Phoenix Wright has been a game franchise that has been around for quite some time. That being said, I never played a single one of the games until the last few months. It wasn’t for lack of interest. It was mostly just the fact that, when I still used a Nintendo DS, I didn’t have much of a steady income to pay for extraneous games. Now that a trilogy of games has been packaged and made available on platforms I use, and I have someone to make goofy voices for the characters with me, the Phoenix Wright Trilogy has been a (mostly) fun way to close out the evenings.

The Short of It

What I’ve Played

• All of the ‘cases’ for the first game and 2 of the second game in the trilogy

• PC version on Steam

Pros

• Writing is clever, funny, and clearly full of innuendos towards the budding ‘romance’ between Phoenix and his rival Miles Edgeworth

• Classic sounds of ‘Objection!’ and ‘Hold It!’ are as satisfying as ever

• Animations of characters are entertaining and look pretty good at high resolutions, considering this was once a DS game

• When you get through a cross-examination section through pure logic, it feels great

Cons

• Controls on the computer are pretty poor and show that this was a port with minimal effort

• A real lack of understanding for how law/courts really work; this can be entertaining at times, but is frustrating as well

• Many instances of the point-click adventure issue where you have to bang your head against the wall and figure out what the game designers want you to choose, rather than pointing to something that also makes sense

The Rest of It

Story

You play as the young and upcoming defense attorney, Phoenix Wright. Phoenix often finds himself with cases that are seemingly impossible to defend in court. This is often due to the fact that the police investigators are grossly incompetent. It doesn’t help that the prosecution has much more power and authority than makes sense in a “free society.” The prosecution also seems to be a bit too “buddy-buddy” with the cops. Not to mention, the judge is a flippin’ moron. Basically, it’s an uphill battle every time, regardless of how guilty Phoenix’s client looks.

From case to case, Phoenix meets new and interesting characters while he does the police’s job investigates the crime scenes, and interviews witnesses. From here, certain relationships develop and grow in interesting ways. For example, Phoenix’s initial rival, Miles Edgeworth, starts out as a worthy opponent in the courtroom who is likely cheating the system to win. By the end of the first game, things had gotten much more complicated between the two of them. While they’re still rivals, it’s impossible to see that the writers were having fun and opening the doors for an endless amount of fan fiction involving the two of them.

The greatest strength of the Phoenix Wright games is the writing. My girlfriend and I have the most amount of fun by providing our own colorful interpretations of the characters’ voices, which often lead to hilarious moments. I can’t praise it endlessly, however. It is certainly frustrating to both her and me when something occurs in the courtroom that would never be allowed in a real court, or when something so blatantly stupid happens that we can’t help but shake our heads. As people who have watched countless Forensic Files episodes and documentaries about true crime, many of the moments in which obvious evidence is ignored drive us both up the wall. Nonetheless, the main reason we continue is the characters and their personalities that are very clear and prominent from the quality of writing alone.

Gameplay

The Phoenix Wright games are mostly made up of two primary sequences: The Courtroom and the Investigation. While in the courtroom, you must make your case to defend your client by finding contradictions in a witness’ testimony using evidence and dialogue choices. This is most often where the drama of the story and the revelations are, with some really absurd moments.

The other half, the investigation portion, is where your part as Phoenix usually starts. You go around to crime scenes or other locales and talk to the people, collect evidence, etc. The first game of the trilogy is pretty straightforward in how you can interact with people by simply asking questions and then presenting evidence to get them to comment on something for more information. By the end of it, new mechanics are introduced involving tools like luminol or taking a closer look at evidence to solve a clue via mini-games.

The second game ramps it up by adding new mechanics involving the profiles of relevant characters, as well as the “psychelock” technique. I won’t get into the details, but it’s basically the same thing as before, but now there is actual risk involved in presenting evidence to someone in order to get them to talk.

Okay. This is the part of the review where the rant comes in. While I truly enjoy the writing and the characters and am invested in seeing where every story goes, I cannot stand the gameplay of these games.

I’m sorry, to all those die-hard fans who hold this series in high regard, but it simply has not aged well. I’ve mentioned this phenomenon in the past when it comes to the retro games we play for pleasure in other reviews, especially in regards to the Hitman games. When it comes to older games, if you experienced them when they were new, you’re likely to be far more forgiving with their mechanics. This is likely due to the lack of market competition or just the nature of your life at that point in time. More to the point, if you happened to enjoy the game back then, even if it’s ported to a newer system, you’re still far more likely to look past the shortcomings of the game than someone who missed it when it first came out. I still play the original Deus Ex, a game I loved as a teenager. It’s a dated shooter from the year 2000 that I wouldn’t force a person who prefers Call of Duty, Bioshock, or even Halo to play, simply because of how dated its mechanics are by comparison. With that long prologue to my argument, I come to Phoenix Wright.

