Bridge to the Turnabout, Day Three Trial

Hallo, alle miteinander, and welcome once again to Wright Wednesday. This is the weekly blog series where we recap, analyze, and review the various cases of the Ace Attorney series. But more than that, today is it. The final day of trial, the final trial, the final game in the original trilogy of Ace Attorney. I am Roy and I think ten installment series are better than trilogies.

I'm Sam and I think the best length for a series is as long as it takes to tell its story.

The time has come, so why don't you start it off, Sam?

Alright, let's go!

Before the trial, Edgeworth has some surprising news: Iris is being prepped to testify for the prosecution. What’s more, Godot has returned and taken over the case while von Karma continues to work at the Sacred Cavern. If all goes well, the locks should be off within three hours. But for now, we begin the trial, knowing there are still many unanswered questions.

Can I just preview the analysis to say that Franziska is an unspoken MVP here?

The one bit of good news is that the judge apparently developed a fever, and our usual, less creepy Judge is taking his place! Though apparently the two are siblings, so that’s disappointing. Godot gives his usual, cryptic opening statement, then claims that Iris has a confession to make. Phoenix wonders why she wouldn’t have discussed this with him first, but nonetheless, she takes the stand.

Does that mean our usual Judge is also Canadian? Or do they have some strange backstory that led them to being raised in two different countries?

Tune in later in Wright Wednesday when we tackle the totally-real spinoff game, "Canadian Bros: Ace Judges".

Back in the original trilogy though, Iris says she can’t keep covering up the truth. She did have a part in the murder: or, more specifically, the cover-up. She took the body to the statue and desecrated it. When the Judge asks to clarify whether she was an accomplice to the murder, she says that’s correct. Phoenix is frustrated, and crumples up Iris’ testimony, removing it from the Court Record. But Iris’ new story is much more problematic. Apparently, she helped cover up the murder to fulfill her duty as a Kurain temple nun: to protect Maya, the real killer. She testifies that Elise (Misty) attacked Maya with her staff, and Maya managed to get the staff and defend herself, killing the victim.

Not only is this a strange change of story from her...Iris definitely seems to be acting differently as well.

When Pressed on the details, Iris claims that the victim threw her staff away to pull out a knife. Phoenix reveals the fact that the staff had a sword inside it, positing there was no reason to abandon it and use a knife when it already had a much better blade built-in. Godot tries to wiggle out of this, which means it’s time to break out the big secret: the victim was in fact Misty Fey, Maya’s mother. The prosecution will have a difficult time establishing a motive for her to attack her own daughter.

Or will he?

Godot has another ace up his sleeve, however. There was a bloody dagger at the crime scene, conveniently stuck on the opposite side of the tree and out of the player’s view. The Judge accepts it into evidence, and orders an immediate blood test. Iris then testifies again, giving more detail about the battle between Maya and Misty. After Maya was supposedly hit on the head with the staff, she dodged the next attack and stole Misty’s weapon. Misty was backed up against the stone lantern, and Maya stabbed her. Misty removed the knife and flung it away, then collapsed.

This testimony contradicts one of the earliest facts of the case: that the victim was stabbed in the back. At this point, there are enough inconsistencies to doubt the whole testimony, but Godot explains them all away by repeating Iris’ claim that it was too dark to see the fight clearly. But what’s more, the stone lantern at the crime scene is supposed to be lit whenever an acolyte is studying there. But it wasn’t that night, because the wick needed replacing. So the Garden was left in near-total darkness. Not only would Iris have a hard time seeing what happened, but Maya and Misty could well have fought without recognizing each other.

Which doesn't explain at all why one would be trying to murder the other, but Godot really doesn't seem to think explaining any of that is necessary.

The lantern is accepted into evidence, at which point both the Judge and Godot are surprised to see that it has the word “Maya” written upside-down in blood. This reminds Iris that it took a second for Misty to collapse after being stabbed, so she must have been using that time to write Maya’s name on the lantern. This is when we get a big revelation: Godot can’t see the bloody writing, likely due to his eyesight and/or visor. This shakes Godot more than anything we’ve seen so far.

It's definitely the first time this day of trial that Godot has seemed anything other than calm.

Iris then testifies that she called out to Maya after the fight, thinking it was her duty to protect the future Master of the Kurain Tradition. So she removed the body from the Inner Temple and dragged it across the bridge to load it onto the snowmobile and drive it back to the main temple. She then set up the scene we found in the first segment. She intended to return to the Inner Temple, but once seen by Sister Bikini she couldn’t. When asked about the snowmobile tracks, she clarifies that it had stopped snowing by the time she moved the body, so there was only one fresh set of tracks.

The issue here is that the snow stopped almost immediately before the bridge caught on fire, leaving Iris no time to get the body across after the snow stopped. Iris somehow wasn’t aware that the bridge had caught on fire, and this gets her sweating. But Godot swoops in, pointing out that even if Iris is lying about these details, it doesn’t change the relevant facts: that the victim was murdered in the Garden, and Sister Bikini saw Iris desecrating the body later on. Iris claims that she “wasn’t herself” that night, so her memory is hazy.

It's one of the worst dodges I've ever seen.

Godot challenges Phoenix to explain how else the body was transported to the main temple if the bridge was out, and Iris testifies again to explain how the body was moved. She says little of importance, basically just that she must have gotten confused. Godot provides a picture of the burned bridge, which is definitely not crossable and has a severed suspension wire hanging down from it. Which means it’s time to bring one of the stranger pieces of evidence into play: Laurice’s drawing of a body flying over the bridge.

Or...is that what it shows, after all?

That is indeed the question! With a strange hint from Godot and a somewhat misleading multiple-choice question, we figure out that the drawing is accurate; it’s just upside down. Unsurprisingly, Laurice made a mistake, but the “why” is what’s important here; he had fallen asleep waiting for Iris, and woke up on his back to the sound of the thunder before looking up toward the bridge. He saw it upside-down, and painted it that way!

To be fair to Laurice, I absolutely do stuff like that right after waking up. It's a weird headspace.

This, of course, changes the situation significantly; the body could not have flown above the bridge, but it could have swung underneath it on one of the severed wires hanging down, seen clearly in the photo of the burned bridge. However preposterous this may seem, it’s the only explanation that makes everything else make sense.

Godot asks for more proof that this happened, at which point Phoenix presents the autopsy report: the body fell 10 feet after death. This had been a mystery up to this point, but swinging in the air and landing on the other side of the bridge could explain it handily. This would also explain how the crystal got knocked loose from the victim’s staff and left in the snow on that side of the chasm.

This...I don't know if we should save this for the analysis, but I am as skeptical of this whole thing as you were of the fake murder in Recipe for Turnabout, maybe even moreso.

Understandable. There are certainly elements of this the prosecution could have easily challenged, if not for the fact that it's the truth and they wouldn't want to call attention to its implausibility.

Regardless, this seems to be fairly definitive. Godot has a rebuttal, though. If the body was swung across the chasm while the bridge burned, there must have been an accomplice on the other side, ready to take it to the main temple. The answer can only be that this accomplice…was Iris. It contradicts her testimony, but only Iris and Bikini had the keys to the snowmobile, and Bikini’s back would not have allowed her to pick up a dead body. Not to mention, Iris was seen in the courtyard, stabbing the victim’s corpse, and was certainly not stuck on the other side of the chasm while being held in police custody.

I have to wonder if you saw what was about to be revealed coming.

I did this time, but I'm pretty sure I didn't when I first played it.

Phoenix asks why Iris didn’t mention this before; if this is the proven method of moving the body, she must have known about it. So why lie? Unless, Phoenix posits…she’s not Iris. She’s been acting strangely this whole time, not to mention she knows information Iris couldn’t while not knowing other information that Iris should. This isn’t Iris. It’s Dahlia.

And she has been Dahlia since the earthquake in the middle of yesterday's investigation. Hence why I wanted to hold off Iris talk at the time: most of that information didn't come from Iris at all.

