Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice Review

It’s been three years since the last Ace Attorney entry, Dual Destinies, but it feels longer. There is something to be said for any game series that can make you miss the characters within it, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice brings back just enough familiar faces to keep that smile on your face whilst sending you on yet another crazy set of cases.

The Ace Attorney series is a light-hearted, goofy and refreshingly positive set of visual novels, based around a slightly bizarre and always ludicrous courtroom setting. Spirit of Justice is the sixth mainline entry and brings a few tricks of its own to the table.

The game once again sees the return of lawyer Phoenix Wright, visiting the Kingdom of Khura’in to check on his friend Maya Fey, and his fellow attorney Apollo Justice, who is holding the fort at the Wright Anything Agency with his partner, Athena Cykes.

As soon as Phoenix lands in Khura’in he gets dragged into defending the enthusiastic monk-in-training Ahlbi. It is immediately clear that Khura’in has a very different approach in the courtroom as the country has no defense attorneys and seems to despise them with a passion.

Khurain deals with its crime using spirit mediums who visualise the last few moments of a victim’s death to cast verdicts with no chance for the accused to defend themselves. Phoenix, not wanting to see Ahlbi wrongly sentenced extends his services leaving the court aghast; so starts the adventure.

The Ace Attorney games are split into episodes, each episode being a new case and each having two phases of gameplay; Investigation and Trial. During the Investigation phase you visit locations, talk to people and examine objects trying to discover the truth of what happened. The Trial phase involves you cross-examining and interrogating people on the stand to find inconsistencies from the evidence you uncovered in the Investigation phase.

There are a variety of mechanics that show up throughout the cases in Spirit of Justice, the Mood Matrix returns from Dual Destinies; this allows you to spot when someone's mood doesn’t match what they said, as does the use of Apollo’s bracelet that lets him perceive subtle hints of tension during testimony. The new mechanic for Spirit of Justice however is the Divination Séance, this allows for the last moments of a victim to be seen but also visualises the feelings and senses they had at the time.

The use of all these mechanics together could have felt muddled and confusing but they do a good job of using them sparingly. Other elements from prior games return like the case notes system from Dual Destinies to help give you guidance on what to be doing as well as the ability to examine more locations (even if there is no reason to) which helps make the game feel less linear.

Unfortunately a niggling issue from prior games has also carried over into the latest entry, one that’s been around since the first game. During Trial phases, it can still sometimes be difficult to tell exactly what item you should present and on what line of dialogue to successfully point out a contradiction. It doesn’t happen as frequently in Spirit of Justice as in the older titles but sometimes you are on the right track but the object/line you think points out the issue doesn’t, leading to some trial and error on occasion.

The writing and characters are where the game shines however. Just like the prior entries the localisation team have done an amazing job of keeping the writing sharp, the characters fun and interesting whilst keeping the whole thing a joy to play no matter how ridiculous the situations from start to finish. There are the usual array of puns and great character humour along with the Ace Attorney trademark of twists within twists within twists. I pretty much had a smile on my face the whole time and even laughed out loud on occasion.

Capcom have always done right with the Ace Attorney games, every single one has been hugely entertaining. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice is a fantastic entry in the series and I honestly hope it’s not three more years before I can check back in on how these characters are doing.