Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney took a step forward recently. Capcom has been porting games in the Ace Attorney series to additional platforms for a while now. When this installment moved from the Nintendo DS to the Nintendo 3DS, something special happened. It received some rather welcome touch ups along the way. While the basic gameplay remains the same, the adjustments are ones that make the overall experience a little more comfortable for those playing.
As a reminder, Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is the entry that skipped ahead a few years to follow an entirely new lawyer after Phoenix Wright retired. Apollo Justice is an enthusiastic young defense attorney just starting out, reinvigorating the series, and it not only offered a host of new features that allowed people to better examine crime scenes with new actions like the ability to rotate evidence to see it in 3D, more closely investigate the area with tools, or sometimes even use the system’s mic. While there are cameos from classic characters, it focuses on new lawyers and controversies. It also gave Apollo a new courtroom tool; he can watch people on the stand to see if they have any “tells” that show they are lying.
One of the biggest changes in Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is the way everything looks and even sounds. Capcom touched up the game, so things look a bit crisper and better on the Nintendo 3DS. Naturally, there is 3D added to the game too. It is absolutely more visually appealing on a Nintendo handheld than ever before, which is absolutely appreciated. Especially since it looks at least twice as good as the original Nintendo DS version of the game does if you try to play it on the Nintendo 3DS.
What I really appreciate in Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is the text skip features. This is not my first time playing through the game, after all. Sometimes, you know exactly what is going on and you just want to get through flavor text and exposition to get down to investigations and trials. This version lets you skip both seen and unseen text, something anyone who enjoys visual novels will appreciate. It feels like a step forward in terms of efficiency.
The ability to choose the edition of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is also an incredibly cool extra. The digital copy includes the English and Japanese versions of the game. This means that, if someone can read Japanese, they can go through the original version of Gyakuten Saiban 4. That means Japanese voices. It also means different images. The localization of the game didn’t just change text. It also altered various in-game images to change the look of food, signs, books, and other notable items to make them look more like things people would see in their native region. It’s quite a cool feature, especially if someone understands enough of the language to see how the two versions differ.
The Ace Attorney games are classics that transition well between systems. Especially with tweaks that make them better fit their current platform. The Nintendo 3DS version of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney feels like a rather comfortable port. People can easily jump in, enjoy new text skip features, savor visuals that look much better on this system than the Nintendo DS original cartridge, and even turn to the Japanese version of the game. It’s quite comprehensive, which is nice for those who missed out or want to revisit this fourth installment in the series.
Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is available for the Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS, and both Android and Apple iOS devices.
