Phoenix Wright: Dual Destinies

Over the past few years, I have made a partial effort to catch up on the Phoenix Wright series, a collection of visual novels about legal justice with only the vaguest passing relation to actual legal systems. Focused more on over-the-top characters and melodrama, the Ace Attorney series is an example of a game that would probably be better off as television series. It’s a series that peaked quite some time ago and is floundering to find its way after wrapping up the initial story.

For those unfamiliar, Ace Attorney games are a played out in a series of court cases, generally four or five per game, in which you act as the defense attorney for the person most likely to have committed the crime, usually murder. Each game’s cases are seemingly unconnected but may come together a bit more in the end and the last trial of each game is usually is a more personal affair for the characters involved. As a caveat, in this world, trials can last no more than three days and the burden of proof lies on the defenses’ shoulders. Corrupt? Definitely. But initially it was only a setup for goofy cases with nonsensical payoffs that always work out in the end (with one major exception).

Phoenix Wright, the protagonist of the series and the one center stage for the first three games, saw a long-running plot come to its conclusion at the end of Trials and Tribulations. An attempt was made to then take the franchise in a new direction under a new protagonist, Apollo Justice. Apollo himself is a totally fine character, but series Shu Takumi made a big mistake of turning Phoenix into a drunk — or a grape juice junkie in the translation — who loses his attorney’s license and cheats at cards through the help of his magician-in-training adopted daughter Trucy. In response, Dual Destinies sought to right some of these issues by putting him back in the suit and bring him back to the front lines. This, along with a few other important reasons, makes Dual Destinies the weakest in series so far and the future does not look bright.

For starters, anything brought up in Apollo Justice is completely ignored. All of Apollo and Trucy’s development is forgotten and halted by the introduction of another new attorney, Athena Cykes, an 18-year-old supposed wunderkind of the legal system, yet she chokes more often than anyone else in the series, literally becoming an emotional wreck on the bench several times before either Apollo or Phoenix comes into to pick up the pieces. Not only is she a left field inclusion for the series, but she drags along with her the prosecutor, who serves as main antagonist for the game, Blackquill, a convicted murderer on death row who is somehow still allowed to practice law. The two of them share a sordid past that serves as the game’s climactic trial, but this is only half-developed.

It makes sense that Apollo gets put in the back seat for this game, as Dual Destinies has to both introduce Athena and get Nick back, leaving little room for anything else. Each case switches between Phoenix, Apollo, and Athena, each with their own little thing that changes them mechanically, but it also gives the game a very whiplash feel that the other do not have. As a means of growing characters, Dual Destinies is spread too thin to effectively develop Athena as fully as she probably should have been. Even more so, Blackquill is a black hole of charisma and fun, his try hard attempt at being “serious” and “severe” is laughable a best, intolerable at worst. Other prosecutors felt far more sinister or dangerous with half the effort, Blackquill looks like he goes back to his jail cell and listens to Linkin Park.

The cases are also botch jobs, a not uncommon occurrence in the series. Most times the cases are constructed by coming up with the idea for the murder and then actively thinking of ways to confound any possible way it could actually work in a realistic manner. One case in particular takes place at school for in-training lawyers and judges. A teacher is murdered and one of three students appear to be the only applicable suspects, but the minute any one of them would be convicted the others would come forward and claim responsibility. The excuse? They have a strong friendship, so strong that they have a secret symbol of their friendship that only they know that they can’t tell anyone else about or it would compromise said friendship.

Ignoring how stupid that is and the fact that they are innocent because god forbid something different happen in this series, these are children actively hindering a murder investigation for group hug session. It would be one thing if they never mentioned it until after everything had been resolved, but it gets brought up while they are under oath on numerous occasions and the judge and lawyers just kind of don’t do anything about it. Even Blackquill, who gets on the defense’s ass whenever they carry on questioning too long, does nothing bring forth the information they were obviously withholding.

