VN Talk: The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve

In which I talk (write) about visual novels from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: Switch (also on PS4 and Windows)
Release: 2021

The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve is the second of the two games included in Capcom's The Great Ace Attorney: Chronicles collection, making its English language debut after originally appearing on the 3DS. I was originally thinking of saving this one for a rainy day since I don't know when we'll ever see another Ace Attorney game again, but the two-part nature of Adventures and Resolve left me wanting to know how the rest of the story plays out, so I played them back to back.

Since this game came out within the past year, this is your obligatory spoiler warning that I'll be covering most of the game including the ending and there will be spoilers for Adventures as well since it's impossible to talk about the second game without discussing the first!

The most pressing question I had when I started the game was: Does Resolve answer everything I was left wondering about in Adventures? And the answer is yes, it does. It doesn't always do it well, but it does. And for that, I'd like to give credit where credit is due, because I honestly thought they weren't going to get around to it with the plot thread pile-up they were having as even more story material is introduced in the second game!

Resolve picks up surprisingly not with Ryunosuke, but with Susato who was called back to Japan during the final case of Adventures. She's the playable protagonist of the first case and it's a true delight to have her in the defense lawyer seat, even though she isn't one. It gives the game a good reason to run through the tutorial again (for people who might have bought the second game in Japan without buying the first) and she ends up cross dressing since the time period would not have allowed for women to be lawyers.

Aside from that, the first case in Resolve revisits the first case in Adventures, following the culprit who has now been murdered before she could be extradited back to Britain. We also learn that she's involved in a government cover-up and that Susato's father is aware of it, which was a great way to start off the game.

But then we hit a stumbling block with a flashback case.

I understand why the creative team might not have wanted players to play this in its proper place in chronological order (assuming this was intentional, it might not have been). It's a second case with Soseki Natsume and takes place immediately after the last one, and two Natsume cases in a row would have felt like quite a bit of filler. But it felt really strange that this case supposedly exists between the fourth and fifth case of Adventures and there's not even a suggestion that anything unusual happened between them when playing the first game.

In-universe everyone was requested not to talk about it, as we learn in Resolve, but it feels more like a band-aid solution, and I don't feel like we really got a lot of out its inclusion except for the discovery of a large dog collar at the end, which is what prompted the secrecy in the first place.

This means that it's not until the third case out of five that we return to present day Ryunosuke, which feels like an echo of Adventures which took until the third case to put him in the driver's seat as a lawyer. The Great Ace Attorney games just really like to take their time to get going.

But once they do, they go.

Resolve really starts running in the third case, which gives rival prosecutor Baron van Zieks his long overdue character development, by making the murder suspect a hare-brained old friend of his from university. It's not just that van Zieks has a friend, but that he's friends with someone who you'd expect an uptight man like himself to have little patience with. Though it's kinda weird how he thinks the best thing he can do for his friend is prosecute him, it's very much an Ace Attorney thing for defense lawyers and prosecutors to battle each other in the courtroom to discover the truth, no matter whose favor it results in.

The third case also introduces van Zieks' mysterious apprentice, which I think could have been handled better, but is the necessary vehicle for Kazuma's return, since it turns out that he's not actually dead. While I was glad that he survived, I didn't like the amnesia angle (I suppose it was to prevent him from reuniting with Ryunosuke too soon), and I didn't understand why Chief Justice Stronghart would have assigned him to van Zieks since he obviously knew who Kazuma really was.

Kazuma's mission, the story of his father, and the van Zieks family history turns out to be major plot threads running through the second half of Resolve. In fact the fourth and fifth cases are really a single case broken up into two parts and continue directly off the revelation at the end of the third case that the Professor serial killer from ten years ago was Genshin Asogi, Kazuma's father.

Kazuma serves as the guest prosecutor for the final two cases and he was such a breath of fresh air after van Zieks' stiffness. Ostensibly he's in this role to avenge his father, who was declared guilty as a result of van Zieks' prosecution, but of course things turn out more complicated than that.

Van Zieks is placed in the role of defendant, reluctantly entrusting his fate to Ryunosuke, because he is currently accused for the murder of Tobias Gregson, our detective for several of the previous cases. And as an aside, I did like making the final murder victim someone we know. This would be hard to do in the main Ace Attorney games, which have been going on for so long now, but given that GAA was clearly designed as a two-parter, they could kill Gregson without many people mourning that he won't be back for another round.

All this puts a lot of character driven angles into play. Why was van Zieks at the murder scene? What was Gregson doing that could have gotten him killed? What really happened to Genshin Asogi ten years ago? Is Kazuma really just in Britain to discover the fate of his father?

