Ruthless villain, reluctant colleague and eventual friend and confidante, Miles Edgeworth has played many roles in Capcom’s Ace Attorney series over the years, and with the fresh excavation of his Nintendo DS-era Investigations spin-offs, he can also add budding detective and even associate defence lawyer to the list as well. Indeed, it’s a wonder that Phoenix Wright and the rest of the defence profession isn’t surplus to requirements at this point, so watertight are Edgeworth’s various case files here that any potential court trial would be over before it began.
Of course, one of the defining traits of the Investigations games is that there aren’t any court trials, with the action instead shifting solely onto the prosecution’s titular evidence-gathering phase before these cases get brought before a judge. That’s not to say the trials aren’t there in spirit, though, as the main thrust of each case is still all about rooting out the real whodunnits and whys by using that evidence to unpick suspicious testimonies and witness statements in lively bouts of verbal combat. These ‘rebuttal arguments’ are essentially unofficial trials in all but name, and in Investigations 2: Prosecutor’s Gambit, they’re also joined by Sherlockian (or should that be Herlockian?) games of ‘mind chess’ as you try and coax even more information out of particularly stubborn suspects.
By this logic, the fingerprints of the mainline Ace Attorney games are still very much intact here. But in untethering these mysteries from their courtroom origins, the Investigations Collection also exposes itself to some far more critical flaws that become increasingly hard to overlook. Not only do these games contain some of the series’ weakest cases to date – respectively revolving around slightly limp feeling smuggling and corruption capers – but it also turns out that having a proper judge overseeing your arguments does, in fact, lend them a touch more credibility than simply having the criminal themselves decide if you’ve proven them sufficiently guilty or not. And man alive, they’re a slippery bunch, this lot, jumping from one blatant lie to another just to make you dance to the tune of their own satisfaction a little longer.
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