I “finished” Ace Attorney Investigations 2 last night by reading spoilers for the last two cases online. It’s not my fault. I was reading and reading and reading and reading and still the game wasn’t ending. And then this really gross-looking character called Blaise Debeste showed up like, ewwww, you know? Not the kind of guy I want to see at 1 in the morning. So I read summaries on a wiki. Hmm, hmm, ah so… Ya don’t say. A balloon eh, that’s new. Hmhmhm, I see I see. Okay, that’s a wrap! And that’s how I finished this bloody game at long last. I should have done this 6 months ago.
Brief final thoughts: It SUCKED. There’s no court scene in these games so the investigation and interrogation should make up for that, but it all takes so long. You can’t investigate until the game lets you. As soon as you’ve checked a few things, the Investigation auto-completes, whether you’re ready for it to end or not. Even before that, you can’t take two steps into a scene without that dumb Debeste kid and his irritating handler showing up to ruin your parade. And that’s not getting into how dumb it is of all of you to be traipsing around a crime scene with the body right there, no gloves, no protective shoes, no nothing, just grabbing bloody artifacts and shoving them into your pockets.
Every case dragged on waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long. And you have to argue every little case with every minor witness just to get them to tell you the time of day. Whyyyyy??? And the cases are so convoluted, and this one killed that one and hid him in this thing for this long and everyone’s carrying bodies left and right like there’s a two-for-one sale, and then that character was supposed to have done this thing but actually did that thing over there and on and on and on and on. AAHHH get to the point already!
And the accusations never make a lick of sense. Jeff Masters is arrested for killing a contestant just because they were in the same building. But then anyone else could have been a suspect, but noooooo, he’s the first one they found so it’s gotta be him.
And the prosecutors are so hypocritical. There’s a case where they accuse Kay of killing the victim because she may or may not have entered a room with her. But another character who definitely entered the same room says “It wasn’t me” and that’s the end of the matter. Well what were you doing there? “Stuff.” “Oh, okay.” And the matter is dropped just like that. You can’t prove Kay was there but I can prove you were there, but somehow I’m on the losing end?! Just because that one character can overrule anything she wants to no matter how much sense it makes? RRGHGHGHGH.
But if I start questioning that, I might as well stop playing the whole series. A lot of it is done on purpose to highlight just how corrupt the system is, but what’s the point of going that far if you end up turning the player off as well? Whatevs, I’m done. Not even gonna think about this game any more. At least now we know why it wasn’t localized. As with Soma Bringer, sometimes companies are doing us a favor when they let a game stay in Japan. Think on it.
: ( I actually thought that this game is probably the most well-written game in the series,
part of it is thanks to the great fan translation we received. I think it’s even better than the 3ds titles even, some of them I found to be even more senselessly convoluted and sometimes, dare i say it, juvenile in terms of characters’ motives and even the case logic. God i absolutely loathed Dual Destinies and Athena’s dumb hearing psychology gameplay mechanic and her trauma regarding her genius scientist mom-seriously what. Not to mention the localization takes a big fall, I feel like. Conversations don’t flow as well in the 3ds translations but maybe that’s just me. ) Maybe visual novels genre and text-heavy games just aren’t for you? After browsing the blog for a bit I noticed that you get tired out by a lot of games with heavy text and exposition build-up. Anyways, I think it’s too harsh to say this game should have been not localized, as not just me but a majority of the AA fandom seems to have really enjoyed it. Some merits have to be given here.
On the point of “why is the judge always accusing this innocent defendant I’m defending and not the more suspicious ppl over there who’re lying through their teeth” I think that’s the flaw of every AA game and not just this one. Gotta make you work hard to take down the true evil, after all, since that’s like the crux of the gameplay.
The fan translation was excellent, no question there. They did the best with what they were given. It’s just too much of a good thing as far as the writing goes. Every single conversation takes pages upon pages upon pages and it takes forever for each case to make the least bit of progress.
While it’s true that I don’t like visual novels or text-heavy games, I’ve enjoyed most of the AA series to date. It’s the Investigations games that push the boundaries of my patience.
About the corruption of the justice system, I was just mentioning to another reader the other day how tedious it is after so many games and so many promises of reform that the system is just as broken as ever. At this point I think it’s laziness on the writers’ part. They don’t know how else to write an AA game so they keep treading the same tired ground game after game. It’s time to shake things up!