, they’re more than just a sequel gimmick for the sake of a sequel gimmick. They also fly in the face of everything Ace Attorney stands for, jettisoning its trademark precision and clever use of evidence in favor of what can only be described as “pure feeling.”
Heck, even calling it chess is a stretch, since each turn is simply a matter of choosing from one or two dialogue options, or “biding your time” to see if they’ll convince you to deliver the right “clue” to move the conversation forward. It’s incredibly vague, and not only does choosing the wrong option feel overly punishing, since it eats up a ton of your ever-ticking time bar, but you’re also forced to rerun the entire sequence from the beginning, causing the dialogue to become increasingly loopy and force you to hit the fast-forward button. It also robs you of the fun of deploying those important clues, thanks to Edgeworth’s constant inner monologue about when to use them.
Thankfully, these maddening mind exercises are used relatively sparingly in the second game, but as I finished the series’ lengthy finale, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of relief that it would all be over. The Investigative series games are certainly an interesting twist on the Ace Attorney formula, and it’s admirable that Capcom has put so much effort into modernizing them in its own way (and, in the case of the second game, localizing them). But even now, they’re quintessential Ace Attorney, and their flawed structure and frustrating scenarios have me putting them at the bottom of the pile. They certainly shouldn’t be the first Ace Attorney game you play, and for newcomers, the original trilogy (if only to make sense of the duo’s constant return and cameos from previous characters) or the historically-set Ace Attorney Chronicles would be better suited. But the release of these games does give me some hope that we might one day see the rise of Phoenix Wright again. Edgeworth may be a handy jack-of-all-trades in these investigations, but there’s one role he’ll probably never be able to fill – because when you’re dealing with the world’s most cunning con man, only the legal profession’s biggest serial liar is fit for the job.
Capcom provided a copy of Ace Attorney: Investigation Collection for review.
