VN Talk: The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures

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: Adventures is making its English language debut fairly late compared to its mainline cousins, being a port of the original 3DS and only as part of the The Great Ace Attorney: Chronicles collection, but that's not so bad because the GAA games are a paired set and an incomplete experience without each other. It's nice not to have to wait a couple years for the next installment.

On the other hand, because you have to play the sequel to see the resolution to questions brought up throughout Adventures, it can be disappointing to play as a stand alone experience. While the Ace Attorney games are a series, this is the first installment that requires you to play a sequel to complete the story.

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 the unresolved plot threads! I wrote this prior to playing Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve so everything brought up here are issues that a player might have when they have only experienced the first game.

Great Ace Attorney: Adventures is series creator Shu Takumi's return to the driver's seat, having left after wrapping up Ace Attorney: Apollo Justice, the main series' fourth installment. In a way, this can be seen as his desire to do something new with the series, moving the spin-off to late Meiji Japan/Victorian England. (Astute players can reverse engineer the year to about 1900 based on comments and a historical character's age.) Ryunosuke Naruhodo, an ancestor of Phoenix Wright and a university student turned unexpected lawyer, finds himself traveling from Japan to England in order to study and having misadventures both along the way and after he arrives.

Though the series is known for its absurdity and outlandish characters, the cast in Adventures is fairly subdued by series standards. Ryunosuke never quite gets as physically put out as his descendant, Phoenix, and the new prosecutor Barok van Zieks is awfully stiff. When reaction shots are part of the entertainment, it's disappointing when van Zieks rarely does anything more than scowl at bad news. Ryunosuke fares a bit better, but he's more serious than Phoenix so when he comes grasping at straws he looks an expectable level of desperate, rather than someone so desperate he would cross-examine a parrot. He just doesn't get a chance to do any absurdity himself.

Susato is a stand-out as Ryunosuke's judicial assistant though. Of all the assistants over the years, she's my favorite, striking just the right mix of knowledge and enthusiasm, with accompanying character quirk. She's a big fan of Herlock Sholmes and it says something that she's absolutely ecstatic at the thought of renting a room in his attic.

And this brings us to our two remaining cast members; Herlock Sholmes and Iris Wilson, who are known as Sherlock Holmes and Iris Watson in Japan, but were changed in the English release. I'm not entirely sure why since most Holmes stories are out of copyright now and other games have certainly made use of Holmes without going the Maurice Leblanc route, but I guess Capcom wanted to err on the side of caution. Or they might have felt better about making this an ersatz Holmes because Sholmes is a pretty awful detective. He has a good sense of intuition, but can't interpret why those clues are significant so he often needs someone else (i.e. Ryunosuke) to correctly put things together.

Iris is not a complete replacement for Watson as he exists too, as her father, but for reasons left unexplained in this game he left England and lived in Japan most of her life, leaving Sholmes to raise her. She writes the Adventures of Herlock Sholmes mysteries under her father's name, basing some of them off her dad's adventures with Sherlock or off her own. She says she finds this a good way to connect with the dad she never knew, which makes me hate this universe's Watson for being a deadbeat dad.

I'm hoping we get the reason for that in the second game, because GAA was clearly trying to postpone the revelation that the two characters are related for as long as possible. In fact, one of the remaining mysteries in the fifth case is why Holmes does not want Iris to publish The Hound of the Baskervilles based off his adventure with her father.

Mostly, Iris is there to ground Sholmes. Despite being only ten years old, she's obviously the adult between the two and much better at reasoning and deduction than he is, though she's put to little investigative use in this game.

Shu Takumi clearly has a love of Holmes as the game is peppered with references (the second case is an obvious homage to The Adventure of the Speckled Band) and the individual cases are titled "Adventure of the..." like the Holmes stories instead of the usual "Turnabout" that appears in Ace Attorney games. Chapters are prefaced with narrative scenes that look like they've been pulled out of classic Doyle stories.

To a lesser degree this extends to Victorian London itself with pawnbrokers, cabbies, and nice details like the need for a former army officer to have a maid in order to appear a proper member of the middle class. Takumi even manages to work in historical Japanese novelist Soseki Natsume as a character during the time period he stayed in London. (And it's largely thanks to him that it's possible to pinpoint the year the game takes place.)

But for all the detail, the story itself doesn't feel like it stands on its own.

Ryunosuke becomes a lawyer after the accidental death of his friend Kazuma, who was to complete a study tour of law in Britain. Not wanting to let his friend's death go to waste, Ryunosuke offers to take his friend's place and do all the things he meant to do in his stead. Both the deceased Kazuma and the Chief Justice of Britain have implied Kazuma was going for more than just a study tour, but this is one of those plot threads that's brought up early and then not addressed the rest of the game.

Part of the issue is that the story takes so long to get going. It's not that the early cases aren't entertaining, because on their own they are, but Adventures is really about Ryunosuke's journey to become a lawyer who believes in his clients, which is hard when he doesn't get his first client until the third out of five cases!

