Board 8 > this grand ace attorney overture music is great (spoilers playthrough)

(+) Yeah! (+)

also man stronghart is taking a VERY heavy hand in this case huh
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kazuma so openly disagreeing with stronghart is going to result in his being taken off the case very, very soon...
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stronghart did say that kazuma was back to london... meaning that he was aboard that ship.

kazuma's name was also among the four of which we know two were reaper, and the fourth - john wilson - could have been

what da hell
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his theme song is called Samurai With a Mission

dun dun dunnnnn

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not sure i'm crazy about kazuma as a prosecutor honestly. thought it would be a little more epic than it is, since he so happily wears his ulterior motives on his arm and keeps saying "nice job, you just unveiled something i already knew about." having a prosecutor who's now openly admitted to be a person of interest in the case (and honestly, a potential suspect...) also is just... ridiculous. even godot didn't outright admit to being at the scene in 3-5. now kazuma isn't the killer, but yeah, it's still pretty silly.

didn't expect harelock to be activated so soon though, that's a relief that it won't get pulled at a high-leverage moment (like the cat-door-maker, ugh)
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Yeah, honestly I think my opinion of Kazuma actually went down after he became a prosecutor, unfortunately.

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Kazuma sucks as a prosecutor and the game would probably be better off if he had stayed gone.

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I don't know if I'd go quite that far. Kazuma winds up bringing out the best in Ryunosuke while also simultaneously being a worse character for it. It's a strange dichotomy.

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whoaaaaa new deduction dance musix (preceded by a pursuit theme?!)
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mikotoba literally just tap danced lmao

also, tchikin strogenov OP name
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aw yeah the true dance of deduction

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"sholmes" is so brilliant here
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feeling very, very iffy about this case's format now that we're taking a break in sholmes's office. was digging this game so hard through g2-3, and through a hiccup in the first half of g2-4's investigation... but this case hasn't built much goodwill for me so far.
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the pacing and the structure of the last two cases is a bit strange, yeah

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like i'm glad we're finally getting answers, but they feel like they're being dumped into our laps and/or force-fed to us instead of our "earning" them in normal sense - unearthing them, or forcing confessions. (getting answers from vigil after breaking him, for example, was much more satisfying than sholmes just dumping jigoku's guilt on us, or van zieks basically confirming what we were working towards figuring out - that gregson was the reaper)
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this is weird though - gregson and shinn were coworkers, so the same people asking one to be a killer and another to be a mark seems bizarre.
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god what the hell jigoku is just admittinf to the assassination plot openly. this is so insanely unsatisfying. the guy you confirm to assassinate is dead after visiting you. you'd think he'd try way harder to deny this plot.

this is on tier with jezaille brett confessing for no reason in g1-1. super disappointing.
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and now kazuma is more witness than prosecutor, while stronghart is more prosecutor than judge. sigh. hopefully their positions go where they belong soon!
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the witness is also using logic (a prosecutor's job) that the lack of his being arrested meant that the sailor heard nothing. i mean we know the boat stopped, but we also know that very same sailor was deliberately comforting with the witness
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okay, the second half of the jigoku cross examination went a lot better. he actually tried to shift his story in a more satisfying way. it's not the best victim-take, but neither was taking down yanni yogi.

kazuma"s objection here is probably his best moment as a prosecutor so far. let's do this thing!
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I liked taking down Jigoku. He feels like the warm-up act for the main course.

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it looks like the real trial will indeed be a lot more substantive - though i really hope it relies a lot on the evidence we've already collected as opposed to being a parade of new evidence we didn't collect ourselves.
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the crushed wine glass not leaving any stains on van zieks"s white gloves suddenly bothers me so much
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so i finished interrogating mikotoba, and caidin/vigil are next. really like the witness train going on here. dressing the sholmes/iris intervention unless it's just to provide more witnesses. though in fairness, the dog collar almost certainly get to be what they're fetching.

at this point, in addition to being the reaper, stronghart also had to be the answer to "who was the professor" and "who shot genshin asogi."

the motive for editing asogi is obvious; the former must have to do with political rivals or something. the trailer situation might have been just to set up a fall guy or because he hates criminals?

unanswered and perhaps discarded til after the trial: why did kazuma's sword end up in gregson's trunk?
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It will be explained during the trial

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"Losh, Vigil... I cannae apologise enough."

"No, Governor, I don't believe you can.
It won"t change what's happened."

