Ace Attorney Investigations was a follow up series to Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney. While the original rode on the gaining popularity of the series in the West that started with the DS re-released (the original GBA releases never made it to the US), for whatever reason the timing of Ace Attorney Investigations 2 was such that Capcom decided to skip it. For fans of the series this was completely baffling especially as the game is a direct follow-up and it’s clearly setup.
It took a long time but Capcom finally released it as part of the Ace Attorney Investigations Anthology. As a game it’s pretty much an expansion pack to the first. The Investigations series actually doesn’t stray too far from the original games. You still go through investigation phases and cross-examinations, but they just don’t take place in court. Investigations aren’t even more prominent despite the title but they do take place in 2D side-scrolling rather than first person visual novel style. The unique system is logic which you put together clues to make progress. And that’s really it. The fact that everything takes place out of court also puts some weird suspension of disbelief. There are no actual stakes so it has to be contrived that the perpetrator will destroy evidence or something. That and cross-examination witnesses have no actual reason to talk to you but they do anyway even as they slowly incriminate themselves. This is literally why you don’t talk to the police.
Aside from that the plotline is pretty well crafted. Things fit together in ways you don’t quite expect and by the final case things get absolutely bonkers. The twists are a lot of fun and the characters don’t get too annoying which I found to be a problem with some games in the series. They’re still dialed to 11 though. For the most part I found the contradictions to make sense, only a couple I thought were a little bit of a stretch. The enhanced graphics are also quite nice as the hand drawn sprites are quite detailed and after the first case I decided to go with the updated art as it just looked better, but the sprite work of the old version is still top notch. I don’t think this game is exceptionally notable within the series, but I am quite glad that I finally got to play it even though I probably missed some references that I simply don’t remember from the first game. I didn’t see any strong reason to replay it.
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