So, this is a little unorthodox - we don't usually create topics for individual reviews. But I'm gonna bend the rules on this because I hope a review this in-depth will kick off some discussion, and I wanted to get it to more eyes outside of the usual impressions topic. (This is also something of a test run for a new C-R feature we've discussed: featuring user writing, analysis, and fanworks.)

Note that while this review is broadly spoiler-free, I do discuss the structure of the game's plot in areas, including some discussion of the ending. I've done my best to avoid any specific plot details or character references beyond what was shown before release, but if you're looking to go in 100% clean, this may not be the best review for you.

With that said, onwards and upwards!

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Ace Attorney is a bit of a relic in today’s market. That’s not meant as an insult; it’s just an observation. The series is 14 years old in Japan, and across nine titles it really hasn’t changed that much. Phoenix/Apollo/Athena/Edgeworth/Ryuunosuke learn of a crime; an innocent person is accused; evidence is gathered; witnesses are cross-examined; a killer is pinpointed while dramatic music plays. Players advance by pixel-hunting, having menu-based conversations, picking out items to answer questions, and doing a whole lot of reading. The budget of the game is modest, but the sales pleasant, and a new one arrives every 1-2 years. The last series that consistent in its gameplay and popularity was probably Capcom’s own Mega Man.

Make no mistake – Capcom sticks to the formula because it’s a winning one. The trick Ace Attorney has pulled off is to make itself the videogame equivalent of a long-running procedural. There are always new cases to solve and new settings to explore, so why mess with the core idea? Throw in a comfortably familiar cast of characters, and you’ve got a nine-season order on your hands.

But that doesn’t mean Ace Attorney shouldn’t evolve. The series has made attempts: Apollo Justice tried a time-skip and a fresh cast, but got tangled up in trying to address the past; Ace Attorney Investigations moved the action out of the courtroom but forgot to bring the emotional stakes with it. The best attempt until now was probably a game that was only half Ace Attorney to begin with; Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright may have suffered from poor pacing and an ending that cared much more about its cast than the players did, but it also shook things up: it took advantage of 3D space to add a cinematic dimension to the trial, shoved half a dozen witnesses onto the stand at once, and forced Phoenix (and the player) to deal with a world without the tricks you see on CSI.

Now, three years later, Dai Gyakuten Saiban seems to be Shuu Takumi’s attempt to bring some of the vs. magic to the main series. Set in Meiji Japan (and then Victorian London), boasting more impressive animations than ever, transplanting all the courtroom mechanics save the literal witchcraft, giving us a new cast, and even throwing Sherlock Holmes into the mix, it’s the most risk-taking entry in the series in a long, long time. And you know what? Those risks pay off.

It’s just a shame some of the other ones it takes don’t.

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Let’s start with the basics. Dai Gyakuten Saiban is still an Ace Attorney game; you play as Phoenix’s ancestor, out-of-his-depth college student Ryuunosuke Naruhodou, and defend your clients in court against whatever trumped-up charge is being leveled at them (which, in this series, means ‘murder’.) The overall gameplay is the same as ever - expect cross-examinations where you press the witness with L and present evidence with R, and investigations where you slowly move through a list of topics as you speak to an unhelpful detective. This isn’t a bad thing; for all the griping leveled against it over the years, Ace Attorney’s gameplay remains one of the most natural fits for a mystery game out there.



What’s new, then, is everything else. Ace Attorney’s heart has always been its characters, so Dai Gyakuten Saiban gives itself one heck of a challenge from the get-go by being set long before anyone we know is born. That means game has to make us care about an entirely new cast, ideally without relying too much on great-great grandparents, and without familiar locales or organizations to fall back on.

It’s a challenge the game rises to marvelously. Ryuunosuke is immediately sympathetic and likeable, and while there are echoes of Phoenix or Apollo in his dialogue, he’s got a distinctive enough voice that he’s unmistakably his own person. He’s partnered with Susato Mikotoba, who is the first main assistant in the series not to have any sort of special powers or gadgetry to help her along – instead, she relies on her own intuition, determination, and studies to pursue a case just as thoroughly as Ryuunosuke. Filling in the mentor role is Ryuunosuke’s friend Kazuma Asougi, whose banter with Ryuunosuke is both natural and inspiring – and Asougi himself is the rare defense attorney in the series who’s a bit arrogant without going entirely over the top.