When the end of the third case leaves him devastated and questioning whether he just got a guilty man off the hook, the game is already past the halfway point, which doesn't leave much time for the narrative to turn him around. As a result, his transformation and fight to defend Gina in the fifth case feels a little forced. He talks about having learned to believe in his clients, but it doesn't really feel like he's earned the right to say it. Though a pickpocket, Gina is a sympathetic face he's already spent some time with and the rest of the main cast is in her court, so it's not a stretch for him to believe in her as well.

The fourth case is a little better in that he's asked to defend a stranger, but it's not a murder charge, and the client is a fellow Japanese man who is likewise studying abroad, giving Ryunosuke a reason to be sympathetic even if he's uncomfortable.

Considering the game doesn't manage to conclude any storylines other than Ryunosuke learning to believe in his clients, the pacing is way off. The first two cases are all setup, giving us characters and plot points to save for later. And while there is a plot beyond that with Ryunosuke's personal story, the main plot is only partially completed; a chapter ending rather than a story ending.

The third and fifth cases are connected, so even if other plot threads are left unaddressed, Ryunosuke gets to revisit his first trial as a defense lawyer and put into context everything that really went down the night of the murder. And of course being an Ace Attorney game this ends up being the smuggling of British intelligence communications, the full ramifications of which we'll no doubt see in the second game. Though the culprit is apprehended, the nature of the materials is only briefly unveiled in the epilogue and likely has something to do with Kazuma's secondary task and probably something to do with van Zieks's past, which is also something alluded to after the fifth trial as a sort of "By the way, here's why I've been such a jerk to you this whole time."

Considering the importance of the rival prosecutor role it's surprising more wasn't done with van Zieks. All he really gets to do is be an obstacle, and he's not a very entertaining one. We know he's a bit of a legend in the British court system and that he recently came back after a five year hiatus, but we don't know why he came back. Besides that, the only real bit of character information (I can't call it development the way it's just dropped at the end of the last trial like that) is that he was betrayed by a Japanese man five years ago which is why he's constantly slinging racist comments at Ryunosuke.

I get that Britain likely had a lot of racists back in 1900, and there are a lot of random no name characters who comment about Easterners and their "strange" ways, but van Zieks's constant stream of calling Ryunosuke "Nipponese" or "my learned friend" made me want to strangle him by the end of the game. Ryunosuke and Susato are such Anglophiles that I'm amazed their enthusiasm for all things British isn't dampened in the face of the massive amount of racists they run into.

With a little more room to breathe I think Adventures could have turned out a lot better than it did. We see glimmers of that in how the third and fifth cases connect and the final villain of the game is one of the series more three dimensional baddies. Though the second case was fun, it made the game take too long to get Ryunosuke started on his path and prevented a nice narrative arc from forming both for him and for the espionage storyline.

Which brings me to the last thing I want to talk about, which is how the game handles its final villain and client, which was the high point of the game for me.

Gina, as mentioned, is a pickpocket and the final client of the game; blamed for a murder she did not commit. She's an orphan and looks after similarly unfortunate children using the "proceeds" of her work. Unsurprisingly, she has a tough time trusting people, but claims to be okay with it, because if you don't believe in anyone, no one can let you down.

Of course, the main cast wears her down and can't help but be nice to her, offering her a chance to share a meal with them and such before the murder happens, so the player's sympathies are with her well before she's accused. After the trial is over, her newly placed faith in humanity is rewarded and she thinks about doing better for herself and perhaps going clean.

The actual murderer, and criminal agent, is Ashley Graydon, who only comes into the picture in the final case. He's introduced as a posh man of means, with a spotless white suit and a walking stick with his initials engraved on it. He appears to be everything that Gina is not.

But as the trial unravels, it turns out that Ashley and Gina aren't that much different, and in a way started on similar paths. Ashley may have had parents, but it was a loveless home and he grew up poor. Like her, he also committed crimes as a kid. But he wanted to do better, he was hungry for a better life. And he got it.

Through hard work he became a communications officer for Britain and began a respectable career in what I'm guessing is upper middle class. If he wasn't so hungry that he was tempted by even more money, he probably would have led a nice life for himself without much incident.

The reason Ashley sticks with me is that even though he was tempted by money, the murders he commits over the course of the game are not motivated by it. As an adult he rekindles his relationship with his estranged father, and when his father is killed by McGilded, Ashley arranges for McGilded to be murdered. Since Ryunosuke had gotten the incredibly wealthy McGilded declared Not Guilty with the unwanted assistance of forged evidence, Ashley likely did not expect a legitimate conviction would ever happen.

The second murder, the one Gina is blamed for, he says was an accident. He didn't mean to kill anyone that night, and after hearing his personal story I believed him. Because of the similarities between the two characters, I think we're supposed to feel for Ashley in the same way, and that's why he gets to join the rest of the extended cast in the "what are they doing now" credits sequence.

Though it was not a completely satisfying conclusion, the end of Ashley's story and Ryunosuke's character arc serve as just strong enough of an ending that Adventures can call it a decent stopping point even if several of the player's questions still aren't answered.