Wednesday 5 March, 2008

Gameplay 2
Since the first game is a straight trial episode, all of the evidence was introduced during the trial without an investigation period. Don't even begin to ask me about the way the justice system works in this game, where there is no discovery period for new evidence, nor is there a jury of peers. The trial is not even structured in the conventional method of segmenting the trial into portions allotted to the defense and the prosecution. It is best to leave that to creative license.

The music is not as catchy as I thought it would be, but you get what you get. I maintain that the first game's music was still the best of the series, but that may be a biased statement. This game's music is less dynamic than those of the previous titles, but luckily the game recycles some older tracks for nostalgic purposes.

The investigation portion of the second episode has been a bit frustrating so far. The type of progression I have been doing lately is that of item collection. I need to instinctively go back to Phoenix Wright for more clues on how to conduct the investigation, even though I know what I have to do. He just keeps giving me options that weren't previously available, even though I knew exactly where I needed to go to progress the story. The names of these new character have transcended wackiness, while some are just downright lazy. There is a specific character I have targeted for this criticism: a man named Mr. Eldoon. If I told you to flip his name backwards, would you know what his profession was? Odds are you said "noodle-maker", so you would obviously be correct. Something like that just makes you feel that the designers were trying to be witty, but failed miserably.

I was mildly disturbed by the inclusion of the fact that there was a thief in the game stealing women's panties, as well as the nonchalant attitude of the female victims' in their openness about the crime. Have you no shame, women? Feeble attempts to censor adult themes fall of deaf ears for simple reasons. They attempt to avoid the fact that Phoenix Wright is an alcoholic by stating that a bottle of wine is a bottle of grape juice, but do not seem to care about the fact that every case is a murder mystery, there is a guy stealing a 15 year old girl's panties, and that a disheveled man who looks like a crack addict is recognized as a doctor and has an unhealthy obsession with attractive young females. Quite an imbalance in adult themes I would say. They should have just let something as simple as alcohol slide if they planned to include all those other vices.

The series seems to have some tendency of using twin siblings or extended relatives as characters. This is another example of laziness when it comes to new character design. Instead of drawing a new character for Klavier Gavin, a new prosecutor, they just redressed his brother Kristoph Gavin in a leather jacket a made him into a rock star bike rider. It just feels a bit lazy to skimp on something so fundamentally obvious.

This is fine, though your design section is awkwardly placed between the summary and first gameplay, and so your second gameplay entry tend to skew to design in the second half. Good, but a little disorganized.

Amy Leek (grader)