Review: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies is a sort of-adventure, sort of-puzzle game for the 3DS. It was developed by Capcom.

Going over a witnesses' testimony, looking for contradictions. 

The Wright Anything Agency is up and ready to take on new wrongfully accused clients, with senior member Phoenix Wright reclaiming his attorney badge, Apollo Justice being second banana, and newcomer Athena Cykes and her ability to read people’s secret emotions. They will have to defend their clients from Simon Blackquill, a convicted murderer who is still working as a prosecutor.

Dual Destinies is made up of five cases, which are made up of two recurring segments. The first segment is the investigation part of the case. Whichever lawyer is defending the client goes to the crime scene and collects evidence by talking to people and looking around the crime scene.

The second segment is at the trial, where the lawyer uses the evidence they found to spot contradictions in a witnesses’ testimony. If there is nothing in the testimony that the evidence contradicts, the player is supposed to “press” the witness on parts of their testimony, which will get them to say contradicting statements. Something like the witness says that were somewhere at a certain time, but you have a piece of evidence that clearly puts them somewhere else at the time. There are also parts during the trial when Athena uses her emotion reading abilities to find parts of the testimony where what the witness is saying does not line up with what they should be feeling, and this is treated as the same as having evidence.

The contradiction finding, and to a lesser extent the emotion finding, is the best part of the game and one of the few times when the player needs to be there. It is nice to feel clever while shooting down some smug lying jerk on the witness stand with your keen detective skills. But it is so easy, I think I only had trouble with one, maybe two testimonies in the entire game. And the game gives you so many clues about which part of the testimony to focus on and what evidence to use.

What the emotion finding part looks like.

A bigger problem with contradiction finding is how little of it there is in the overall game compared to parts where you are just reading. Ace Attorney games have always been text heavy, but before they were usually balanced out with a reasonable amount of interaction. Here though Capcom went overboard, and mostly regulated the player to watching the game.

There is little interaction in the investigation part of the cases too. Except for those few times when you can look around the crime scene the game just leads you from one witness to the next.

I am of two minds about the main story which Capcom put so much time into at the expense of actual gameplay; I cannot decide what is better, the filler cases or the “important” cases. On the one hand the filler ones are not really interesting. They are like the regular episodes of a crime drama show, you will be entertained for the time you are watching, but you will not remember what they were about by next week. The “important” cases meanwhile are more interesting, but that is because they involve the main character’s personal lives and rely a lot more on drama clichés, so I feel embarrassed that I remember those more.

Like I said, the story relies on a lot of clichés, trauma or drug-induced amnesia, cases being saved by evidence arriving at the last second, etc. There are two storytelling elements though that are particularly bothersome. One is the number of times when the crime scene is a very obvious frame up, and the lawyer works hard to point out that it is a frame up, and in the process uncovers more much damning evidence against their client that was planted by the real criminal, who was apparently counting on that happening, and the prosecutor is never surprised. The second is in the last case, the final important person reveal pulls the bad trick of making the murderer the very last person you would expect by offering absolutely no foreshadowing to maximize the surprise, which is unfair to do in a mystery.

Most of the plot revolves around Athena in some way, with the final case and overarching story focusing on her, and two of the five cases involving her friends. Athena is not a terrible character, she’s peppy but not extremely so, optimistic and friendly in a safe and unobtrusive way. But she is not interesting or remarkable, even with her eventually revealed backstory, and I would have preferred her screen time given to someone else in the already bloated cast. I was not that impressed with Blackquill either.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies is not that fun of a game. It was nice to see some of the old cast, but the story was boring except for the parts that were dumb, and gameplay was sacrificed to make room for more of that dumb, boring story.