But the vast majority of the game takes place in London, not Tokyo, so quite a bit of the cast hails from across the pond. First and foremost is the Great Detective himself, Sherlock Holmes, and he is a treat. Takumi’s take on Holmes leans heavy on the “eccentric” part of “eccentric genius”, and the end result is a Holmes whose mind simply runs on a different track than anyone else’s – without undermining his skills of observation. Ryuunosuke becomes a perfect straight-man to him, and the scenes where they work together – which I’ll touch on below – are some of the funniest in the game. The natural point of comparison is Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright; there, Layton seemed to be so in charge of things that you had to wonder why Phoenix was even needed. Here, Holmes and Ryuunosuke complement each other’s skill sets, making for a natural partnership. Takumi frequently described their pair-ups as being the key of the game, and he was right on the money with that.



Rounding out the cast are the other two British mainstays: Holmes’ roommate and assistant, 10-year-old writing prodigy Iris Watson, and legendary British prosecutor Barok van Zieks. Unfortunately, it’s with these two that the cracks begin to show, for reasons I’ll go into more detail on below; while Iris is still enjoyably peppy and Barok appropriately intimidating (with some terrific animations to boot), neither is given quite enough room to breathe.

Along with these six, the game brings the usual colorful cast of secondary characters: an exchange student with a giant swan nesting on her hat, a teenaged pick-pocket named Lestrade, a burly sailor whose name is a Romanization choice away from “Meatloaf Stroganoff”, and so on. While a few of them are sketched a bit too lightly, the vast majority are memorable and enjoyable. Takumi’s strength has always been his characters, and it’s a strong showing here as well.

But characters are only one half of the story, so to speak; the other is plot. And Dai Gyakuten Saiban’s plot is where it starts to go off the rails.

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As with past games, the story is presented through separate, semi-connected episodes, each dealing with a new crime. This compartmentalization makes it possible to judge each episode on its own merits – a pastime in the fandom if ever there was one – and so the good news is that two of the game’s episodes are up there with the series’ best. Another two are perfectly serviceable. But the game’s finale is compromised so severely that I’ve seen multiple people go into it with the game at the top of their Ace Attorney lists and leave with it near the bottom.

See, I’m beginning to suspect something about Shuu Takumi: that his Achilles’ heel is pacing. It’s a bit difficult to quantify, but looking over the low points of his games, it always seems to come back to that. The original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney infamously dragged its later cases out across three days before the later games learned to compress it to two. Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney suffered from a climax that, at one point, required the player to press every statement of a five-statement long extremely expository testimony to proceed. And eight years on I still have no idea what the hell the finale to Apollo Justice was supposed to be, or why it required holographic time-travel.

Pacing issues rear their head far too often in Dai Gyakuten Saiban, and the worst of them come at the start and the end. The game’s first case makes its culprit clear within the first twenty minutes, and then proceeds to stretch out for three hours; the game’s final one takes a torturously simple shooting and drags it across a solid six hours of court, plus investigation. Both of these would be more palatable if the game offered a solid overarching story to back them up, but it doesn’t. Instead, the game is content to present the player with open questions and then never answer them in favor of spending hours chasing down answers to a crime that shouldn’t tax Sherlock Holmes.



Put another way, Dai Gyakuten Saiban is really just the first part of a larger work, and its finale is little more than a filler case therein. Never has any other game in the series so doggedly punted its mysteries to a sequel; even much-maligned Apollo Justice just left a few possible questions, not whole unresolved plot threads. Assuming a sequel gets made, I’m sure Takumi will wrap up these mysteries in a satisfactory manner – but until then, this game is left hanging in the wind, without enough meat in its overarching plot to work well standalone. The game even chokes on the all-important final villain; without going into any details about their identity or actions, I’ll just say this character crosses the bland personality of Dual Destinies’ final villain with the ridiculous tenaciousness of Ace Attorney Investigations’ last boss.