Phoenix Wright has the ideas for a fun time, but fails to execute, due to conflicting mechanics that are similar to older games. For example, a fair amount of the Phoenix Wright experience is in collecting evidence, such as objects, details, memorabilia, etc. You collect these objects for the purpose of using them in interactions with other characters to unlock dialogue or further pursue your defense in a legal case. This is similar to the point-and-click adventures of old by Lucas Arts and Sierra. While I played some Sierra adventure games back in the day, I didn’t like the whole thing about using objects that might get you killed in the process. The reason as to why you would die in those games may have been sound for certain instances, but all point-click adventure games run into the same problem, and Phoenix Wright is no different: You have to understand the logic of the developers to progress.

If you don’t understand what I mean, let me explain. Say you pick up a shovel in your point-click adventure. It’s a long shovel, but there’s nothing else special about it. What do you typically do with a shovel? You dig for something, right? So as a person playing the game, you would naturally look for any dirt mounds, or something out of place on the ground to dig up. Or, you might even consider it as a defensive weapon in a last-resort scenario. What if you come to a tree branch that has a key tied to it for no apparent reason? Is your first instinct to use the shovel to knock it down? What if you have something more obvious like a ladder in your inventory? If you chose the ladder by mistake and lost some of your health for not choosing the shovel like the developers wanted you to, how would you react? If you’re playing a game that punishes you for getting something wrong, it gets really frustrating, really fast. It’s especially frustrating when you cannot get the proverbial key off the tree until you try an object that is far less obvious to the current situation.

This sort of occurrence is not an unusual one in old point-click adventures and it certainly isn’t a rare one in Phoenix Wright. It’s a shame that there aren’t other ways of reaching the same conclusion when you have evidence that is clearly contradictory to the prosecution’s theory, but you have to wait until the right moment to use it. I wouldn’t know how you could begin to design a game like that, but I’m not here to offer solutions, just complain.

What also adds to the frustration is that I have to save-scum my way through these interactions because of the fact that you are punished if your logical path does not lead you to the destination that the developers intended. If you guess wrong too many times, it’s Game Over and you have to start from the last save point. This means I have to rapidly tap the ENTER key a million times to get through the dialogue I’ve already read. I rarely have a desire to play games with a walkthrough open, but this is definitely an exception. This might be so much of an exception, due to how many times I’ve had to choose a less obvious clue or response than I’d expect, I think I’ll probably just check every single time I get to a choice. It’s better than wasting my time trying to figure out what the developers wanted me to say or use.

Although not all of my anguish would be resolved by some simple updates, I’d at least be a little less furious about the experience if I didn’t have to worry about a Game Over or having to spam the ENTER key for minutes. The fact that you can’t simply brute-force your way through the interactions like other point-click adventure games is annoying, but the fact that there’s not a “fast skip” button to get through all the crap you’ve already heard is what makes it that much more intolerable.

Another annoyance is the navigation process. I understand that the developers needed a way to control your progress through physical areas so that you would encounter characters and evidence in a particular order during your investigation segments. However, I hate that If I know I need to get to one room in a particular building, and I’m currently at the detention center interviewing my client, I have to go to the building, and then navigate through any other areas there might be before I can reach my destination. Why not have a simple button to go to that destination and let the game stop me along the way if it needs to? This could have been a simple change that could have been added with the re-release of these games on the PC, but Capcom clearly did not feel that was necessary for this port.

Finally, the controls are trash. For a game that was on the DS that was meant to use your stylus like a mouse, the port’s use of the keyboard and mouse is simply pathetic. It just assigns keys that are not bindable, so your hands have to go all over the keyboard. The mouse, surprisingly is even less pleasant to use because the interactivity with your mouse is reliant on when the button is held down or released, not when you move it around. It doesn’t feel right, so I just stick to the keyboard, even though it sucks.

Presentation

For a game that was supposed to be played on two tiny screens, the Phoenix Wright games look pretty good in HD. Sure, the animations are not amazing, and the art is a little goofy-looking sometimes, but the game gets away with it due to its inherent charm.

The music and sound, likewise, are also still pretty good. It’s got the same sort of catchy Capcom tunes you’d expect of the original hardware. And listening to the sounds of Phoenix and Edgeworth slamming their hands on the table or shouting Objection! is pretty satisfying.

TL;DR (Conclusion)

While I am invested in the characters of the Phoenix Wright Trilogy, and intend to see it through to the end, I cannot stress enough how angry I get playing it. The illogical approach to law, while entertaining and charming in it’s own way becomes frustrating when the tedious and outdated game mechanics make the whole experience that much more irritating. I have fun doing voices and reading the text like it’s a visual novel, but I will not be playing it without a walkthrough open on the side.