#this wasn't gonna get a readmore but it got longer and longer so...hhhh

[aro-attorneys]

Oh the complicated...state of Dual Destinies and Spirit of Justice.

I'm not sure how to word this well so I guess this will just be a rambly essay or something.

I feel like my expectations were already lowered, which helped me enjoy any mainline game after the trilogy more (probably). I'm leaving AA4/AJ out of this though because it feels a lot more like Good Old Ace Attorney game that is clearly a follow-up after the trilogy and has the "retro" Nintendo aesthetic (can't believe I can call it retro. god).

Going into the Trilogy, I knew almost nothing about AA aside from "people ship the blue and red/pink guy" and a few memes. None of that knowledge came even close to the True AA experience, so I was rather blown away by the quality of the games.

Moving my way into the fandom after finishing AA3/TaT made sure that getting "spoilers" is inevitable. A combination of Fandom Exposure and having Friends who already played the games caused me to kind of receive...mixed reviews for post-trilogy games? DD and SoJ were the most controversial (I guess AJ just aged really well bc I mostly see praise for it nowadays). The overall impression I got was "not bad bad but also Not That Good either". (some takes were more on the negative side but some of them were more on the..."forgiving" side.

I really loved AJ, so I was wondering how DD and SoJ would hold up in that case. Like...maybe it wouldn't be that bad or something, you know? And the overall impression they gave me was Kind of a Drag but Not Bad.

Cases felt a lot longer. I guess that was only natural after moving to a better Nintendo system with more memory and processing power. But sometimes Cases that are Longer are Bad. It felt like they had more padding just to fill up some time and it made me move through the storyline incredibly slow; I got distracted easily because they failed to keep my attention. I know, big surprise from someone with ADHD lol. But the Trilogy simply held my attention better because with the limited space they had, everything had to kind of Move Faster for the plot to happen and every line contained important information.

Anyway, that's mostly a mechanical issue. I think another issue, one that most people probably agree on, is that it's very sterile. The first 4 mainline games clearly took more risks. They wanted to tell their story and felt more experimental; it felt more integer in a way. The games had a story to tell, a direction they wanted to follow. Whereas DD and SoJ so far feel very...safe. I'm sure others before me explained it better than I can, but I will try regardless:

The Trilogy and AJ didn't shy away from letting characters react pretty intensely to the situation around them, especially Phoenix. Because things were stressful! There wasn't a constant yelling of course but you could feel how stressful the final cases were for everyone involved.

I think the best example I can think of is Trucy. She was introduced in AJ and they made her instantly likeable to me. You're also immediately invested in her since she's the daughter of Phoenix. And you want to know what happened! How did she end up in Phoenix's care? Is she hiding something? Who were her biological parents? And by the time you unravel that mystery, you're invested enough that you can emotionally feel the importance of the bond between Trucy and Phoenix. AJ even ends with Phoenix stating how well he knows her as her adoptive father! You get a little glimpse of how both of them truly feel and it's just...so good.

And all of that was thrown out the window in DD (and SoJ by extend). They barely interact, they don't even mention any of the terrible things they went through together.

And that's the impression I have throughout both DD and SoJ. They do have compelling characters that I care about. I loved Athena's storyline! And I liked going against Blackquill! And so far I really like Apollo and Dhurke's storyline as well! But none of them really have the same lasting impact on me as the Trilogy and AJ had on me. I would say it's just AA Fatigue (I've been playing these games for so long lol), but even then. I've worn myself out during TGAAC too and yet its impact on me is much greater.

I know this "playing it safe" actually pissed some people off, or at the very least made them stop playing the game. To me, they are still enjoyable. But that is also about it. The only exception for me was doing Athena's trial in 5-5 which gave me the same excitement + stress feeling I had during the trilogy sometimes. There's also some other moments in both games that are actually really good. But if I had to give an overall expression, it would be Enjoyable at best and Dragging at worst.

Tl;dr: DD and SoJ are not Bad to me, but it does disappoint me a bit that once they knew they could just get money with a Safe AA game, they stopped taking creative risks and made Just Average Games.

Last side-note: I am aware of the rumor that Shu Takumi said to ignore AJ as much as possible due to its controversy. Ironically, I see most fans nowadays really like AJ so uh...hm.