You know, I don’t get to talk about the Ace Attorney franchise nearly enough as I’d want to. That could just be because I didn’t get to play a majority of the games until way later, so they didn’t stick with me as much as one specific game. This is not that game, but it was the first to impress me in a long time. It may not be the best, but I still love it, dammit. And that is the fifth game in the main series, Dual Destinies.
Dual Destinies takes place a few years after the last game, Apollo Justice, where the law is in shambles, with crooked lawyers just looking for victory and the people losing faith in the court system. You play as three lawyers, the protagonist of the franchise, Phoenix Wright, the protagonist of the previous game Apollo Justice, and new character to the franchise, Athena Cykes, as they try to solve a series of murders while also finding out what went down on the bombing at the courthouse and just why the prosecutor for most of these cases, Simon Blackquill, is on death row in the first place. When people saw these new characters, along with Dual Destinies getting an M rating, something the Ace Attorney franchise never had before, people were more than sceptical. But when I played it, I loved this game. This had some of my favorite cases in the series. Not all of them were perfect, but I felt like they were really well thought out and made the stories more gripping and more interesting to go through. The game doesn’t hold your hand, but allows you to use your thinking to find out the evidence in these cases. And when you find them out and show them to the person lying on the confession stand, you can’t help but feel so smug and satisfied when they shout Objection, with all music stopping before the music kicks back in… until the prosecutor tells you how wrong you are, because they always do. But the real kicker is the breakdowns in this game. When you finally got the culprit of the murder cornered with all evidence pointing to them, ready to take them out, all they can do is lose their shit. And thanks to the HD graphics of the newer games, they look so damn satisfying to watch these people who have been insulting and belittling you with that smug look on their face get found out. And the new characters they introduced are amazing. Simon is probably one of my favorite prosecutors in a long time, and Athena is waifu for laifu. I will die proudly on this hill and their ain’t shit you can say about it. And no spoilers, but when we got to see the big villain of this game, all I could think was… damn.
Dual Destinies is the first Ace Attorney in a long time that kept me wanting to see what the rest of it had in store. I wanted to see what else this game could do to surprise me, and every time, it had something up its sleeve to shock me, and I loved it. I played Spirits of Justice, and that one was decent enough, but I do look forward to what the franchise has in store from here on out. And with that, we are now halfway through the Top 100. Just fifty games left to go. What will we have in store? Something special, I assure you