"I'm so sick of Khura'in!"
Gender: Male
Location: The localized equivalent of Denmark
Rank: Ace Attorney
Joined: Tue Jul 02, 2013 4:04 pm
Posts: 1637
So, bear with me as I haven't played SoJ yet but I do know enough to know that I think Capcom needs to be better at selecting the assistant characters in the future IMO.
With the AAI games everything is happening at a faster pace between investigating and cross-examining and thanks to the third person view, the way it switches between assistants per scene is fun and really suits those games's style but in the main series I'm finding that with DD and now SoJ there's starting to arise an issues of "Assistant-bloat".
So, with AA5 they were actually semi-consistent with almost always letting us run around with Athena; it literally feels like she's following you like a stalker at times thanks to the way they made the "move" system in that game but the problem with Athena is that she shoved Trucy to the side in what some thought was going to be a sort of AJAA sequel for a moment.
Had they managed Trucy better outside of the assistant role she didn't get aside from two occasions in that game then I probably wouldn't have addressed this particular complaint but they didn't really know what to do with her so they let her get kidnapped when they finally were about to give her some space... and then they introduce Pearl
and it was okay but what the hell? Why are you constantly shoving Trucy to the side!? xD
With DD I particularly felt that the only "Assistant-related" problem was Trucy's role. But then came SoJ... and boy, for all the characters they could've prioritized new and old, they sure liked to mess around with the assistant roles again. First off, "MAYA'S BACK, YAAAAY!" and that's good and all, so I guess Phoenix gets his own assistant in Khura'in while Apollo gets... wait, who does Apollo get? NOPE, still not Trucy, he gets Athena once again, but Trucy gets arrested so we can give her one or two conversations in the detention center and a few defendant chair appearances (AKA, "We had to find another way to give her as little screentime as possible!"). So that's all
not well and dandy
but wait, there's more!
You're happy to see Maya right? NOPE! She ALSO gets arrested and hid away as much as possible, "but don't worry! We have a new character who is ALSO a teenage girl" and waddaya know, Nick gets her as an assitant when he investigates.
Sweet mother of Aristotle Means, can you cool it with the rapidly increasing amount of female teenage sidekick characters already, Capcom? This is once more why I feel like it would've been interesting if the new team had gone with what was most interesting about DD which was the new characters and only focused on those instead of trying to go both ways. They try to re-establish the Phoenix Wright part of the series with a lot of tacked on Apollo Justice returning characters and a whole lot of their own new and unique characters that alreaady seem to have gotten 2 or 3 mainstays.
I feel like they should just pick between one of these 3 parts of the series that currently exists in the main series canon and stick to it because it occurs to me they really struggle to filter the necessary characters from the unnecessary ones. All this talk of bringing back Maya seems half-hearted at this point when A they did it to directly address some feedback they got from AA5 and B they make a whole fuss about her reappearance and then waste this by making her only barely show up in two cases outside of the DLC where
I still think what irritates me the most is that this wouldn't have happened if they decided to either not reintroduce Maya but choose to focus on Rayfa or, instead, if they had simply chosen to let Maya be the assistant and Rayfa would be sort of like a prosecutor who you meet every now and then and then of course in every trial. Introducing Rayfa as Nick's primary assistant seems so backwards to me when you also have Maya and ALSO Athena who already shoved Trucy aside, not to mention Pearl who just showed up to say "hello" once in DD.
So that begs the question: If the next game is GS7, which way should they actually go? If they decided to write off some of the "one too many" characters they have introduced (again) then how do they justify it? Lastly, would you be fine if the next game is GS7 and it continues with the same cast as SoJ (Phoenix, Maya, Rival, Apollo, Athena, Trucy, Ema/Detective (+ cameos of previous main characters: Pearl, Blackquill, Edgeworth, Rayfa)? They expressed how they wanted to see Franziska in the next game, so add her to the list!
Remember when an AA title implied you had a main cast of around 5 per game? (Phoenix, Maya, Gumshoe and Rival (+ cameos of previous mainstays; Edgeworth and Franziska, badabim-badabum!) or Apollo, Trucy, Phoenix, Ema, Kristoph and Klavier)? NB: In the old games all the respective roles served well-earned moments. Characters like Trucy, Pearl or Edgeworth, to some extent even Maya in DD and SoJ struggle to find serious relevance. It's starting to get crazy, I tell ya!
PS. While I have already claimed SoJ overdoes it, especially with Rayfa as yet another new assistant, I have yet to play it to see how much we actually get to see of Maya or Trucy. I'm reserving judgment, so bear with me for making this a bit prematurely, but I'm hoping you'll just correct me if I'm off-base and then continue the discussing the topic as it is.
This is the Dark Age of the Ace Attorney