Ace Attorney Investigations Collection review: check and mate

Why should Phoenix hog the spotlight? Why are we always trying to find the good in people? Why don’t we wear a quaff red suit with more ruffles than an 18th-century aristocrat? What if we just want to send some bad guys behind bars by uncovering guilt, rather than saving people?

What if I just want to be a pompous prosecutor with a pompadour? Ace Attorney Investigations Collection might be the for you.

This latest Ace Attorney remastered collection from developer Capcom completes the set of bringing every game in the beloved franchise to modern consoles, and for those of us in English-speaking territories also brings the final untranslated adventure in the series to the West for the very first time. 

This set houses two games in the Nintendo DS-era spinoff starring Miles Edgeworth as the protagonist (Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth and Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor's Gambit), but two Switch games (also available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC) of which only the first ever made its way outside Japan upon its initial release. Poor sales led to the second game remaining unlocalized from 2011 until now. 

Enhanced Interrogation

A few enhancements have been brought to the collection over the original adventure. All art has been redrawn for HD screens, although those who love the pixel-art walking animations of characters in investigation sequences can use them if desired. With the new art remaining the only option for dialogue and the pixel art backgrounds standing up to scrutiny poorly on larger screens, however, the new art was certainly preferable. A gallery allows you to revisit old illustrations and listen to music (including orchestral arrangements of some songs) at will, with character designs and bonus illustrations also a welcome bonus.

The major appeal of this new title is the move from the courtroom to the mind and machinations associated with the role of prosecutor. In this role, you’ll investigate the scenes of crimes - murder and otherwise, though the latter will likely lead to murder at some point. This is Ace Attorney, after all - and uses logic and reasoning to find the true culprit and bring them to justice.

Notably, in this game such justice is inflicted all without entering a courtroom, as you freely move Edgeworth through crime scenes using the analog stick to seek out clues and speak to suspects. Speaking to suspects involves testimony and cross-examination using evidence that plays identically to such scenes in the court in mainline games, but you won’t see Miles standing at the prosecutor’s bench during your time in the world of Ace Attorney Investigations. 

For those used to the point-and-click puzzling through environments associated with mainline entries in the series, the ability to control these pint-sized protagonists at will and wander around environments in search of anything suspicious is an unusual feeling that takes some time to adjust. The actual mechanics of finding points of interest to add clues to your evidence is functionally identical otherwise, as is speaking to characters and examining evidence, but it serves as a way to differentiate the two characters and their approach.

Acting as a prosecutor rather than a defense attorney, your arsenal of tools to uncover the truth alongside your approach to each case is different from those of Phoenix Wright. Alongside clues, you’ll pick up on pieces of logic that will be added to a bank of logic statements. Collect a bunch from your investigations and you’ll be able to combine them to create new leads or deepen your understanding of a case, perhaps finding the thing you need to uncover the truth in the process.

In the third case of the first game involving kidnapping and murder inside of a theme park based around the lovable police mascot, it’s possible to piece together the existence of three used cups in the kidnapper’s hideout alongside a trio of folding chairs to reveal that there are actually three kidnappers involved in the case instead of the original two you first believed, a vital clue in unmasking the real culprit.

While a cool idea in theory, it also reveals the biggest flaw with this game’s unique approach: it’s too simple. At their best, Ace Attorney games thrill through their challenge, the complex investigations spanning a mass of environments, interrogations, and cross-examinations, confounding conundrums that only become clear of a culprit at the very end. Here, logic rarely involves more than a few statements that can easily be pieced together and, by consequence of them being highlighted as logic statements in the first place, only make it more clear what the key pieces of evidence are when you confront and cross-examine statements from witnesses and suspects later.

Investigations are also disappointingly streamlined. Rather than spanning numerous environments and crime scenes that intersect to unveil the truth, you’re locked into a single environment at a time to investigate for every clue before moving to the next in a railroaded fashion that feels lacking in freedom and control. Together with logic, it makes much of the game feel formulaic.

Rook-ie Mistake

At least, it feels too simple at first. This is a game of two halves, quite literally in this case. For much of the first game in this spin-off duology, I had yet to encounter prior to this review, I found myself somewhat saddened by how simplistic I found the experience compared to the puzzling heights of The Great Ace Attorney or twisting tales of the mainline titles. Towards the end of the first game, I finally saw the potential of the idea, before the second game expanded affairs further with new mechanics that completely transformed the title into one of the most dynamic in the series to date.

In the second game, Miles Edgeworth uses a new talent to get the truth out of his adversaries: Mind Chess. Rather than your typical ‘health bar’ that reduces whenever you use the incorrect piece of evidence, you instead enter a new Matrix-like environment where you converse with your opponent-of-sorts in a more dynamic fashion. As they share their side of events you can choose to retaliate with words or bide your time in the hope of leaking more information, at which point you can shoot a pawn at their words to break their defenses and, eventually, Checkmate them into bringing more information.

In a way that even the most enthralling in-game cross-examinations fail to achieve, the achievement of this mechanic is in its bringing of the intensity and pressure of a real interrogation to the series. A time limit forces you to act and react to statements on the fly, with real consequences if you mess up. It’s easier to fail, but more satisfying to catch their knight in the act or corner them with a well-timed counter to their words backed up by the facts of the case that force them to confess or share new evidence.

If I were to call the first Ace Attorney Investigations a decent, entertaining experience but perhaps the weakest title in the franchise, its sequel bursts into Western markets as one of the stronger entries to date for this mechanic alone. As cases become more brooding and dark the mechanic opens up new avenues to seek out the truth, and alongside featuring the better of the two overarching stories single-handedly makes a case for the collection’s existence solely for being the reason this title has its first English localization after 13 years. 

Accessibility 

Alongside language options, the game provides options to turn off screen shaking and flashes, remove controller vibration for those with sensitive hands, and adjust the transparency of the text box. Autoplay of text is also possible with a chance to set the amount of time text remains on screen after fully rendering before proceeding to the next text box.

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How I reviewed Ace Attorney Investigations Collection

I played the game on a Nintendo Switch OLED model primarily in handheld mode, although sections of the game were also played on an ASUS VG27AQL1A gaming monitor in docked mode. I primarily played the game with AirPods for audio and put in roughly 30 hours of time to the experience in total across both games.

First reviewed August/September 2024.