Quick Look – Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (#CapcoMonth)

#CapcoMonth has not been great for me. My initial choice – Resident Evil 4 – made me sick, literally. I have never had motion sickness like that from a game, but apparently, it’s somewhat common for people playing the PC port. So I decided to wholly switch gears, and play a game I’d been really looking forward to – Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.

I really really wanted to like it, but I petered out midway through the third case.

I’ve always maintained that – at least for me – story is more important than gameplay, and in most cases, that’s absolutely true. I can put up with some really dull gameplay. What I don’t have a much patience for is fiddly gameplay that feels like it just doesn’t respect your time.

Maybe I would have felt differently if I had been playing this on a mobile platform instead of PC – I find myself more tolerant of pokey games when I’m comfy in bed. But by the third case, I was playing with a walkthrough up on my second screen, and the continual (and immensely slow) back and forth of the investigation sections finally made me realize, I just didn’t care enough to go through any more of them.

Which is a shame because I did enjoy the courtroom sections well enough, despite them also feeling pretty slow and finicky at times. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is a game that revels in its profound ridiculousness, and it honestly makes the whole thing fairly interesting, especially since I frequently found myself unsure of where it was going to take me next. I could overlook the repetitive nature of reading through the full testimony before the chance to cross-examine, and I think perhaps even something as simple as a direct travel option between locations might have kept me playing. But going from the gate, to the employee area, and then through four screens to the trailer, and then back through those same four screens to the employee area for a fetch quest that would take me back to – you guessed it – the trailer was the breaking point for me. I didn’t want to go on.

That said – #CapcoMonth still isn’t over! With a little over a week left, I’ve decided to revisit the Dead Rising series. I have completed the main story of all four games, but I never did more than dabble in Dead Rising 2: Off the Record – my first attempt was right after completing Dead Rising 2, and that story was still too fresh in my mind to want to basically play it through a second time. Now, I’m a couple years off having played the game for the first time, so it seems like the perfect time to revisit it.

I’m not sure if I’m going to get through the whole thing in the time remaining, but we’ll see how far I can get.