"..."
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*Vigil shakes himself at Caidin*

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suspecting caidin now of being the gunsman, i guess.
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huh... wondering if the asogi papers are sonehow hidden inside karuma. that sword is obviously insanely important
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so, pausing as ryunosuke apparently has figured out the contents of klint's will... my suspicion was initially that it simply outed stronghart as the professor.

but ryunosuke thinks there is an unthinkable truth that turns everything on its head.

which means... maybe klint's will was a confession - that he actually was the professor himself. and that perhaps asogi took the fall for klint, and in fact actually killed klint himself to secure the document?

just idle spec. it could just be indicting stronghart i guess.
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oh man - stronghart just confirmed it... but there's no evidence on this, is there?

can there be?
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this is absolutely fascinating. stronghart is 100% the present day reaper ordering assassinations, but he's doing it all as a coverup for someone else's crimes.

but what the heck is he doing confessing himself as the reaper here?! surely this can't be the end

edit: sholmes still has a role to play, and the confession is unfound, and there's a gunman to unmask. so this should continue despite the confession (?!)
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three-paged last will and testament...?!
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this part of the trial is super good

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these chants do not sound at all british lmao
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i raised an objection because i didn't think the "evidence" to present could possibly be summoning sholmes' astral projection. that is not evidence, lol

musix is hype enough to get me through this though
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sholmes's troll dance LOLLLLL what the hell
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yeah this is the ultimate deus ex machina moment in a series with a lot of them

but that music sure is great

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I legitimately love the fact that it's worded that way. Having "Raise an objection" and "Present evidence" be two different options made you wonder what the difference could possibly be, because in this series, one almost always means the other. It leaves the deus ex machina completely up to you to remember, so I don't mind this one at all. The way it plays out actually makes this my favorite in the entire series. It's incredible.

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done! man these epilogues are so long
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I didn't realize they were 32 hours long

must have been rough

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took a break after the trial because i didn't think i'd have the hour+ required... and i was right <_<
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so, wrap up of these two games i guess

overall, they felt like they had a lot in common with layton games - trials that were unsatisfying at times, similar scores, similar character designs, multiple-witness trials, and the like

one thing that caught me way off guard was how ryunosuke was so often the smartest person in the room, including me. he'd see things coming that i would only realize after ryunosuke himself pointed it out. there's a moment in 6-5 where apollo recognizes this, but it happens repeatedly in GAA2. i think there's a case to be made that some of this was somewhat poor foreshadowing/logic not following entirely cleanly (G2-3 and G2-4 might have some of this) - but the most notable big twist about the professor killings in G2-5 is brilliant and entirely earned, and ryunosuke saw it coming before i did.

as much as i hate to say it, G2-5 also gave me some 4-4 vibes with the way it ended. just as G1-1 had some 4-1 vibes with the lack of confession and the flimsy-ish way in which the villain was caught, G2-5 decided to follow 4-4's path in having the climax be resolved not by using real evidence, but by pulling a plot device out of its ass. 2-4 arguably suffers a little bit from this as well but is executed so much better it's not even in question. i'm also reminded of 1-2, where the perp confesses to murder because of the threat that a list of his victims will be read (lol).

additionally, G1-5, G2-2, and G2-3 all have a 4-3-like element where you essentially get one character to rat out another or stop defending another. it's an interesting dynamic but IMO, not the most satisfying way to finish off an opponent in court.

so overall, i'm conflicted here. the two-part finale was brilliant in many ways but i have just weird reservations about it!
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Yeah, I loved Ryunosuke as the protagonist. The games felt like his journey, and he routinely impressed me with his approach to trials. It rarely felt like he was bluffing, which is a nice change to recent AA games where they've kind of made it Phoenix's defining feature.

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I'm completely shocked that I liked G2 as much as did. It ended up being my favorite AA game. Hard for me to deny that when my second tier of cases ended up looking like this:


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I need to replay both games, partly to get time stats and partly to solidify my feelings on these cases. I don't know how I'd rank them relative to other games yet.

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i'm almost certain i wouldn't have most of these cases quite that high, due to their at times shocking lows. that said, i really do think ryunosuke might be the single best playable character in the series. (which is not to say i like him overall more than phoenix or edgeworth, but as a playable character, i think he's highly competitive there.) with the "older/saner guy, younger peppier girl" dynamic pretty established at this point - and the series does do it well - the fact that so many of GAA's investigative jokes are at ryunosuke's own expense is fantastic.

currently i have AAI2 as my favorite game overall, in a pretty close heat with AA3 (and i say this having never replayed a case outside of the original three games). GAA2 had a lot of AAI2 vibes throughout it - as the second entry of its gaiden series, it no longer needed to lean into playing with gimmicks so much and could deliver harder-hitting cases. the times it does use the gimmicks wind up being stronger too. AA3 is kind of similar as well; with all of its new mechanics fleshed out in AA2, i've often described the "heart of the lineup" cases - 3-2 and 3-3 - as feeling like a victory lap of sorts.

will think through it a bit before coming out with new full rankingz, which i haven't done since AA5
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