These issues are particularly frustrating because so much of the rest of the game’s storytelling works well. While the game’s overall story bungles the plot, it does better character work than possibly any other game in the series. One of the major failings of past Ace Attorney games was the tendency for characters to act as though past cases never happened until it was convenient for maximum drama. Take Maya in the first game; she loses her sister in the game’s second episode (give or take some spirit mediums), but she’s perfectly chipper throughout the game’s third case, with nary a thought given to the upheaval her life’s been through in the past two months. Not until the end of the fourth case does the specter of Mia figuratively (and literally) cast a shadow over things. (Phoenix is also fairly ambivalent towards the death of his boss during these cases.)

This isn’t the case in Dai Gyakuten Saiban. The characters evolve throughout the game in a realistic, consistent way. Ryuunosuke gets the majority of the focus here (he is the protagonist, after all) as we see him slowly go from out-of-his-depth student to confident attorney. But in the process he often reflects on and refers to events that have come before, and it’s a breath of fresh air. Even when the cases aren’t connected by plot, they are by the effect they have on Ryuunosuke, and it gives the game a wonderful sense of coherency. The same goes for the other characters, particularly Susato, who is given a struggle that feels much more character-based than plot based. (Trucy, Kay, and Athena had development primarily focused around their connection to the overarching backstory; Susato’s development and arc are based on how she reacts to the crimes around her, and the game mercifully avoids trying to tie her entire backstory into the game’s mysteries.) Even some secondary characters recur and see their own growth.

Unfortunately, though, it’s not quite a home run on the character development front, either. I mentioned above that Iris and Barok don’t quite live up to the other four main characters; the main reason is simply that they don’t get the combination of agency and depth the others do. In Iris’ case, the game does its damndest to give her pathos and motivation for a 10-year-old child, but her role in the plot is ultimately superficial for the most part, serving as “secondary assistant” and not much more. Barok, meanwhile, seems promising with his confident attitude and control over court proceedings, but the game never makes anything of this; somehow, it manages to give him less interaction with the protagonists than Dual Destinies’ Simon Blackquill, who was literally on death row.

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After all the above complaints, though, it’s worth taking the time to point out the parts of the game that do shine. To do that, let’s talk about the two best episodes in the game: the second episode, The Adventure of the Unbreakable Speckled Band, and the third, The Adventure of the Runaway Room.

The Unbreakable Speckled Band is the best example of how Takumi challenges the Ace Attorney conventions in terms of structure. Set aboard a steamship as Ryuunosuke and Susato travel to London, it does the unthinkable: it sets the entire case in the investigation phase. Considering the game is part of the main series (known as “Turnabout Courtroom” in Japan), this seems like a contradiction. How can you catch a criminal without a court? Where’s the tension? Investigations are infamously slow – how can you keep up the excitement?

By turning it into a Sherlock Holmes story, of course. The episode is a very loose adaptation of one of Conan Doyle’s stories – and I do mean very loose – and that gives it a flavor unlike any other episode in the series. This is the episode where Ryuunosuke meets Holmes, and the game progresses at his pace; investigating the crime scene is, if anything, more important than questioning witnesses, and there’s never any need to get so dramatic as to demand on-the-spot testimony. Holmes dances through the case (mostly metaphorically, occasionally literally) while the player carries out their own investigation. Tricks and twists are uncovered, bit by bit, until finally there is, as there must always be in these kinds of stories, a great summation with all the suspects gathered and a slow showdown where the player’s only weapons are evidence, observation, and waiting for someone to slip up. It’s the only episode in the series where nobody yells “OBJECTION!”, and it’s all the better for it.

Of course, even with all that said, the investigation gameplay of Ace Attorney is still pretty limited. This is where the first of the game’s two new major features comes into play: Joint Reasoning. These segments – regrettably rare – see Ryuunosuke and Holmes teaming up to follow a rapid-fire train of observation and deduction to reach a new conclusion. It begins with Holmes addressing a suspect at large, making his accusations, and then explaining his reasoning – a theatrical, dynamic presentation with spotlights and spins that has more than a bit of Takumi’s Ghost Trick about it. The thing is, Holmes is universally wrong about his conclusions, so to help him along, Ryuunosuke needs to step in and correct him, represented by the explanation occasionally freezing to give the player the opportunity to swap out some of Holmes’ words and set him down a new path, be that by presenting evidence or spotting something the Great Detective missed.



