Past the Point of No Return (2 lefts and a wrong turn from easy street)

So recently I've strayed back to twitter, because snarky one-liners about various things (at the moment, mostly Kingdom Hearts - because Meg is playing KH3D - and Phoenix Wright - because I am playing that) take a lot less effort on my part than a full post. However, I have been feeling the vague impulse to make an actual proper post about a few things, and this is one of those things.

As alluded to above, I am currently replaying the Ace Attorney/Gyakuten series of games on DS in preparation for Gyakuten Saiban 5, AKA Ace Attorney Dual Destinies. I've got it in Japanese - not least because I have a Japanese 3DS and 3DSes are region-coded - but I originally played the first 4 Ace Attorney games in English. I did play Gyakuten Kenji (AKA Ace Attorney Investigations) in Japanese, though. Which is not the point of this post, but is some possibly interesting context.

So, I am currently replaying the series. Skipping Apollo Justice, because the system drove me crazy and I'm still mad about Hobo Phoenix and the lack of recurring characters, I have played through the three original games with Phoenix Wright as the main character and am now back on the first of the Miles Edgeworth investigation games. It has been quite a few years since I played them the first time - I remember Investigations was on display at Tokyo Game Show in 2008, when I was living in Japan and attended the show, and I was excited about the replica of Edgeworth's office, so I must have played the 4 Ace Attorney games before I even went to Japan for the first time - which makes it a good 6 years ago now. There is a lot of nostalgia, and a some interesting things I have forgotten about some of the central cases, but there is also a lot of gnashing of teeth and rending of garments and screaming WHYYYY at the complete lack of legal sense to the games.

Obviously I love the games, or I wouldn't be replaying them now and I wouldn't have bought the new game. I mostly love the gameplay (although, Apollo Justice, less so in your case...) and the characters and the plot (... again, I am side-eyeing the whole hobo Phoenix thing here). Nevertheless, as a lawyer, sometimes the illogic drives me up the wall. I mean, I am sure non-lawyers also stop and go "wtf?" at the fact that you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that SOMEONE ELSE DID IT for the person on trial to be found not guilty... but I suspect that my own desire to howl NOOO, WHYYY at the screen or choke with incredulous laughter and bang my head against a wall is exacerbated by my training and profession. I know I did headdesk at a lot of this stuff the first time round, but I swear it is worse this time. Which is odd, actually, because I don't practice criminal law and I would have studied criminal law not that long before playing the games, so it should have been a lot fresher in my mind. Perhaps it was just as frustrating, and I am misremembering this.

However, like with movies and TV shows that are so bad they are funny, at a certain point all this legal ludicrousness becomes as hilariously ridiculous as it is insanely maddening, and so I have turned it into a game and started keeping a list of things that nobody in the Ace Attorney/Gyakuten universe really knows or cares about. In all fairness, I am approaching this from the angle of an Australian lawyer and the Gyakuten legal system is (loosely) based on the Japanese legal system, so some of these things don't apply or at least not to the same extent if you view it in that context. Still, at least some of this stuff is universal, and either way it amused me, so: I present to you the list of things that nobody in the Ace Attorney/Gyakuten universe legal systems knows or cares about.

So far, having just replayed AA 1-3, skipped replaying Apollo Justice, and starting to replay Ace Attorney Investigations/Gyakuten Kenji, this list includes:

( Things that no one knows or cares about in Ace Attorney )

Okay, done for now. I mock because I care! XD Wow, that took hours. This is why I stopped updating my LJ so much.

Meanwhile, I just walked out to the kitchen and my parents were watching The Lincoln Lawyer. Now there is an interesting contrast to Phoenix's guilty client...