#seriously though RftA is great for giving us the Skye sisters . . . I love them . . . wish we could see Lana again

[sage-nebula]

It's been so long since I've played the original trilogy that I honestly couldn't tell you which of the three is my favorite, but at this point I'm starting to think that it might honestly be the first one, if only because the first one doesn't have a single case that makes me want to concuss myself. (Which isn't to say that T&T does, but just that I really don't remember T&T well enough to say for sure.)

The four original cases in the first Ace Attorney game are all excellent, both in terms of story / character content, but also in terms of gameplay. Although I hadn't played in so many years, I didn't pick a wrong answer even once in the first four cases, because the puzzles were laid out so masterfully that the answer became clear with only a minute or two of thinking. I want to note that this is different from hand-holding; it's not that the game told you what the answer was, but that logic allowed for puzzling out when it was time to show this or that evidence. You also didn't have to Press on every single line of testimony usually, because pressing on just the ones that it was intuitive to press on was usually enough.

Now, that's for the first four cases. The same can't really be said for "Rise From the Ashes," but that's because RftA was written after the main trilogy was already completed, and thus suffered the same issues that JFA (and I'm assuming T&T) had: extremely finicky cases which were incredibly picky about when and where they wanted you to show this or that evidence, or requiring you to backtrack to rooms because it refused to make a crucial piece of evidence appear during an investigation sequence unless you had talked to some completely unrelated character already beforehand.

This might sound like griping because I am just not good at these games, but I don't think that's the case. Again, the first four cases in the original game didn't have this problem, at least in my most recent experience. Both the trial sections and the investigation sections made sense with very little nitpicky "this must absolutely be done in This Particular Sequence" bits. It's just RftA, and so far each case in JFA, that seems to have this issue. This could be because Takumi or Capcom wanted to up the difficulty in the later games, or at least increase the length of the cases (both RftA and the cases in JFA so far have significantly more evidence than the first four cases in the original game), but either way, it's noticeable.

Having said that though, although RftA had numerous parts where I had to look up a walkthrough because I didn't interact with the exact pixel of the evidence room at the exact right moment in the investigation and thus couldn't get the evidence I knew was right there, I still forgive it because I love the story and the characters. Although there is legitimate critique to be made about it (most notably how they retconned Edgeworth having ever forged evidence because of his popularity by that point in the series timeline), I still enjoy the story and the characters so much that it doesn't matter as much to me. Plus, tbh, it explains even more why Edgeworth would make the drastic choice he made between games, even if you don't take the retcon into account. The man was really going through it for those few months. (Though having said that, Phoenix being like "all prosecutors are evil scumbags" in light of him knowing Lana is still . . . lmao. You really can tell that RftA was made post the original trilogy.)

So at least, thus far into my replay of the OG trilogy, I rank the first game (with all five cases present) as above JFA, since while JFA has what is quite possibly my favorite case in the entire series (Farewell My Turnabout), it also has Turnabout Big Top, which just . . . well, you know. I feel like TBT is probably the most universally hated case in the fandom, lol.

But we'll see how I feel when I get to T&T, since that's the game from the OG trilogy I remember the least. I do know that I loved playing as Mia and I also love Dahlia as a villain, and getting to play as Edgeworth vs. Franziska was also delightful. So it definitely has aspects I am looking forward to. We'll just have to see if I find all of its cases enjoyable like I did the original game before I can make the final determination on that.