It works far better than it has any right to. For starters, the segments are funny; Holmes’ initial deductions run straight past “wrong” and into “absurd”, and he delivers them with such confidence you almost can’t blame Ryuunosuke for pointing out the mistakes subtly enough to let Holmes recover with dignity. (Susato does the same not-so-subtly in one of the game’s most hilarious scenes.) And they’re not just funny, they’re fun. At the end of the day, Ace Attorney is limited in how it can let you make deductions; you’re always going to be pointing at something, choosing from a menu, or presenting evidence (which is really just a fancy menu.) So Joint Reasoning goes whole hog – sure, you might just be spinning the camera to point at a hidden clue in the trash can, but when that’s followed up by the screen shattering back into full color, Ryuunosuke spinning across it, snapping his fingers, and a dramatic spotlight appearing, who cares that you’re just pointing at garbage?

If The Unbreakable Speckled Band is Dai Gyakuten Saiban’s evolution of the investigation chapters, The Runaway Room shows how far it’s willing to go with court. As Ryuunosuke’s first English trial, the chapter does its best to put both Ryuunosuke and the player out of their depths by minimizing investigation and setting the stakes explicitly in the intro. Most Ace Attorney trials simply imply what will happen to the defendant if the protagonist fails; here, it’s made very clear to Ryuunosuke that the hangman’s noose is waiting for his client if found guilty. The game also shows the aforementioned dedication to character from the get-go here, as Ryuunosuke struggles with whether or not it’s responsible for him to take such a heavy case in a country he has no legal knowledge of.

When the trial does get underway, the player is given an uphill climb: with virtually no evidence prepared for them, and in fact nearly zero knowledge of the crime itself, it’s a case-one setup with a case-three difficulty curve. The mystery presented is one of the more hopeless in series history: the defendant was found alone in a moving carriage with the body of the victim. All the doors and windows were locked. A locked-room mystery is one thing, but a locked-room omnibus is another entirely. The game is stingy with its clues as the trial progresses, letting the player develop theories and then slamming the door shut in their face. It’s one of the best-designed trials in the series.

Livening things up is the other major new gameplay addition: the jury. The British trials of Dai Gyakuten Saiban add a six-person jury to the proceedings, with jurors allowed to adjust their votes at any time. If all six vote guilty, the defense has the opportunity to make a closing argument, represented as a pseudo-cross-examination of the jury where the ‘testimony’ is their rationale for voting guilty. The core of the mechanic is actually a slight evolution of a feature from Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: rather than present evidence to disprove a statement, the player selects two of the jurors’ statements and objects to them taken together. It’s surprisingly fun, and the game is smart enough to evolve the process as the game progresses, bringing in other facets of cross-examination to keep things fresh.

Where the jury really comes to life, however, is in the script, not in the gameplay. Each case has its own set of jurors, and though they stay nameless, each juror is a unique character often bursting with personality. The game is careful to strike a balance between giving them chances to speak out and leaving the proceedings to the actual lawyers – a needle it had to thread lest the trials become too chaotic. The trials are at their best when the jurors begin swapping their verdicts, as either Ryuunosuke or Barok turn up the heat to save their side. Later in the game, unfortunately, the jurors begin to settle down into a pattern of all simultaneously voting, which robs a bit of the dynamism, but in episode three the jury’s potential is on display in fine form.



There’s one other thing that makes episode three a triumph, and should convince any player that Takumi can still bring the thunder when he needs to: its conclusion. It goes without saying that I can’t go into any detail – this is a spoiler-free review, after all! – but the path the mystery takes and the ultimate result is right up there with the series’ best. In some ways, it’s a case written against the players rather than Ryuunosuke, as a few sacred cows are tipped and a trail of breadcrumbs is left to give players just enough rope to hang themselves with. It’s a strange Ace Attorney where the game’s second and third cases are its strongest, but Dai Gyakuten Saiban isn’t worried about sticking to series conventions.

