🎮 Played Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.
This a 20 year old visual novel videogame, reissued on a wide variety of platforms. You play Phoenix Wright, a hopefully-up-and-coming defence lawyer.
The game consists of you participating in several court cases, with the goal being to have your clients declared not guilty. During the game you’ll regularly alternate between a couple of phases. The first is “investigation”, wherein you travel to various locations looking for clues, and interviewing whosoever is around to interview. It’s here where the story of each crime, or potential crime, is to be elucidated. You also collect up physical evidence for later use in court.
Then we have the court case phase. In that setting, you argue your case in front of a judge. This is mostly done by cross-examining witnesses, which involves picking from a set of phrases to say and backing up your claims by selecting appropriate pieces evidence. The main task here is to find contradictions. Is the witness saying something that doesn’t make sense, that’s inconsistent with what they previously said? That’d be suspicious, right?
The witnesses are of course usually lying, often in quite dramatic ways. But, as a simulated lawyer, you making foolish choices here could lead your client to prison, or simply make the judge angry enough to throw you out of the court room. Mostly it’s easy and kind-of-logical enough to figure out the right approach; only very occasionally did I feel like I was clicking random buttons and hoping for the best.
The cases are generally a bit on the wacky side. There are incredible twists and turns, wild new evidence pops up all the times, worthy of the most cliff-hangery of TV crime series. It’s also pretty light-hearted. Sure, we’re talking about some of the most serious offences going - including murder - but it’s usually comedy cartoon style murder being committed, not very graphic or disturbing in how it’s presented.
If you don’t like games with a lot of reading then this isn’t for you. But if you enjoy a detective story and want the chance to defend some clients in a visual novelly style, then this is a classic of the genre that should probably be given a whirl. And it works fine on a phone, if that’s useful to know.
It’s also where the ‘Objection!’ meme came from.