Everything ends up being interconnected, because this is Ace Attorney, and in that respect the plot did not disappoint. The coded communications from Adventures turned out to be a transmission involving an assassin exchange (under the guise of being university exchange students) between Japan and Britain, with the British assassin killing John Wilson at the start of Adventures and Kazuma being the Japanese assassin assigned to kill Tobias Gregson (though he ends up not doing it).

The reason everything's connected is that it all snowballs into Mael Stronghart's personal agenda, being a corrupt gentleman of the law who doesn't mind manipulating others into getting himself promoted. He's an overbearing presence throughout the two games and even serves as a guest judge for the final case. The current situation with the assassin exchange, Gregson's death, and the removal of van Zieks is all part of Stronghart's desire to tie up loose ends.

As a chessmaster and villain Stronghart is pretty good, maybe even too good. It's not surprising when he turns out to be the villain, or that it's exceedingly difficult to tie anything to him, because he gives that air of arrogant competency, but his influence is so strong that he literally could say "I am the law, and what I say goes!" and be right about it. The final case is very nearly decided that way in the court of the judicial system's opinion.

The only reason it does not is because of a deus ex machina, and not anything that Ryunosuke does himself. Instead Sholmes pops in via never-before-seen hologram technology and explains that he and the queen have been listening to everything thanks to the walkie-talkie Ryunosuke has been carrying around, and the queen, being the queen, fires Stronghart.

While there was emotionally something gratifying in someone so arrogant forgetting that there was someone even more powerful than him, it didn't work for me intellectually. If I'm playing as Ryunosuke, then I want Ryunosuke to be the one to deal the final blow, or as close to it as possible. For instance, if Ryunosuke had been the one to get the queen involved, instead of it coming out of left field, I likely would have accepted it more.

The last thing I want to talk about is Iris, her dad, and Sholmes's partner, since that's all stuff that was leftover from the first game and finally answered in this one.

We learn in the fourth case that Sholmes's partner was actually Yujin Mikotoba, Susato's father, and not John Wilson. In a nice bit of artistic misdirection, Mikotoba is introduced in Adventures wearing traditional Japanese clothing, and it's not until he arrives in London late in Resolve that we see him in western clothing and the bowler hat makes him look just like (surprise!) popular depictions of John Watson.

Ten years ago, when Mikotoba was younger, he and Sholmes shared a flat together and got into misadventures, all of which he wrote down in his journals, later found by Iris. But because one generally doesn't sign their name in their own journal, Iris concluded the author was John Wilson due to finding a coroner report which was written by Mikotoba (while a visiting student) and signed off on by his supervisor, who had been John Wilson.

This explains why Sholmes mentions his partner went to Japan ten years ago. His partner was not going away and abandoning a daughter. He was going home.

So whose daughter is she?

The last case brings to light the true identity of the Professor serial killer, who turns out to be Klint van Zieks, the elder brother of Barok. Klint was manipulated into it by Stronghart, and before getting killed himself he asked that Genshin Asogi ensure his pregnant wife was looked after.

Iris is Klint's daughter, and Yujin Mikotoba delivered her (before Klint's wife conveniently passed away for more drama). Rather than bringing Iris to her closest living relative, Barok, Yujin took her home and raised her with his flatmate Sholmes until he was called back to Japan, leaving Sholmes as her sole guardian.

Presumably the reason Sholmes never told her that no, John Wilson is not her father, is the same reason he gives the rest of the cast for not telling her the story of her heritage. He doesn't want Iris to live with being the daughter of a serial killer, at least not until she's ready.

I can kinda understand that, but this all relies on Baron van Zieks being ignorant of the fact he was going to become an uncle, which bafflingly, he is, despite being described as close to his brother. It just doesn't make sense. And the reason Iris was not allowed to publish the Hound of the Baskervilles in the first game is because the journal entries she used covered the Professor killings, and Sholmes didn't want her delving into that, which is really weird since Sholmes and Mikotoba were not involved at all, except where Mikotoba came in to deliver Iris at Genshin's request.

After finishing the game, I browsed the in-game art gallery and it includes staff commentary. Surprisingly, even though it's from the perspective of the artist, there is an interesting plot detail that reveals the Hound of the Baskervilles connection was unplanned and the team actually didn't know where it would go after completing the first game. It was the artist who suggested making it Klint's dog, and so his wife was written in as coming from the Baskervilles family.

I had assumed that as a two-parter the games would have been plotted together, but this might explain why there is a second "missing" Natsume case and why a lot of the answers to remaining questions from the first game feel like someone was going down a list to check things off. For instance, a lot was made of van Zieks' retirement five years ago in Adventures, and he finally says why in a throwaway line in the epilogue! The answer is there, but it's not woven in as part of the story.

And that's a lot of what Resolve feels like. It's got a lot of good parts and the interconnectedness between cases that the series is known for, but it keeps dropping the ball on the less plot-relevant details, which is rather annoying for a crime-solving game.