But of course, this stretches believability for the average court-goer. Dahlia was executed for her crimes a month ago. Even Godot goes to bat for this theory, and Phoenix brings up that Iris and Dahlia have the blood of the main Kurain family in their veins. Godot worries all this is too coincidental, but Phoenix knows it was no coincidence. He brings out Morgan’s instructions to Pearl, which call for the channeling of Dahlia Hawthorne on that night at the Inner Temple. Based on when Iris was seen where, we deduce that the Iris at dinner, and who gave Phoenix her hood, was the real Iris. Meaning the Iris at the Inner Temple, who Sister Bikini saw the night of the murder, was Dahlia Hawthorne inhabiting the body of a spirit medium.

It's a pretty perfect explanation for explaining all the inconsistencies in Iris's character and testimony.

Godot brings up a problem, though. Iris has been under supervision ever since the night of the crime, so there was no opportunity for Dahlia to switch places with her. But Phoenix remembers that, yesterday, Iris ran from Edgeworth during the earthquake and was found a few minutes later at the Training Hall. Phoenix believes Dahlia and Iris switched places there. At this, Dahlia finally drops the act. Her mannerisms change, the music switches to Dahlia’s theme, and she openly declares her name and deceased status.

It's a pretty great moment, and one I'm sure made Samuel's blood pressure rise.

Oh yeah. There are some new animations at play here, that weren't even in previous Dahlia cases, and they are extremely effective. The whole mood just switches, and it's so good.

No longer hiding her identity or role in the scheme, Dahlia goes on to testify about the plot. Before she died, Morgan Fey enlisted her in a plan to kill Maya and frame Iris for the murder, ensuring Pearl would become the head of the Kurain tradition. Phoenix immediately objects to the idea that Maya was the original target, but at Godot's behest he begins the cross-examination.

It is so weird that Phoenix is befuddled at Maya being the target. Like...Phoenix. Dude. C'mon. It's a plan by Morgan. Who else would it be targeted at?

What follows is a ton of explanation, so buckle up. For one, Morgan made the plan before Dahlia’s death, having been held in the same facility as her. She originally planned on killing Dahlia herself, but that plan changed over time into what was enacted in this case. We also find out that Dahlia is the one who convinced her father to abandon Iris at the temple, since she found her sister to be a nuisance and Dahlia wanted more of her father’s inheritance in the long run. In other words, most of the tragic backstory we’ve discovered in this case all comes back to Dahlia Hawthorne.

To be fair, it pretty much equally comes back to Morgan.

That's true, which we will certainly talk about in the analysis.

Despite her central role in all this, Dahlia sees it all with the clear eye of a master manipulator. She regularly and explicitly speaks to her own self-centeredness, claiming she never did anything for anyone other than herself, and recognizes that Morgan’s plan had nothing to do with Pearl’s wishes. She just wanted to reassert her bloodline into the Master’s position, regardless of what Pearl wanted or what role she would have to play. Thus, the plan to have Pearl channel Dahlia, using this innocent child to kill a person she dearly loved. And since Pearl would have the appearance of Dahlia at the time, anyone seeing the murder would see her twin, Iris, committing the act.

It's...I was going to call it a well thought out plan, but I wouldn't go that far. It is evil as heck though.

It had the weakness of relying on a child who didn't know the plan, and the unpredictability that brings, but it also accurately predicted how that child would act. As we'll see soon, it would have worked perfectly had Misty not figured it out and stepped in.

That said, Dahlia insists that while the plan may have gone off the rails, it still ultimately succeeded. Maya Fey, she says, is certainly dead. This is when she turns her ire directly at “Feenie,” mockingly using his nickname from their relationship and saying she always despised him for his naivete and his faith in others. When asked, she says Morgan’s plan was greedy and arbitrary, and nothing to be proud of, but she went along with it for her own satisfaction. Killing Maya Fey was the only way she could get revenge.

In other news, Dahlia is still the worst.

One last side-note about all this; Godot is abnormally silent during this portion, and only really chimes in to clarify things with Dahlia rather than to counter or reprimand Phoenix. We can guess why the change in attitude, given his history with Dahlia.

He's definitely a lot more restrained, and picking apart his motives and his feelings throughout this trial is definitely going to be a hot topic later.

