Thursday, May 15, 2014

Justice for All

Since upgrading my Nintendo DS to 3DS XL, I felt the need to clear the backlog of unfinished games on the old DS especially an ongoing series such as Capcom's Ace Attorney. So I spent the last month resuming my save game of Apollo Justice which I probably first started more than a year ago and finished the last two remaining cases over the weekend.

Now Apollo Justice was the first real installment of the Ace Attorney series made for the Nintendo DS as the previously 3 games were originally Gameboy Advance games that never made it out of Japan until they were ported to the Nintendo DS. If you never knew this, you wouldn't be able to tell after playing all four games as Apollo Justice doesn't look very different aesthetic wise from the earlier games. The interface remains the same, sprites of old characters like Phoenix Wright looks identical in the flashback sequence (he has aged in the present story you see) and there isn't much changes introduced apart from new characters.

Capcom bundled the first 3 games and ported them to the 3DS, so it's a port of  what was already a port. 

The real draw of the Ace Attorney game is the story and in that sense, the fourth game does the series justice in the final case where events from 7 years ago all come together to explain Phoenix Wright's involvement in this one. It's hard to remember why I took this long to finish Apollo Justice, I guess the fatigue of playing all four games in a relative short amount of time on the same system eventually wears you out. Like remember when Capcom ported all of the previous RE games to the Gamecube after doing a full blown remake of the first? Same thing with the Ace Attorney games and eventually you get underwhelmed with game's dated graphics running on more powerful hardware, no matter how good the games were back in the day.

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