The Ace Attorney games provide some of the most captivating storytelling in gaming. Set in crime scenes and courtrooms, these titles revolve around defending clients while trying to solve cases in abbreviated and eccentric legal proceedings. 2019 and 2021 saw a selection of these portable games released for home consoles, and now to start 2024 we have the final mainline titles hitting PS5, Series X/S and Switch with Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy.
Those previous re-releases, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy and The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, suffered from their share of technical failings, so does the new game learn from those mistakes and make full use of the console hardware available? And what tweaks and additions can returning players expect?
To start, we’re comparing the new port on PS5 against the iPhone port of the original Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney game from 2007 – and differences are evident from the moment the game begins. The opening cutscene has been adapted from 4:3 to a wider 16:9, with the framing punched in to cut off the top and bottom of the image. The underlying sequence here seems to be based off scaling and panning sprites, with occasional bits of pre-rendered video mixed in. The new games do use reasonably high quality assets here, even if the cutscenes do look primitive by modern standards.
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