Bay 12 Games Forum

It's kind of fitting though since everything revolves around him!!

I fingered the true culprit way before they were intended to be revealed and I feel kind of cheated on that front, a similar problem I had with VLR (though that wasn't actually the true culprit)...I can't remember deducing the real culprit so soon in the previous games like case 1-4, 1-5, 2-4, 3-5, you get the picture.  And in fact every case in AA5 pretty much shoved the real culprit at you right at the start, at least in the older cases they had the decency to hide the real culprit until the end sometimes, even if it was shameless.

Case 1 and 2 outright show who the culprit are in those cases.  Case 3 is probably the best one in that I was a bit torn between Means and O'Conner, but as somebody else said Ace Attorney is far too ideal to tear up a friendship so it would have to be Means.

Now this is where things get wonky.  Case 4 made Fulbright too obvious.  I am quite disappointed in how heavy-handed they showed Fulbright at the end of Case 4.  It was too suspicious.  Finding that lighter?  The oddness in his actions at the end made it impossible for me to ignore.  When Case 5 started I was quite sure it had to be either Bobby Fulbright or Aura Blackquill, but then Blackquill took hostages or something ridiculous and that killed the possibility of them being the Phantom.  For the entirety of Case 5 the game had planted the idea in my mind that Fulbright fits the criteria of the Phantom perfectly, and did almost nothing to dispel that until the end where it's revealed that...yes, Fulbright is in fact the Phantom!  That felt kind of shitty.

Detective Arme's actions didn't make any logical sense either, and it's never explained what she was doing.  Why did she try to kill Yuri Cosmos?  You wouldn't shoot at somebody you can't see in the dark unless you were an insane psychopath or you knew who was in there and wanted them dead.

I also would have liked if Ted Tonate was involved in a deeper level beyond "mere coincidence".  He didn't actually detonate the bomb, sure, but he was a bomb expert and used the explosion to cover his own murder, isn't that far too coincidental?  The game could have explained that.

On the plus side I never got stuck.  AA5 did a good job making the game easier to understand even if it felt easier than usual.  I never had to use the hint system either, but it was there!

The bulk of the plot (Case 1, Case 4, and Case 5) had some good scenes as well, but I don't feel any of them were expounded upon nearly as much as I would have wanted.

The Phantom's Theme is amazing though.  Athena's Objection Theme is also very good.

Now that I've had a bit of time to reconvene I should point out what I think worked:

-The majority of the new models look very good.  The animation is very smooth and dynamic.  Only a few characters have "off" or "eerie" looking vibes.  The breakdowns are very nice.
-A majority of the cases were relevant to the main plot.  Case 2 would be the farthest from the main plot, but still manages to make use of the Mood Matrix and have a very silly and chaotic murder.
-The new font is larger and easier to read, and the GUI is more accessible in general.
-The writing is still pretty good even with the oddities, and the "middle cases" were fun and not boorish like it can sometimes feel like.

The voice acting was pretty terrible, but it led to me grin a few times in the ridiculousness.  The yelling in particular was awful.

"UUUWAAAAAhAaAAAaaaaaAAahaHAhAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"

The murder mysteries themselves were pretty cool and unique, but I found figuring the culprits out to be too easy or obvious.

So to put this into three factors:
The music is very good, the voice acting is not.
The new art is very good, the CGs are also very good.  The stuff involving Athena in particular could get pretty amazing.
The writing is probably better than usual for AA, but I don't think it really hits exactly where it wants.