After the exposition, Phoenix posits that Dahlia’s revenge had nothing to do with Maya, but instead, everything to do with the woman who put her on death row: Mia Fey, Maya’s older sister who died in the first game, while Dahlia was awaiting execution. Unable to take vengeance against Mia, she went along with Morgan’s plan so she could do the next-best thing. Kill Maya, so Mia’s spirit would know even in the afterlife that Dahlia took her beloved little sister from the world.

She explains more details about what happened that night. She materialized into this world at 9:30pm, pinning her hair up and putting on her hood to pass as Iris. Phoenix notes internally that this means Misty Fey was the one who channeled her. Sister Bikini didn’t notice, of course. Then, Dahlia explains, she cornered Maya at the stone lantern, took out the dagger, and stabbed her.

Or at least tried to.

Yep, but that's not how she puts it. As far as the court knows, Maya Fey was stabbed. This revelation is…not taken well. Obviously. 

Dahlia continues, saying her memory is strangely fuzzy after that, but she thinks she was stabbed as well. She’s certain it must have been Maya, so she scrawled Maya’s name on the lantern behind her back before leaving the body she was inhabiting. This is, of course, nearly the exact story she told the court earlier while posing as Iris, but acknowledging the correct positions and identities of those involved.

But from here, her memory stops. More specifically, she has no memory of actually killing Maya. When she woke up later, she was in the Sacred Cavern, surrounded by darkness. She swore not to return to the underworld until she was sure Maya Fey was dead, but try as she might, she couldn’t get past the trick lock at the entrance.

Her testimony is full of holes, but not because she's lying anymore. After all, Dahlia has very little reason to lie anymore.

She was trapped in the cavern until early in the morning, when someone came to the Training Hall. Dahlia hid in the cavern to avoid discovery, so she wasn’t sure who it was. But Phoenix knows it could only have been Maya or Pearl, and that Pearl did enter the cave at one point to cover the wall scroll in gravy.

However it happened, by the time Dahlia did manage to get out, the bridge had been fixed and the investigation was ongoing, so she couldn’t leave without being spotted. She returned to the cavern and locked herself in until, as luck would have it, Iris showed up alone after the earthquake. Dahlia left, and locked Iris inside in her place with the five trick locks. Meaning those five locks that spontaneously turned up were Dahlia’s doing, and she impersonated Iris from that point on.

It's a long info dump, for sure, but at the very least it feels satisfying (at least to me) to finally get an explanation that solves so many of the issues surrounding this case.

For sure. It really clicks things into place, despite being long, convoluted, and still not the full, accurate picture.

Trust me, we're going to be talking about the plot of this case later, I assure you of that.

It’s then, when she got out and caught up on recent events, that Dahlia realized who had actually summoned her the night before. Not Pearl, as planned, but Misty Fey. Dahlia’s blackout coincides with the time Misty’s body would have been moved to the courtyard. So Dahlia may not have gotten to kill Maya with her own hands, but if her deductions about how that night went are correct, she did effectively force Maya to kill her own mother. In many ways, a far more tragic and torturous fate.

Which she gloats about, because it's Dahlia.

Oh yeah, she loves it. This is the whole reason she thinks the plan was successful despite not going as planned.

Phoenix doesn’t want to accept this, but Dahlia says the evidence points to it. Maya hasn’t been found; she was unable to escape from the Inner Temple due to the burned bridge, but certainly isn’t in the Sacred Cavern either. The only other place Maya could be, in Dahlia’s estimation, is at the bottom of the Eagle River, having flung herself down after realizing she killed her own long-lost mother. Considering most bodies that fall in the river are lost, it’s reasonable to think she wouldn’t have been--and in fact, could not be--found.

It is funny that the river is frequently referred to as deadly, how bodies aren't found, when the two people we know have fallen in for sure are the ones currently talking about it. They both survived!

...okay, well, Dahlia is dead but not from that.

I've found that strange in both this and the previous cases. Its notorious undercurrents are basically just there for the sake of tension in this moment, since it doesn't really affect anything else.

Just as everyone is processing the idea of Maya's suicide, Godot’s phone interrupts. Investigators just got past the locks in the cave, and inside was…Iris. Not Maya. Obviously, this supports Dahlia’s story. And so, this case seems to be over. Dahlia possessed Misty to attack Maya, who killed Misty in self-defense. Upon realizing she had killed her own mother, Maya cast herself into the river in grief. But...Godot seems unshaken.