Attention is brought to this in the least subtle way possible. The script goes on and on about “The Dark Age of the Law”, which just means that the trials of the times have become far too reliant on evidence and “winning at all costs”. The rest of the series has been like this, but its important now because this game needs a theme. In this case it’s emotion versus reason or in a more literal sense psychology versus hard evidence. Athena has the ability to tell someone’s mood during certain testimony and will just flat out tell the witness that they expressed “inconsistent” emotions and the witness will almost always immediately fold. As I said before, this kind of stuff has littered the series before, but bringing it front and center of the plot puts it in the crosshairs of criticism. What was once an aspect of the series to be overlooked as the basis for the game working is now the exact reason it doesn’t. Worst still, this was acknowledged in a much better manner in the previous title, where the final case is a test run for a new jury system. This is also one of the aspects that is completely ignored.

Dual Destinies is not a great sign for the series’ future, one that seems to be devolving into absolute nonsense as opposed to entertaining nonsense. The script cannot manage all the disparate elements introduced and it completely disregards previous games in service of trying to make a message about the legal system that is only applicable to the universe built up in these games. I’ll admit I may be missing a key component of the Japanese justice system, but those elements were always lost on me regardless. This is just the first game in the series where its worse elements were too much.

Resident Evil: Revelations

As far as major Japanese developers/publishers have come in the past decade, Capcom was the last to fall and still seems to be the last to recover. Being one of the few Japanese companies who made an adept change from regular to HD development, Capcom shot out the 360 gate fresh off of the success of Resident Evil 4 with titles like Lost Planet and Dead Rising, both of which are fun games that capture the spirit of the company while avoiding any major pitfalls many of their competitors. While Square Enix, Sega, and Konami languished trying to make their old franchises work for the new generation, Capcom dropped hit after hit.

A decade later and Capcom is a very different company. Many of its major franchises are dead or dying, its fanbase is splintered from frequent poor decisions and consumer unfriendly practices, and most of its top talent has jumped ship long ago with Yoshinori Ono and Hideaki Itsuno being the last vestiges of the company’s glory days. While Square Enix has been turning it around in recent years, Konami has downsized to essentially just Hideo Kojima, and Sega has found a second life with PC audiences, Capcom struggles to get projects finished and must rely on partnering with console manufacturers — Dead Rising 3 with Microsoft, Street Fighter V and Deep Down with Sony — to ensure safe profit margins. Capcom is a company that has little clue as to what to next in the rapidly changing gaming landscape. And no series is more indicative of this than Resident Evil.

I like Resident Evil. It’s a series with ups and downs, much like any other. But for its general elements of quality have always come hand in hand with some truly strange design choices. Forcing the series to a cooperative setting goes against the games survival horror roots, the series mythology, consistently silly, became more and more convoluted with each successive iteration, and the game kept aiming to go bigger and bigger, despite the series relatively humble and contained beginnings. But it was easy to overlook things like this when the series produced one of the best co-op experiences, remained silly enough to laugh through the insanity and ever-growing set pieces. But escalation cannot last forever and it must come crashing down.

The crash came with Resident Evil 6. I haven’t played the game yet, but the general consensus seems to be that the game is overdesigned, overproduced, and incredibly misguided. While I can’t comment on that game yet (It’s on the backburner, waiting for a friend to take the plunge with me) I can comment on the spinoff game released in a similar time frame that supposedly harkens back to the series’ survival horror roots.

Resident Evil: Revelations began as a 3DS title, where it received favorable enough reviews to justify getting an HD port to every other modern machine. This became very obvious the minute the game turned on. It’s quite the change from the last RE title I played, Resident Evil 5. That game had excellent production values and a much tighter control scheme. Revelations is a loose game, one where characters glide along the floor like a budget PS2 title. Gone are the open and varied environments, most of the game takes place on an ocean liner.

I suppose some context is in order. Taking place before 5, Revelations follows Jill Valentine as she and her partner, Parker Luciani, are sent to investigate a derelict ocean liner before communication is lost and the boat is predictably filled with mutant zombies. Chris Redfield and his new partner, Jessica Sherawat, are sent to rescue them, all while uncovering a bioterrorist plot to infect the world with a new strain of the T-Virus.

The plot isn’t exactly new ground for RE, but no one comes to RE for the plot. They come for the gameplay, which over the past decade has slowly been evolving from survival horror to action game. Revelations feels like a step back, both in a good and negative sense. Actually, Resident Evil: Revelations reminds me a lot of last year’s derivative RPG Bravely Default.