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I’ve spoken at length about the story and gameplay at this point, which just leaves the small issue of basically anything that isn’t text or a concept. We’ll start with the graphics and animation. Simply put, they’re wonderful. The game’s 3D models may not be as eye-poppingly vivid as Dual Destinies’, but their slightly muted palette matches the setting and tone of the game far better than cranking the saturation to 11 would. The style again takes inspiration from Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright, but while the models in that game suffered from odd proportions, glassy eyes, and the like – the result of the team splitting the difference between the two series’ styles – here the characters are beautifully realized and incredibly lively.

The bulk of that is thanks to the animation, which is an order of magnitude above anything the series has seen before. On a micro level, details as small as which way a character’s eyes are pointed are now part and parcel of the characters’ movement, and it’s a treat: Ryuunosuke’s eyes nervously darting around the courtroom isn’t just great physical comedy, it shows his mental state just as effectively as an internal monologue. On the macro level, this is the first game in the series to make use of motion capture, and boy does it ever. Barok is possibly the best example here, as over the course of a trial he slowly transitions from graceful bows and slow nods to throwing wine glasses into the gallery and slamming his leg on the table. Sprite animations will always have a place in my heart, but Dai Gyakuten Saiban may very well be the final word on whether 3D models can surpass them.

Also helping manners is the improved camera direction for the game. One of the big failings of Dual Destinies’ visuals was how little it took advantage of the transition to 3D, particularly in court; the developers seemed determined to stay as close to the DS/GBA staging as possible, save the occasional breakdown shakeup. Dai Gyakuten Saiban maintains the familiar camera angles of the series for the most part, but it also feels free to have its characters walk around, or to have the camera swoop across the courtroom and realign itself. (In one memorable moment, it focuses on a piece of decisive evidence sitting on the prosecution’s bench, then spins a full 270 degrees to catch the reactions of the jurors, Ryuunosuke, and witnesses.) Coupled with the aforementioned Joint Reasoning segments, it feels like the team has finally figured out how to make use of a 3D space in a way that makes sense for the series.



The rest of the game’s visual presentation holds up as well. While the environments aren’t quite as gorgeous as Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright’s (where they were bolstered by Level-5’s world-class artists and, presumably, a higher budget), they fit the period well and are often a treat to look at. Animated scenes pepper the game as well, though they’re few and far between, and the animation has a slightly darker tone to it than past entries’. And the game’s interface has been given a period-appropriate facelift, in the process adopting a variation of Dual Destinies’ 5-per-page system for managing evidence and profiles.

On the audio front, we’re treated to a soundtrack by Yasumasa Kitagawa (Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright) and series newcomer Hiromitsu Maeba (Sengoku Basara). The soundtrack, appropriately enough, attempts to blend eastern and western styles, and for the most part it’s marvelous. The new cross-examination Allegro theme is perhaps the liveliest incarnation yet, and Joint Reasoning gets a fun set of pieces building on one another. If I do have one issue with the soundtrack, it’s simply that its inspiration from Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright gets to be a bit much at times; as the game is primarily set in London, Kitagawa and Maeba opt for the kind of European instrumentation that already dominated parts of that game. A little more Japanese-inspired work would have been appreciated. Still, it’s a strong entry in the series’ musical history. Other sound details are essentially fine – what little voice acting the game has is delivered well enough, and many of the series sound effects are given subtle do-overs to match the tone of the game.

Finally, I’d like to speak briefly about the game’s difficulty. Dai Gyakuten Saiban is far from the hardest entry in the series, but it’s a mercy that it never approaches the level of hand-holding that defined Dual Destinies. Investigations no longer have that game’s “to-do list”, but instead feature brief comments from your assistant in the move menu to indicate if a location has something worth investigating, which makes for a nice, in-character equivalent. The game also tones down the pixel-hunting of the original trilogy while still restoring the free-form investigation that Dual Destinies removed. And while you can ostensibly get a game over in investigation portions thanks to Joint Reasoning, the game simply boots you to the beginning of the scene, much like Psyche-Locks simply kicked you back to stage one.

