"OBJECTION!"

 Finally I've managed to lay my hands on a little gem for the Nintendo DS™ that I always saw there in the corner of my eyes, waiting for me to grasp it, to raise it high above my head, praise it - worship it!! - only to plunge it deep into the depths of my handheld and *god-damn* play it!: Phoenix Wright - Ace Attorney. Although it was released in the end of March 2oo6 in the target lingo most attractive to me (in this case that would be german) it took me quite some time to actually play it myself. I've heard a lot about it through GameTrailers (blasphemy! There's no archive function for really old titles in GT!! I never knew that.) and other pop culture references. So at last the journey began .. and it was good ... [...]
(show me)(don't show me)

First off, this purely single-player game is a text adventure. And boy, text adventure it is, at its best. Although the "o-wiki-fficial" genre is called "adventure / visual novel" I prefer to call it a modern text adventure, like all those hentai dating sims. Just without the dating. And the hentai. But being a text adventure there are somewhat of a few let-downs that stick to the genre, and they are linearity and an easy difficulty.
Naturally creating a multi-pathed plot needs quite an amount of effort and time, so I understand the decision of a linear plot and I am totally fine with that. Sad but comprehendable. And naturally the difficulty is easy because when you're asked to make a decision you are supplied with a handful of "lives" which makes picking the wrong decision not very punishing. You just get to read the last five lines or so once more. Besides you can save anytime. But despite this, never lose all your lives or you have to start from your last save point. Read all you've read already again. It can be frustrating ... (-.-' )

As with the visuals, this is described rather quickly: it's all text accompanied by popular and effectful anime-illustrations being scantily put into animation (if you are no friend of the typical 'japanese art of still life' then you probably won't like Phoenix either). Not to forget the music which was, except for one increasingly annoying tune, quite suitable for most of the situations. Exciting when in danger, relaxing when investigating, moody when in empathical melancholy et cetera.

The gameplay is splitted into about an equal amount of investigation versus defending your client on trial which turns out to be an extraordinary load of fun. The investigation part feels like a good old click & point adventure while the other part, a mixture of cross-examination, finding of contradictions and presenting the investigated items and information, makes for an astoundingly exciting game concept.

Strangely Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney was the most exciting game I've played since Hotel Dusk: Room 215 - although I'm not focusing solely on DS games in this consideration. Despite having played games like Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Burnout Paradise, Assassin's Creed, skate., Kingdom Hearts 2, God Of War 2 in between I still can't say I was as much excited by them as I was by this game. They were all somewhere between "boring" and "entertaining", most of them rather boring - addictingly challenging in the case of Call Of Duty 4 but not exciting. Oh, I forgot The Legend Of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass - although, on second thought, in spite of being wonderfully fun to play, this Zelda game was not as exciting and thrilling as Hotel Dusk: Room 215. Or Phoenix.

I think what makes this game so exciting and thrilling - among many other things, like the story - is that sometimes you had to made decisions you didn't understand until a few lines later. Just like the protagonist (^^ ) That was also what made this game funny. Just like the characters, although some of those didn't really behave like they should when on trial, imho. Or maybe that's just me being fuddy-duddy again.

And talking about the story, it really was a decent compelling crime story. Something I haven't experienced for a long time - even better than Hotel Dusk, maybe - be it videogame, book or (hollywood) movie. It was like Conan times three. Come to think of it, thanks to the added episode with touch screen and microphone support - unlike the previous episodes due to the game being a GameBoy Advance™ port - you feel all the more like a detective. So why not make a Detective Conan-game like this one? I truly wish this would happen ...

Apart from all these bad things mentioned so far there was actually pretty few material recycling for a modern text adventure, fewer than I expected. I mean, there is material recycling, like only one illustration for each state of emotion per character - which is rather typical for a japanese media of entertainment actually - or returning characters from previous episodes. But in Phoenix they don't seem very odd. I've seen worse (Sam & Max: Season One for example). And I expect worse from the sequels of Phoenix, with which I mean that characters of the first game might occur in the sequels.

My final word: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney gets a 9.6 out of 1o from me. I think it would be cool if you would be punished harder for making wrong decisions forcing you to think harder about your reasoning in order to achieve a better deducation skill, but apart from that it was the best game I've played this year so far, I guess.
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