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Phoenix Wright 1-2-3 + Apollo Justice; OBJECTION!
Topic Started: Mar 21 2008, 11:40 PM (444 Views)
Fullmetal
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Moblin
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Phoenix Wright is a series of games made out of awesome. Your reflexes will not be tested in this type of game. Your brain and logic will. I'll review the 3 Phoenix Wright at the same time and will do a separate review for Apollo Justice. The game is completely text-based. You gather evidence and informations from the crime scenes and witnesses and use these to get your client a Not Guilty verdict.

The Story
You are Phoenix Wright, a rookie defence attorney. You are about to start working on your first case. Your friend Larry has been accused of murdering his girlfriend, and it's up to you to clear his name. With some help from Mia Fey, your mentor and boss, you manage to find the real murderer. On that same evening, Mia is killed and her younger sister Maya, found at the scene of the crime, is accused of killing her. The police officer in charge of crime scenes, Detective Dick Gumshoe, is pretty incompetent, so he's going to arrest pretty much anyone involved in the case. After this case is solved, Maya will be your assistant. She's a spirit medium in training, which will prove useful for your cases more than once.

The Gameplay
Your job is to defend your clients by investigating crime scenes, finding contradictions through the witnesses' testimonies and destroying the prosecution's claims using all the evidence you've gathered. The games are divided by chapters, and each chapter represents a particular case, which in the end further develops the story.

The gameplay is divided in two, investigations and trials.

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This is your typical investigation scene. The top screen is used to display the people you can talk to and the scene, which you can examine for clues. The bottom screen is used for actions such as moving somewhere else, talking to people and presenting various objects to them and using the Examine command. During investigations, you'll sometimes have to use material to detect fingerprints or find traces of blood using Luminol testing fluid.

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During trials, you'll be using the evidence the prosecution and yourself have found to pin the crime on someone else (sometimes you'll accuse random people because you're grasping and need more time to investigate). During trials, you have a life bar of some sort, which shows how many times you can screw up and show the wrong evidence before the judge decides that your case sucks and that your client is guilty.

The Audio

The audio is what this game lacks. The only voices you'll hear are Phoenix and the prosecutors shouting "Objection!" or "Hold it!" , but I'm not complaining about it, because completely voicing the game would slow it down a great deal. And besides, it's a DS game we're talking about, so I don't think the voice quality would be that great. The audio is definitely the worst part of this game, not because it sucks that much (it's not that good either, just average), but because it's extremely repetitive. The whole time you're searching through your evidence to find a particular detail that contradicts a testimony or proves your point, the same music is looping over, and over, and over. This by no means make the game bad, it just becomes annoying after a while.

The Graphics

The graphics are perfect here. They do their job and while there are no 3D cinematics or anything huge and revolutionary, you shouldn't expect that on a DS game anyway. Go sprites. I prefer a game with good sprites than a game with bad polygons.

The 3 Phoenix Wright games get from me a

[size=7]9.5/10[/size]

And while these games may not have a lot of replayability, they'll keep you busy and entertained for a pretty good time. If you have a DS and can enjoy working out puzzles, then at least try the first Phoenix Wright game. You won't regret it. It's definitely worth those 20 bucks.

Now then, for Apollo Justice.

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I'm not going to do a full review, as a lot of it is similar to the first 3 games.

The events in Apollo Justice happen 7 years after the ones in the third Phoenix Wright game. You play as Apollo Justice this time around, and incidentally, your first client is Phoenix Wright himself. He's now a piano player in a Russian restaurant, although he's more known for being a legendary poker player. As the plot unfolds, you learn that Phoenix lost his attorney badge after being tricked into presenting forged evidence in a trial. In the last case of the game, you'll be putting together all the information you got in the previous ones and finally learn the whole truth about Phoenix, his lost trial and the one who rigged it.

Now then, the main difference in Apollo Justice is Apollo's total lack of personality. He always seems to be the last one to realise what happened, and the spotlight is more often that not stolen from him by Phoenix or Klavier Gavin, his rival prosecutor. These two seem to always know everything about the cases, even if Phoenix has nothing to do with them. Overall, you'll find much less personality in the characters from Apollo Justice than in the ones in Phoenix Wright.

Apollo Justice gets from me a

[size=7]8/10[/size]

It's by no means a bad game, but it's not as good as the first three. And while I was really interested in the cases in the first games, in this one, you just end up wanting to learn more about what happened to Phoenix Wright. This is probably due to Apollo's lack of personality. If you liked the first 3, try this one out.
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