Despite knowing of the great popularity and reputation of the Ace Attorney series for quite some time, I’ll admit that I never got around to checking them out. So given the opportunity to finally take the plunge with this collection, I was eager to jump in and see what the hype was about. I do understand that these are more of a spin-off of the original Phoenix Wright series, carefully given a visual facelift in the move from the DS to modern systems (though the original pixel art look can be switched to), but I assume the overall experience should at least be comparable.

While the collection spans 2 distinct titles, overall that really just separates different sets of cases from one another, so you’re dialed in for the same core experience across the entire collection overall. What I did appreciate about the games, even though I absolutely felt like I was walking into the middle of things with characters who’ve obviously been around in some cases, is the mix of story elements to help provide flavor to what would otherwise just be a mystery-solving game. The characters are all quite dramatic, though some could say perhaps a bit too much so, and they can also be quite amusing at times, with the collective dialogue and story often playing out like episodes in a crime drama series.

When it comes to the actual mystery solving, I’d say the series feels like it definitely has a distinctive flavor, but I’m not sure it always works depending on the case you’re working through. It did take me a little while to latch onto the pretty unique methods the game uses, which did feel like they would have been well-suited to the game’s courtroom origins, but thankfully the opening tutorial cases in both titles did a reasonable job of getting me up to speed. Where I ran into some trouble, though this is at least consistent with other games with this style of play out there, was with getting on the same page with the game on how to share my specific thoughts on how to break down the case and my conclusions. Even when I had worked everything out, there were times where it was a struggle to pick the right thought or piece of evidence the game required to move things along. Sometimes it felt like I was simply ahead of the intended curve, so I needed to first go through some more motions to get to the point I could share, and other times it felt like the item I was trying to tie my conclusions to were just as valid as the ones the game expected. Not a crippling problem, but it could at times be an aggravating one.

Since this is my first foray into the Ace Attorney series, I unfortunately am unable to share my thoughts on how these two particular games fare in the overall series. Instead, I’m left to pit them against the likes of some similar indie titles I’ve played that have tended to be tied to classic sleuths from literature like Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. Up against that competition, I’d say which you’d prefer would be more of a matter of taste overall, with this series obviously more focused on its sometimes wild characters, scenarios, and dialogue. It’s the drama here that holds the most appeal, with the case solving being more of a compliment to the story. In the others the focus tends to be more on the casework, though in implementation I wouldn’t always say that has always meant they worked out better either. If you’re already a fan of the series this feels like it should be a good enough time, even if not being as fiery as the originals, and if you’re simply a fan of solving mysteries this series absolutely has its own often entertaining take on how that can be done.