Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Justice For All (2013)

The start of my time playing Justice For All was a little mixed. While I enjoyed seeing the return of the cast, and the introduction of new faces, the first half of this game wasn't really hitting all that much. Luckily, the second half of the game had much more interesting cases to the point that while I wouldn't say this game is as good as the first one, it ends up being quite close.

To improve the gameplay of the sequel, improvements have been made to the health and investigation systems. HP losses can now vary from 1 to 10, instead of just 2 points lost every time. This can vary the stakes of a mistake greatly. With the addition of Psyche-Locks, you now have mini court segments scattered throughout investigations, making them a bit more interesting, and beating them allows you to replenish your health. As much as I appreciate both of these additions, cases have become harder overall, causing you to do a lot more guessing (and realistically a lot more guide looking up). While I usually understand why that was the option once I get it right, this is not always the case and much more than the first game I felt like I was doing the right thing but the game deemed it wrong, or I was just completely lost. Investigations also haven't changed much gameplay wise outside of the Psyche-Locks, meaning more of constantly spamming the move button and find the small little thing I missed in order to progress through them.

Cases follow a pretty consistent structure now, with all cases having 2 investigations and 2 court cases, sometimes split into multiple parts. While I can appreciate the consistency, it felt quite strange for the first case to be so long, coming from the first game whose first case was quite snappy. I felt like the added time the cases got really paid off for the last 2 cases, but the first half... not so much.

The first game had quite a nice soundtrack that fit the game really well, and some of the tracks make a return here. The new tracks and sounds for some scenarios took some time to get used to but I did end up liking the soundtrack here overall as well, though it's maybe not quite as iconic as the first one.

Story wise, once again while I felt like the 2nd half of the game was stronger than the first. The whole conflict against Phoenix and a certain someone felt a little overblown due to the added Episode 5 of the first game (and it felt a little overblown even without that honestly), but I think it ended up having a nice conclusion. The characters are a treat! Pearls is so cute and the main prosecutor this game is so mean (to the point where it kinda hurt me at times) but she is entertaining. Gumshoe got a big spotlight in this game, and I am always a big fan of Gumshoe moment. The return of some characters felt a bit too much. Lotta got more screentime than she deserved and Oldbag is... Oldbag. It's whatever though, the cast of characters and overall story was a fun ride.

Finally, technical issues. I played the Steam release of the Trilogy via Linux on Proton (I was still on Windows when I played the first game). I would have this strange bug where my controller would randomly stop being accepted by the game after a random amount of time, even though the rest of my computer could use it fine. This would require me to restart the game or just play on with my keyboard until it magically accepted it again. I have no idea what was up with this, but it wasn't a deal breaker I guess, but I hope it gets fixed or I find a solution by the time I return because...

1 more game in this Trilogy to go, and I'm quite excited for it!

Cross-posted to Backloggd.