“Once you eliminate the impossible,” he says, “whatever remains must be the truth.” No matter how improbable. Echoing the exact same predicament in Mia’s first trial against Dahlia, he points out that Maya could not have jumped into the river from that side of the chasm. There’s a rock shelf there. She would have simply jumped to the rocks, and her body would have been found there.

I think that quote originates (in some form) from Sherlock Holmes? Or, I suppose in this game's universe, Herlock Sholmes.

Given the circumstances, all the reasonable places for Maya to be have been eliminated. Except one. In this courtroom, at the stand. Apparently, Dahlia thinks Pearl Fey is the one currently channeling her. But Phoenix knows that’s false. Pearl tried, after all, and couldn’t do it. Likely because someone else already was. She tried the next day as well, and still couldn’t. And Pearl has been present since then, while Dahlia was disguised as Iris. The one currently channeling Dahlia Hawthorne is none other than Maya Fey.
 
Maya must have known that the only way to protect herself from Dahlia was to channel her herself, so Dahlia couldn’t find her and would, ideally, assume she had been killed already. This could have been dangerous if Dahlia figured it out, but thankfully, Dahlia thought Pearl had been the one channeling her. Not realizing that Maya had been hiding as her vessel the whole time.

It's one of those twists that you can pretty easily work out yourself ahead of time, if you're in the right frame of mind, but still feels largely well-executed.

There was certainly a point at which I felt there were no possibilities left but that Dahlia was possessing Maya, but it's a surprising enough idea that I'm not sure it would have occurred to me if I hadn't already played it. It's a pretty great twist though, even if it is a little predictable by the time it comes out.

This breaks Dahlia. The idea that she was played for a fool by Maya Fey, a naive little girl, is abhorrent to her, and she refuses to believe she could have come up with such an idea. Which is when Mia shows up, channeled by Pearl. This visibly upsets Godot and Dahlia alike. According to Mia, Maya lost consciousness at the same time as Dahlia during the fight, and woke up in the training hall. She wrote a note asking what she should do, and channeled Mia. Knowing the danger Dahlia posed if channeled by someone else, like Pearl, Mia wrote two responses: channel Dahlia Hawthorne as soon as possible, and lock herself in the Sacred Cavern until help could arrive.

Probably not in that exact order.

Now it’s Phoenix’s turn to taunt Dahlia. He points out that not a single one of her crimes truly succeeded. The fake kidnapping resulted in her needing to kill her own sister before the truth came out. Her attempt to kill Phoenix misfired and got her a death sentence. And even from the grave, this plan didn’t work either. When Dahlia gets angry at Mia, she responds by saying Dahlia will never defeat her: in life, death, or anywhere in between, for all eternity.

Phoenix then says that, despite Dahlia’s insistence that she couldn’t be punished since she was already dead, the spirit, the ego, lives on forever. And she’ll never escape the punishment of this failure. Her immortal soul will live with this humiliation forever. And with that, she has the mother of all Ace Attorney freakouts: her spirit splits from Maya’s body and dissolves into blue flame in the shape of a Magatama, reliving all her crimes and failures until she finally disappears back into the ether, leaving Maya to collapse at the stand.

It's pretty epic, and they make a great point: despite how evil she was, Dahlia is kind of a failure on every level.

Some time later, Iris takes the stand, having been freed from the cavern. Phoenix notices how comfortable the Judge is with all this spirit channeling stuff now, and he says he studied up on the Kurain Channeling Technique. All cases, he says, take place in their own world, and to get to the truth behind them one must immerse themselves in that world completely. He then readies himself to give the verdict…but Godot objects. Takes a sip of coffee. And mentions that they still don’t know who killed Misty Fey. Dahlia said she was stabbed, and one way or another, someone must have killed her. And until they know who, Iris is still on trial. So, Godot calls the prosecution’s final witness: Maya Fey.

I love that little speech from the Judge.

The Judge agrees to this, following a recess so the doctor can ensure Maya’s health. Before the break, Godot tells Phoenix he doesn’t think much of him as a lawyer. He somehow manages to barely win cases without actually understanding them, until “some beautiful woman” dashes in to save him. And he says that this time, Phoenix will have to do this by himself.

In the lobby, Iris apologizes for being absent this whole time, and Phoenix asks why she helped Dahlia out so much. Iris says that she felt sorry for Dahlia; she was abandoned by her mother, unloved by her father, and lacked the mother figure Iris had in Sister Bikini. She admired Dahlia’s intelligence and strength, and wanted to help her. But she ran from the kidnapping incident, and thus blames herself for Valerie’s death later on. Following this, of course, Dahlia poisoned Diego Armando, and tried to kill Phoenix.

It's really interesting, and I am sure that we, or at least I, will dig into Iris's character further in the analysis.

This analysis segment is sure to be a real doozy. Prepare for the longest Wright Wednesday post yet.

One more question for Iris during the recess: did she really transport Misty Fey’s body? And yes, she says, she did. After ringing the lights out bell, she went back to her room, and got a call at 10:30pm saying to come to the Inner Temple. But by the time she got there, the bridge was on fire. Then, another call, detailing the way the body had been swung across the chasm with the staff still inside the wound to keep it from bleeding too much.

This confirms the cane sword was indeed the true murder weapon. Iris didn’t want anyone to know the staff was the murder weapon, hoping to avoid revealing the victim’s true identity as Misty Fey. So she stabbed the body with the ceremonial sword, cleaned the cane sword’s blade, and left the staff on the ground near the body. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know who the mysterious caller was.

As Iris is called away to speak to the Judge, she tells Phoenix to meet her afterward. There’s something she wants to tell him. Once she leaves, Mia shows up, still in Pearl’s body. Maya is weak but fine, she says, though obviously emotionally traumatized. Mia filled her in on everything, including her mother’s identity and death. The real killer, Phoenix knows, must have known of Dahlia’s plan and stayed at the Inner Temple through the following day, since the bridge was out. And that’s all Phoenix knows as he goes back in to finally end this nightmare.

As court reconvenes, the Judge has an important announcement: the blood test on the dagger has finally come back in. While they don’t know whose blood it is, they do know whose it isn’t, and that is the victim’s. Things look grave, as before Maya takes the stand Godot takes the time to make it clear that she’s physically weak, so no matter what happens, it needs to be done quickly. This is also, oddly enough, the first time in the series that Maya has stood at the stand and testified.

For as many times as she's been accused of things, you'd think she'd have done this at some point.

When Maya appears, she gives her occupation as “assistant manager at Wright and Co Law Offices”. The Judge brings up that she’s also a spirit medium, but that just makes Maya say that, after all that’s happened, she doesn’t want anything to do with her family occupation any more. Which...honestly, that’s fair. When asked about what she saw, Maya tries to avoid answering, but Godot cuts in, telling her to stand up straight and tell the truth. She can cry later.

It's definitely understandable, but I still think it's sad. And the moment is done well, too. She hesitates for a moment before listing her occupation at Wright and Co Law Offices, and it's clear that she's wrestling at this point with how she fits into such a phenomenally messed up picture. And just, in general, her sprite work here is very down and sad, and it makes me want to punch everyone who hurt our dear sweet Maya.

He also says something about Maya having seen everything that’s gone on, how they’ve worked to find the truth, and...I hope he’s talking about that in a general sense? Because Maya has literally not been present for any part of this trial.

Maya gives a testimony, but it’s rather vague. She basically just says she was on her way to a spare prep room, got hit over the head, called for help, then passed out when something wet splashed on her. Phoenix tries to coach Maya into saying it was Dahlia who attacked her, but Maya can’t testify to that. It was too dark, and she can’t remember who it was. Not only that, but it’s clear throughout her testimony how physically and emotionally exhausted Maya is, it’s hard for her to really keep the conversation going.

Cross-examining a freshly traumatized witness always sucks. And sucks more when it's Maya.