In court, the mysteries are occasionally taxing but never overly challenging, with hints from Ryuunosuke’s partners kept to a reasonable level. The game does occasionally edge towards the “new piece of evidence out of nowhere that solves the problem” issue, but usually it at least asks the player to make the connection themselves (including one particularly electric moment in the final case.) Also nice: the game features a return to a focus on examining evidence, like Rise from the Ashes and Apollo Justice, and in fact expects the player to look over what they have without any particular prompting.

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Dai Gyakuten Saiban is a step forward for the series, but not a perfect one. Its willingness to challenge Ace Attorney traditions, its lively cast, its focus on character development, and its stellar presentation help it feel like a long-overdue evolution for the series, but its scattershot plot and pacing issues keep it from being all it should be. Don't get me wrong: Dai Gyakuten Saiban is an Ace Attorney game, and that means even when it's misfiring it's still a lot of fun. Still, while I’m looking forward to seeing all this setup pay off in Dai Gyakuten Saiban 2 – and one seems all but guaranteed, even if DGS didn’t quite hit the same sales highs as Dual Destinies – it’s hard to avoid the sense that the game would have been served by a little less focus on the future and a little more focus on the present. Ace Attorney needs most of the shakeups DGS offers – it just doesn’t need the ones that undermine the rest of the game.



The elephant in the room:

No, Dai Gyakuten Saiban has not been announced for a Western release, and apparently series translator Janet Hsu (who provided some support for the English bits of DGS’s Japanese version) isn’t optimistic about its chances. This is a shame in a couple of ways; besides the fact that losing an AA game just plain sucks, the way DGS sets up a sequel all but guarantees the West’ll be missing another as well. Add to that that this game is still a great shakeup even with its issues, and it’s more and more of a disappointment. Here’s hoping a fan campaign can get Capcom to change its mind, or that a fan translation will work out like AAI2.

Spare Observations:

• You might have noticed I didn’t really address the game’s fourth episode at all. That’s because it’s probably the least memorable in the game; despite its amusing premise (featuring a real-life historical figure as the defendant), it’s pretty much just a middle-of-the-road filler case. The main things that stick out to me are that it’s probably the series’ most lighthearted case, and that it drags out its jokes (and testimonies) too long. (The fact that one of said jokes is the old-fashioned ‘henpecked husband’ trope doesn’t help.) It does continue to show the character continuity of Ryuunosuke and Susato I spoke about, though.
  
  • Oh, all right: it also has the funniest breakdown in years going for it.
• Something I didn’t explicitly mention: multi-person testimonies are standard, like PLvsPW. They never get quite as crazy as they did in that game, but the “Questioning” mechanic is given more interesting uses this go around to make up for it.
• Also something I didn't explicitly mention (thanks for the heads-up, Bad Player!): the Meiji/Victorian setting means there's nowhere near the level of forensic technology available. This winds up working out great in two different ways: it actually becomes a topic within the game, as the potential for improved police work comes up several times and Holmes' homegrown forensics are challenged; and it lets the game dial back the murder cases to simpler situations now that there's no need for killers to jump through hoops to hide blood types, fingerprints, etc. The setting also gives the game a lot of flavor, as the plot and characters are all strongly informed by historical Japan-England relations. No Japanifornia here!
• There is DLC for the game! Unlike Dual Destinies, which had a case clearly chopped out halfway through development and put up for sale afterwards, Dai Gyakuten Saiban opts for a much more lightweight touch. The DLCs – comprised of ‘issues’ featuring short skits, concept art, development videos, beta music, and so on – feel like a modern-day take on old omake galleries you’d find in games. Whether or not that’s something you feel is fair to ask money for is up to you.
• The game almost avoids falling into the trap the DS games did of shoehorning in a hardware gimmick, but then you get to the last case and people start going on and on about stereoscopes for no good reason. At least this one sets up some pretty spectacular visual gags.
• Undertale is still my candidate for ‘funniest game of the year’, but DGS does slip in a brick joke that just might be the single best one-off gag in the series.
• Thanks for reading! It’s been a long time since I’ve done a game review, and certainly a long time since I’ve gone so in-depth on one. For fun, you can read the Justice for All “review” I wrote a decade ago here: http://www.gamefaqs.com/ds/933086-phoen ... ews/107068

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*giggles uncontrollably*
(Intended?)





