LogFAQs > #956699455

So almost immediately after I mentioned Ryunosuke's shifty eyes, Kazuma also takes note - "try not to look so bewildered," he tells us. Ryunosuke is also totally adorable with the hand-raised animation and the failure to slam the desk with any effectiveness. He in fact gets intimidated when Kazuma slams the desk. He sometimes gets his words stuck in his throat. And yet we still volunteer ourselves as counsel.

Kazama continues to be very Mia Fey-in-1-1-esque - he has a line about "thrust [evidence] in the witness's face and make him choke on it!" - which is so damn close to "rub it in his face" that I'm almost certain he's a victim or a future rival. Unless he's secretly not an NPC and we do play as him in the UK half of the game - who knows.

We're in a military/government, closed-door trial, some pretty drastic atmosphere for a first case. When it's revealed that the victim professor was in fact a visiting Englishman, the reason why becomes more apparent. Having a government-sanctioned reason why the case is rigged against us (and there's so much urgency) actually makes the game feel more grounded than the bizarre "justice" system found in most AA games - though of course, as a long-time AA fan, I don't care about verisimilitude too much anyway!

Payne-as-Auchi is fantastic. I love that they brought back the hair-pat animation, though now with a fan - it's pretty great! He also gets some cool lines. "The defendant may have fled a tiger at the front gate, but he will find a wolf at the back."

Our first witness, Hosonaga, winds up being not a sworn witness - and we don't even get to cross-examine him! The hell is this. He's a highly suspicious-looking waiter, a classic AA witness, who occasionally coughs blood and has Sinister Spectacles. His breakdown is going to be extremely bloody, isn't it?

The next two witnesses look very Layton-esque, and they testify together like in Layton as well. Nosa loves using military jargon, and the old dude Korekuta is incredibly verbose on top of Yoda-speaking a bit. (It seems like his insistence on using big words fades a bit as the trial goes longer, making the sentence-structure inversion more prominent.) Nosa is "ingesting regulation beefsteak" and Korekuta watches him "masticating his meal." It's fantastic. Nosa also bizarrely accuses us of "subordination" instead of "insubordination."

Pressing on these statements is incredibly detailed for a first case, and occasionally absolutely hilarious - there's a part where Auchi has some spiel about how he just blinked and tries to use it to prove a point. But man, it actually takes a long time to get through trying to see all the text. Nonetheless, we're insistent about the presence of an Englishwoman, of whom there seems to be no evidence, and whose existence the witnesses are insistent on denying.

The game uses the Suspense theme for the most part, despite our first Objection, which kind of hurts the pacing. It takes a long time for us to hit what seems like the actual theme, when we finally point out this dental record (a fairly interesting contradiction, albeit with a lot of handholding). It's kind of weird to just be proving her existence through trial; this actually feels more investigation-y, since the actual contradictions in the witness testimony don't seem to be the main focus. That actual Objection theme is awesomely triumphant - perhaps it's specifically going to represent Kazuma's theme. And it coincides with the first time that Ryunosuke has a successful, loud desk-slam - signs we're coming into our own!

Anyway, after some some more hand-holding, we're directed to pointing out Hosonaga's business card showing that the dude is a 29-year-old Chief Inspector who's tampered with the witnesses. (Ryunosuke, always a genius, deduces that Hosonaga was working as a waiter because his salary was so low.) Finally we've proven the existence of the woman, and the Judge - in one of his first big moments - says that he refuses to play politics, and that he wants the woman questioned.

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- The bad French of "au la Carneval" kills me.

- Instead of an attorney's badge, we have a collar pin to indicate we're a student. Just glad we have these forms of ID available to us.

- Maybe it's because I'm playing on a Switch for the first time, but the text scroll feels slow. I don't like turning on skip-text since I like the sense of pacing created by the scroll (and scroll sound), but I wish there were a way to up the scroll speed by like 50%.

- Nosa's son Aido obviously stole Korekuta's missing coin, right?

- Kazuma is so great. "There is no place for an amateur prosecutor like you in this courtroom!" He also has an Edgeworthian forehead point.

- So many throwbacks - reminded of the steaks in 1-3, whose significane I don't particularly remember.

- Ryunosuke has a major aversion to dentists. Good to know!

- Is Kazuma the first person to utter the word "perjury" in this series?
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yet all azuarc of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness