Phoenix Wright: A-Button Attorney

Phoenix Wright is no Freelance Police.

In the gaming press, reviewers for all platforms have fallen hard for Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. To many of them, the game heralds a promising future for the long dying point-and-click adventure genre.

I am not a professional game reviewer, so upon reaching chapter four of Phoenix Wright I made the decision to trade the game in for credit. My research suggests that slogging through to chapter five may have finally opened up some semblance of actual play, perhaps even game, but that would have required pressing the A-button through more than 50 screens where the only text displayed was "...". I only suffered through as much as I did because it takes a long, long time to come back from Japan.

Phoenix Wright isn't so much a game as it is an electronic story told in sparely parsed sentence fragments. One critic on the 1Up podcasts likened it to Encyclopedia Brown. Considering I never liked those books either, I believe the comparison is apt.

Unlike a traditional point-and-click adventure, where your interactions with the environment are based on the icons or commands you choose, the pointer in Phoenix Wright is limited to one function depending on the scene. In investigation scenes, it is used to look. (Lacking a sensitive cursor, these scenes are the most frustrating, as it's impossible to tell if the object you touched is an individual item or part of a larger whole. Touching a desk lamp may prompt a message about the desk. Is the lamp part of the desk or did you miss and touch the desk instead?) In dialogue scenes, it is used to scroll from one sentence fragment to the next.

The pointer can also be used to slowly move about the limited locations in the game. Given the static two-dimensional environments, you'd think you'd be able to jump from the front gate of a movie studio to the trailer in lot B, but no, that requires going through the gate to the main path, taking the left branch, entering lot B and going into the trailer. That may not seem like much, but considering the puzzles in the exploration segments of Phoenix Wright involve going from location 1 to location 2, picking up item A, and making your way back to location 1, it quickly sucks all the joy out of tapping a stylus on a plastic screen.

Another difference between Phoenix Wright and a real adventure game is the lack of dialogue trees. The entire experience is basically text on rails. Puzzles cannot be solved until all the relevant text has been read. For example, in order to prove a lamp was bought at a certain time you have to go through a deposition twice, fail to find any contradictions in the witness' statement after pressing him at every turn, and allow your character to faint so he can be visited by a psychic vision of his former employer. She then tells him to look at the back side of the receipt you've been trying to submit as evidence for the last 30 minutes, at which point it can finally be put into play.

The impossibility of skipping to the chase makes the court sequences especially tedious. Testimony is presented once, and you have to click or tap your way through all of it (with the sound off, because every letter and punctuation mark is accompanied by a beep which cannot be turned off). Then it is presented again for rebuttal, and you must press the witness on every line of dialogue to get the full story. This leads to miscellaneous outbursts by the judge, the prosecuting attorney, and the court. A not-so-hypothetical scenario:

Phoenix Wright: Objection!

Phoenix Wright: I submit this evidence to show that my client is awesome!

Maya: ...!

Edgeworth: ...!

Judge: ...

Court: ...

Witness: ...?

Admittedly, I may have been setting myself up for disappointment, as I expected the game to involve some semblance of realistic detective work or melodramatic courtroom drama. Instead, during a trial to prove someone's innocence, I found myself getting a witness sentenced for murder. But no matter how much leeway I was able to give the setting, I could not forgive the writing. Phoenix Wright has been praised for its great sense of humor, and this reputation is completely undeserved.

A few examples: There is a character named Mrs. Oldbag. She is old, and she calls everyone "whippersnappers." Your assistant insists on calling you "Nick," even though that is not your name. You begin the game defending your friend Larry Butz--nickname, "Hairy Butz"--and later interrogate a nerd stereotype named Sal Manella. A man named Redd White is CEO of Bluecorp. April May...I could go on, but to sum it up, a sample of dialogue from the game:

Phoenix Wright: He couldn't handle the truth!

Compare that to this random soundbite from the first episode of the finally revived Sam & Max series, which is now finally a series, and unlike Monkey Island does not disappoint:

Sam: I think I've done enough pumping for one dream.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, is not a modern incarnation of classic point-and-click gameplay. At best, it is the first point adventure game.