I think you forgot to put "for now" in here :P There were definitely hints towards giving her a connection to the overarching plot. Also, while she didn't get as much screentime as some of the other characters, I thought it did a pretty good job of balancing the "child" and "genius" parts of her character.


(Pssst, other way around.)


You forgot to mention how now all poses transition into each other, rather than cutting from one to the other. Also how the models rotate to face each other when you have multiple people talking to each other. Small details, but I thought they really made things feel more alive.


What/where was it? I don't remember.



Anyway, great review! I agree with it for the most part, although I think I liked cases 1, 4, and 5 more than you did :P I also get that there's a part of me that just can't completely judge DGS without seeing DGS2 first. I mean, as a standalone game, the cases feel like they could be a bit meatier, and there's a lot of unresolved plot threads, and some undeveloped characters... but why fault that stuff if it's going to be fixed in the sequel?! And Takumi is Takumi, and even if Takumi wasn't Takumi, it was clear in DGS that the team knew what they were doing. Which is why I'm confident DGS2 won't make the same mistakes and whatnot~

...Oh yeah, one other bit about DGS: I think we agree that DGS makes quite a few shake-ups to the classic AA formula, and what makes the game so great is that those shake-ups are used and actually matter, rather than being thrown in for the sake of being thrown in. But one of those shake-ups that I don't think you really discussed was the changed time period, from the mystery side. Because a lot of the mysteries in the game do rely on the fact that they're in Victorian London, as it means that the police can't test whether the gun that killed the victim was fired from the gun found in the defendant's hands, or if the murder weapon has the defendant's fingerprints on it. And even when they don't make the mysteries hinge on a lack of forensics, they still incorporate the setting in other ways, such as by having the murder take place on an omnibus.
tl;dr: another relatively sublte thing that I think the DGS team did really really well

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I may not be able to speak for Bolt, but I get the feeling he's referring to


Nice review, Bolt. I was quite impressed by this game from the atmosphere and the fluid theatrics, not to mention some wonderful, lovable, unforgettable characters. I just hope DGS2 won't try to push too many of those holes onto DGS3 when it comes along, or we're going to face another PLvsAA-like ending. Still, I have high hopes for DGS2. Takumi has rarely, if ever, let us down when it comes to his stories.

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I'm also not 100% sure, but I have to assume he's referring to

Anyways, good review. I can't really disagree with any of your points, though I still enjoyed cases 1 and 5. The dangling plot threads, on the other hand, really drove me nuts. Especially how they up and decided to Like, seriously?

Still, I definitely enjoyed it more than Duel Destinies.

I admit Iris is getting ragged on a bit here just because she wasn't quite hitting the highs of Ryuunosuke/Susato/Holmes/Asougi! And while I appreciate the setup for her to have a larger role in the future games, I tried to judge DGS as it stands today for the most part.



Semantics.



Great points, especially about the transitions! The game has a fluidity of movement to it that's just unmatched in the rest of the series.



DoWolf got it -





I realize I went pretty hard on episodes 1, 4, and 5 - but again, that was just because the highs of the game were so spectacular! I did enjoy the cases while I was playing them (though the ends of 1 and 5 did lose steam even on my first go-round), but put next to episodes 2 and 3, which go right to the top of my list of favorite cases, they just don't match up.

As for judging the game as it stands today - I agree, we'll be able to do a much better analysis come DGS2(+3?) I do respect what Takumi is going for - and of course, in some ways these cliffhangers are a plus, because we want to see what happens next. But I think when you're going for that kind of a multi-work structure, you've got to be careful to give each individual entry enough to stand strong, and DGS didn't quite hit that level.



Heh, yeah, that spoiler felt a little awkward to me too, like they knew if they started discussing that they'd have to address the rest of that plot line and they weren't ready yet.

I also enjoyed it more than DD, though I might have had a better first go-around with DD just because it was a long-overdue return to the AJ timeline and I was really excited to see some old faces. But on reflection I think I'd take DGS over DD pretty happily. Hopefully AA6 can do its own shakeups for the series!

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Two more things, which I forgot--although they're a bit spoilery.



About Barok--

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Super lame! After all the excitement your review made me feel... :(

Sorry, I felt it just had to be said, though I think everybody knows by now that any game not featuring That Guy In The Blue Suit has a microscopic chance of seeing a release state-side or anywhere outside of Rising Sun Land.

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Speaking of shakeups, nice review! I have been jumping back and forth during the last couple of weeks for maybe some news tidbits on AA6, should it happen, or some other discussions and felt not much was happening, so I certianly didn't expect such an elaborate read to pop up.

Frankly, I may have skimmed a few parts because there are some descriptions of the cases I'd rather savor so I'm not too judgmental when I eventually play it myself.

Unfortunately when it comes to the thought of a fan-translation... yes, it's certainly possible in the future but don't count on the current project that's going on as its led by people who seem to despise the western localizations and wants it to be a literal translation. I'm sure that's still good... after all it's usually the actual humor by Takumi's writing itself and not the pop-cult references and stuff that makes me laugh in these games (take Godot's imagery and overall characterization for example xD) but thinking about playing this in english where people address each other with "Naruhodo-san!" and alike, not to mention obscure references or japanesey jokes that make no sense if you don't know japanese... I'm not really interested in that. I feel then, it'd be a translation made for weeaboos, no offense to anyone.

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Putting aside the current fan translation (I haven't been keeping up, so I don't feel comfortable passing judgment on it) one thing I forgot to mention in the review is that the game does use its historical setting to inform the characters and their motivations very directly. This really isn't a game where you could transplant it to "Japanifornia" and have it make sense - the game actually relies quite a lot on the history of Japanese-British relations (with occasional references to real historical events... albeit with the serial numbers filed off.)

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However you'd pull a localization off I'm definitely all for NOT using the japanifornia thing this time, but I think not localizing any name-puns or jokes or references is a shame although I do get even in localization that Literal translation -> localization in terms of order.

It always hurts to watch characters speak in english but then they go "As expected of [person they're talking face-to-face with]" and whatever other non-idiomatic english phrases you get when you make a literal translation from japanese.

In case anyone is like "what's even wrong with that example?" -- I believe everytime someone said that in the officially localized games the translators are keen enough to change it to "That's so like you [person they're talking face-to-face with]" emphasis on "you" because it's first-person, and addressing someone you're speaking directly to in third person using their name is a japanese gesture that you don't use in english.

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You do have to understand, localization and translation are not just two positions of a switch. All translation feature localization, as all translations feature culture-specific features. Even the simple act of 'translating' a first person pronoun to the English "I" is localization, because the source word will always contain meanings not available in the English, so it's just a localized counterpart they're using. It's the [i]degree[i] in which a translation is made accessible to the cultural / linguistic target public that is of importance here. Too many people think that there is something like 'literal' translation that is the opposite of localization, even they these things are very close to each other.

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My stance is just that when you translate something directly from any language without considering how to make it seem idiomatic for the target language you're translating to you're not doing it as well as you could. I know it's more nuanced than just Literal vs localization. I speak 2 and a half languages myself so I recognize the thing you say about having meanings to words not available in the other language, (in fact, I constantly insert english words into my danish for convenience and laziness) and that you sometimes need to work around that.

If I go see an anime or something that has fansubs though, I too often see someone who's translated it very directly, where there's often clearly ways you would say certain things in english but the translators seem to miss those, and that's why I'm afraid that fan-translation of DGS will just feel like an anime-sub where you can constantly feel how not-very-english the dialogue is.

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I just had a brilliant idea:

'Literal' translations for Ryuunosuke and Susato

Localized translations for everyone else (the Englishmen)

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I think Susato would be fluent enough with the language. It's Ryu who would have some trouble understanding sometimes, especially concerning English slang. Let him mess up English slang most of the time and let the others correct him. It's the perfect way to switch up the straight-funny-men duality.

That, and maybe have Holmes on the occasion say something unintentionally racist. I mean, it's pretty much a given with Barok, who does intend it.

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