Played on Nintendo 3DS

The Ace Attorney was actually my favorite game series on the original Nintendo DS, and I always talked it up since I felt like it was such an underrated and unknown series. I still hold the games in a pretty high regard, with the first game having one of my favorite story moments in video game history, and the third game ranking among one of my favorite games of all time. However, I feel like something may have changed for me over the years. I started to feel a bit of fatigue from the series, to the point where I just got around to playing this sixth game in the franchise three years after it came out. After playing through Spirit of Justice, I remembered why I loved this series because there are plenty of great moments in it, but I also wasn’t quite as into it as I was previous games in the series.

This entry is a bit different than some of the previous ones. The main shake-up here is the setting. While the rest of the games seemed to take place in a weird hybrid between Los Angeles and Japan, Spirit of Justice mostly takes place in the fictional kingdom of Khura’in. This is where series veteran Maya Fey is completing her spirit training, and so Phoenix goes down to visit here. He soon discovers that the kingdom is on the brink of a revolution, as well as the fact that lawyers are hated in Khura’in. They even have a law called the Defense Culpability Act, which states that if a lawyer chooses to defend someone that’s found guilty, they will also be charged with the same crime.

You can see where this leads to a narrative conflict. Phoenix naturally gets himself caught up in some cases in Khura’in, and each time he has to worry about being imprisoned or killed for defending his client. As anyone who’s played this series will know, the main dealbreaker is how good the cases are. Much like my feelings towards the game as a whole, my opinion is that Spirit of Justice definitely still has some strong cases, but that they didn’t quite live up to previous games for me.

I should mention that I’m not going to talk about the core gameplay here. My reason for this is two-fold. For one thing, if you’ve played a Phoenix Wright game before, you know how this works. The core gameplay is still the same, and so I don’t need to waste my time describing it to you. The other thing is that if you’re a newcomer to the series, I definitely don’t think Spirit of Justice is a good jumping-in point. I would still highly recommend playing the first game, as it’s the most accessible and will give you the best indication on whether or not these games are for you.

I will mention the one big addition to Spirit of Justice though. So, almost every new Ace Attorney game has introduced a new game mechanic, whether it be Phoenix’s ability to see Psyche-Locks in Justice for All, or Apollo’s bracelet from the fourth game that allows him to perceive when people are lying or hiding something. Going in line with the new setting of Khura’in, the new gimmick here is the Divination Seance, a rite that the Royal Priestess performs during court trials. This allows the court to see the final memories of the deceased, and so this gives a better indication of how the victim was killed. This vision is then interpreted by the Royal Priestess and presented as testimony, and so you wind up cross-examining the testimony with something that just doesn’t quite seem right in the memory. Honestly, I’ve pretty much liked every new mechanic that’s been introduced in this series, and Divination Seances are no exception. These are fun ways that help shake up the typical gameplay, so it was a fun time to play with these memories.

Everything else about the game is about on-par with what you’d expect from an Ace Attorney game. Everything looks and sounds great, from the character models to the intense music. There’s always a ridiculous cast of characters in these games, and that’s here in spades as well. My biggest criticism with all of the regular aspects that go into an Ace Attorney game is that I didn’t really care for the prosecutor in this one. I normally find them to be really compelling antagonists, but this one was possibly my least favorite of the series, which is a shame.

I think one thing that took me out of Spirit of Justice is just that it overstayed its welcome for me. This was easily the longest Ace Attorney game, and I think it took me over 40 hours to finish. The introductory case alone took me over four hours, and had no narrative break in it. This is a far-cry from the first game, which had a first case that was maybe 30-60 minutes total. This one just felt really bloated, and there were a lot of points where I just felt like characters were talking for way too long. It unfortunately soured an otherwise fun experience for me.

It’s entirely possible that I’ve just outgrown this series a bit, but Spirit of Justice was probably one of the least fun times I had with an Ace Attorney game. The fourth game is the only one that I’d even consider being worse than this one, but I still think I give it to Spirit of Justice. The thing is, this is probably my least favorite Ace Attorney game, but it’s still a decent game nonetheless. It still has all of the things I always loved about this series, so in the end I’ll never consider it a bad game. It was just dragged down a bit for me by a setting I didn’t care for, an uninteresting prosecutor, and a bloated length. Everything else about the game is still a positive for me, but these things dragged the game down to be my least favorite in the series.

3.5/5