Like Bravely Default, Revelations regresses over a decade’s worth of series progress for the sake of not scaring away the long time fans who turned away from 6. The game feels like Code Veronica X but with RE4’s camera and shooting controls with the small addition of strafing. As I mentioned above, the cramped environments make a return, which helps the game feel claustrophobic, but does little to help the more modern camera angle. It’s a game that wants to remind you of the series’ origins, but fails to accurately capture the feeling, instead just making the game feel like a poor man’s Resident Evil 4. It’s a game that tries almost nothing new and seems proud of it.

The few new things it does manage to add are mostly forgettable. There is no co-op but an AI partner still follows you around. The Genesis scanner allows you to scan the environment, occasionally finding a hidden item or, more usefully, can be used to scan enemies to produce herbs…somehow. Most of the time I just forgot it was there unless I was stuck on a puzzle in which case it did very little. The game has an episodic structure that adds nothing to the game except hilariously putting “Previously, on…” in front of chapters containing scenes you just witnessed a save screen ago.

The one new addition that does feel fun was Raid Mode, an objective-based mode where you take a character through the game’s environments as they try to complete certain objectives while killing enemies along the way. Rewards for the missions carry over to one another and in between scenarios the characters can level up and purchase new weapons, adding an RPG element to the progress. Raid Mode takes the place of Mercenaries mode, where numerous characters are unlockable and playable, each of whom has different abilities and starting packages. It’s a mode that’s fun, the only downside being it only has online multiplayer, so no splitscreen with friends.

There is very little else to say about Resident Evil: Revelations. If you like the old Resident Evil‘s, you may enjoy this one as they attempt to combine the best of both worlds. I say attempt because there isn’t much on the screen to indicate they succeeded. What we got is a boring handheld RE4 that just doesn’t hold up on consoles or PC.

As an aside, the character design for the game is mostly unremarkable, but Jessica has an astonishingly bad costume. She spends over half the game running around in a wetsuit with one of the legs missing. It’s stupid and bad and stupid. And bad.

Stupid and bad.

That new Strider is alright.

While it’s hard to deny the actual dollar value of a PS Plus account, especially if you have the full PS3/4/Vita complement, what ends up happening most of the time is another indie game being added to my backlog. Titles like Stick it to the Man, Mercenary Kings, and Stealth, Inc. are just more games to sacrifice at the altar of never really getting around to play them.

Then one month the recently released Strider came out for PS4 and I gave it a shot. It was fine.

Developed by Double Helix, responsible for a handful of bad-to-middling games and the new Killer Instinct, Strider definitely stands head and shoulders above the likes of Silent Hill: Homecoming and Front Mission Evolved. This is likely due to the fact that Strider feels like a game that properly recognizes what works and what doesn’t rather than soullessly aping it’s predecessors.

Which may be a bit unfair, as I’ve never player the older Strider games. I know very little about him, outside of he is a holdover from Capcom’s more arcadey-er era, which this game still has a feel for. Not exactly a a straight forward sequel, the new Strider plays like a Metroid or Castlevania title, with a fully explorable map and hidden upgrades and items galore. Strider’s sword can be equipped with different elements that open different doors, he can summon the ghosts of animals that transport him to new areas, and can slide, dash, and wall climb for days. Think a speedier version of Guacamelee!, which helps keep it’s arcade roots intact.

The game’s story does exist, but it lacks the charm or striking aesthetic of the previously mentioned games. It has no pervading atmosphere or unique bent that gives Metroid or Guacamelee! their sense of self. Strider is like the Saturday morning cartoon of these games: silly in and of itself but hard for anyone over the age of ten to take seriously. The only level I remember with detail is a cool robot factory, mostly because it had some conveyor belts, which I don’t remember other games of this type having.

Other than that, the games highlights are definitely it’s boss fights. While possibly a few too many (This is one of those games where early boss enemies turn into more generic ones later), the fights are varied and interesting, from fighting giant mechanical dragons to jetpack bounty hunters to a trio of martial arts wizards, the game spared no expense in the boss fights. I will admit, however, there was one boss I just never figured out how to fight properly, instead just trying to out damage him until I succeeded, but that one’s more one me than the game.

For $15, it’s hard not to recommend a game like Strider. It’s not a long game, my clock came in just under 7 hours and I stopped to smell most of the roses and it doesn’t track time through retries, but it’s a solidly built one. Double Helix should make there games more like this one in the future, lest we be blighted with another movie tie-in like Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters.