Honestly,Nahyuta kinda irked me at times. Definitely my least favourite rival. He's only kinda good at the end of the game. Otherwise,he's barely present or just being unnecessarily jerky.

Datz I found to be unfunny,and this is as a Larry fan. I did like his part in the second day of investigation of case three,though.

Amara was also confusingly written overall. I kinda found her to be portrayed in too much of a good light,which is strange considering her role in case five.

Finally,Ellen Wyatt really salted my apples with her overly long animations. Her story relevance was alright,though.

I liked Amara when she was this creepy god-like uber-cold queen that had just come back from the dead and summoned lightning and wild animals. Her whole theme would have made such a great final boss. But then she turns out to be a total pushover and her role was completely secondary despite all the build-up for the reveal.

The more I think about it the more I wish she had been the villain and Ga'ran just a lackey. What a wasted opportunity.

Agree, for the most part. I liked Amara but I too was disappointed that she was such a push-over. When she appeared in the game I thought she was gonna turn out the main villain, and was disappointed that she wasn't, now I'm fine with that part (even if it would've been neat) but I still think her general epicness could have been used in a bigger and more interesting way. While on the final case, I liked Ga'ran during the game but then she just got bland and over-the-top, in an annoying way. She didn't leave much impression as a final villain/prosecutor, and I think she had the potential.

About Amara, I think it would've been really cool if she WAS still a pushover. Ga'ran forced her to murder Inga using Rayfa as leverage, but Ga'ran was still the murderer from 23 years ago

But nope, the big bad always has to be responsible for everything

I fully agree about the big bad having to responsible for everything. To me it feels like when all is said and done the good people have to be completely innocent little angels while the big bad is basically evil. Also, I don't know if I'm imagining things but to me it feels like this is something that has become worse in later games.

I agree with that. Look at the first gane: von Karma was the bad guy but he didn't kill Hammond.
In JfA deKiller did the deed but Matt was the villain.
In T&T Morgan was the one with the evil plan and Dahlia was the main villain of the game but Godot was the final boss.
In RftA (made later) things start getting a little more bland with Gant being the guilty party in both the present and past cases but still half the characters are guilty of something.
Something similar happens in AJ: Kristoph is both the murderer and the mastermind behind Phoenix's disbarment, but the event that kickstarted everything (Magnifi's death) had nothing to do with him.
The trend reachs its peak in AAI by having Alba being not only the leader of the smuggling ring behind the incidents of the whole gane but also the murderer of the two victims. Even Shih-na switches sides for no reason just so we can focus on only one villain.
GK2 actually subverts it by having many different characters with their own agendas behind each incident.
In DD we're back with one bad guy: the phantom is responsible for the courtroom bombing, the deaths of both Metis and Clay, the Hat-1 sabotage and the Dark Age of the Law for good measure.
Same with Ga'ran: she killed Inga, she killed Jove, she personally carried the assasination attemp and she passed the DCA.

I really would have liked it more if she had just been the active hand and Amara had been the mastermind.

And on the other side of the coin, we have Espella, the game's super-defendant, who couldn't even be responsible for acidentally starting the fire. Which would have made things at least a little bit more interesting.

What I liked about the AJ defendants was that they were not wholly innocent. Phoenix manipulated the crime scene, Wocky threatened to kill Maraktis, Machi took part in the smuggling, and Vera was a forger.

Least favourite character? I'd have to say either case 4's defendant or victim. I can't get invested in Bucky, nor can I understand Toneido's "tricks"

A good thing about this game is that it didn't have really obnoxious characters like other entries in the franchise. The witnesses were usually helpful or had good reasons to be unhelpful (namely, being the actual murderer or covering for someone), and those characters who were complete assholes were hilarious (namely, Pees'lubn and Paul Atishon) or, in the case of Roger Retinz, a magnificent bastard that you have to compliment because how brilliant his plan was. Ga'ran was kind of a bland and one-dimensional villain, but she at least felt like a real threat, so i didn't dislike her character but i wouldn't call her memorable. Even Bucky wasn't that bad as a defendant. He managed to be useful and discredit by himself the hypothesis of the prosecution, saving Athena's case. Not many defendants do that.

However, i must say that i didn't like Nahyuta. His unpleasent and holier-than-thou attitude got tiresome really fast. The twist in the final case about him being actually a good guy was diminished by the fact that he acted like a total jerkass most of the game. I mean, i understand that he had to act in that way in Khura'in because he was being blackmailed by Ga'ran, but he really didn't have good reasons to be a jerk in the trials outside his country. He had his funny moments, though, like when he gives that overly long explanation about Rakugo.

I mean, I could be being overly simplistic about this as April wasn't the killer. I guess the whole sexy woman, who manipulates men with her bewbs and who gets kinda ugly once you reveal their lies has been done before. I didn't really feel that bad for her at the end of the case and felt her motive was kind of weak...she just rubbed me up the wrong way.

It could've been worse, Ga'ran could've killed Dhurke

I think my problem with Ga'ran is that her motive is just kind of boring? Like queen dies so sister becomes queen is kind of eh. It would've been cool if Ga'ran tried to kill Amara but failed and Amara now uses this as leverage over Ga'ran. Ga'ran gets to enjoy the fruits of power but Amara's really the one who controls everything behind the scenes, maybe even killing Inga because he realized the truth

It's weird cause I ended up actually really liking Amara by the end so I'm not THAT upset. I just remember being so excited when it seemed like she'd be the killer but it ended up going back to Ga'ran

Everything about Ga'ran felt like a Disney villain, minus the ominous feeling they can give you. They're always just evil mostly for the sake of evil. Sure, they have a reason for it, but the reason is always wholly selfish. And the visual design leaves no doubt either. And on top of that, she's a queen, which in Disney terms is synonymous to evil unless you learned to let it go

Totally agree. I can completely see why people don't like him. He's rude and insulting, but it's possibly too simplistic for people to say it's all to do with Gu'ran stuff. Apollo never says anything about how laid-back and kind Nahyuta was when they were little. He merely seems to think it's odd that he'd get behind something he doesn't think Nahyuta would have believed in due to Dhurke's influence.

Well, that's how it seemed to me, anyway. I could be forgetting things, I guess?

Every Disney queen is evil unless they learned to let it go. In other words, every Disney queen but Elsa is evil.

For real though, the evil disney-queen feeling of Ga'rans design played a big part in how she bothered me. Evil disney queens work wonders in Disney movies but felt extremely out of place in an Ace attorney-game. On the other hand, Amara had some disney-ness going on with her animals too... But that was easier to swallow for me because it just seemed tongue-in-cheek and not actually having anything to do with anything.

Geiru's mine,honestly. She was rather mediocre on the whole,and the balloon jokes were NOT funny. They tried to make her sympathethic at the end,but I felt zero emotion for her.

Geiru didn't leave much of an impression on me either, she mostly felt like the standard wacky AA-witness. I did feel sorry for her in the end, however. Meanwhile, Persnickety was extremely boring until he went into his surgeon persona, which makes sense since he was putting on an act but doesn't change the fact that he was not enjoyable for the most part. I also feel like he's motive of "you took away someone I love so now I'm gonna take away something someone you love as revenge" is really icky.

Athena was literally using Geiru's "balloons" as a way to persuade the judge. I don't mind dirty humor, but that was literally a 19-year-old selling a 34-year-old's breasts to an elder

I don't like "radical" transformations, so I didn't like Peeslub'n. I don't mind characters showing their true colors (see Matt Engarde), but somehow, in a lot of Yamazaki games, they go through some sort of actual transformation and pull stuff out of hammer space, like huge freaking speakers

He was trying to murder a completely innocent girl just to punish a mostly innocent guy for something he caused by accident and is deeply traumatized and sorry about. That's really messed up. This is an Acro situation we have here.

Ga'ran. It's a little sad that they missed the mark for the big one. She's like the final boss of an old RPG: she only exists to give the player a challenge, and in that sense she delivers, but there's absolutely nothing more to her than that. Out of final bosses I think she only beats Alba (which was the same idea but executed much worse) and maybe Dahlia if you count her (since she easily overb*tches her.)