The key is to Press her on screaming out for help, which leads to her mentioning she thought it was her “last hope”. Digging into that detail in particular, Phoenix notes how strange that is. Maya clears it up by clarifying that she wasn’t screaming it at her attacker, but to someone else who was standing behind that person. The words barely leave her mouth before Maya realizes what she’s done: she was trying to hide that.

The first confusing indication that Maya is hiding something, a dynamic which makes this whole segment rather interesting in my opinion. I really like the way this one progresses, using our understanding of the case and the motivations of the relevant actors to cast doubt on the broad strokes we think we know.

This adds a new statement to the testimony, one where Maya claims she could see a man behind her attacker using the light from the stone lantern. That’s a clear contradiction, however, as we know already that the stone lantern wasn’t able to be lit at the time of the crime. Phoenix notes as he Objects that, considering the circumstances, the man who Maya saw has to be the killer. Misty Fey was stabbed through the back, there was a splash of something wet (probably blood), and Maya fainted. This means Maya knows who killed her mother, and she’s protecting him.

Strange indeed. Especially considering she just now found out it was her mother who was killed. You'd think the trauma and grief would be too fresh for her to protect the killer, no matter who it is or why. Just more mystery for this final stretch.

Godot tries to cover for Maya, saying that her addled mental state is causing her to slip up. But of course, that ignores the fact she literally just said that she was trying to hide the very existence of the man behind her attacker. There’s a bigger contradiction at work as well: Maya couldn’t see someone directly in front of her, but she could see someone standing behind them, in the pitch black night of the garden. How is that possible?

I will say, and we'll get into why very soon, but I find it interesting how Godot's demeanor changes here. He's still working against Phoenix, but it starts to feel less manipulative and more performative? He also treats Maya better than I would expect. Like, it starts to feel a little like those moments when the prosecutor works with Phoenix, though he's obviously still working to obscure something rather than reveal it.

After noting that Maya clearly must know her mother’s killer, hence why she’s trying to protect him, Phoenix believes he can explain how exactly she was able to see and recognize this man despite there being no light sources around. In fact, Phoenix claims it was the darkness that made seeing this person even easier. While Maya is begging Phoenix not to do what he’s about to do, Godot challenges Phoenix to name the killer. So, who is it? Why, Prosecutor Godot, of course. His mask emits light, in a very distinctive pattern, which let Maya know right away who he was.

I will say, it's a strange twist compared to the other time the prosecutor was the murderer. Manfred von Karma was clearly involved in the situation from the start, and so obviously evil that it came as little surprise that he turned out to be the ultimate villain. Godot's involvement with all this isn't completely out of nowhere, but it's definitely less telegraphed than that, in my opinion. But then, his involvement is far more nuanced as well, which we'll find out in a minute.

Phoenix demonstrates his point by having the courtroom’s lights turned off, so everyone can see the glowing red light of Godot for themselves. Godot is completely calm, and just asks the Judge to direct questions about the situation to the witness. Maya denies it was Godot, though, and claims she thought the killer was a man for a completely different reason, which leads to a new testimony.

Her new explanation is that the next thing she knew, she woke up in the Inner Temple. Heading back out to the Garden, it was still dark but Maya could see now thanks to the torches all being lit. She saw how the crime scene had been tampered with, including how all the snow had been removed. It was a lot of work to do in a short time frame, and that’s why Maya thought the killer had to be a man.

It's kind of a flimsy excuse.

That, and a tricky testimony: you need to Press Maya on her third and fourth statements, about exactly what had changed, before going back to Press the second. That leads to a new statement, where she claims all this was done to protect her, but there’s a big issue with that.

If the killer was trying to hide all evidence that pointed to Maya as a suspect, he should have removed the bloody writing on the lantern. But we know exactly why Godot couldn’t do that: he can’t see it. It’s the same reason he had to remove that enormous patch of snow, rather than just removing the snow with blood in it: Godot can’t see red on a white background. They even flashback to the incident with the apron from Recipe for a Turnabout as another example of it happening.

Yep. That detail is really well set up, I think. Multiple hints, big enough to be noticed but not called to attention enough to be completely obvious.

At this point, Phoenix formally accuses Godot of being the murderer, and he reacts by continuing to be fairly calm as he denies it. Maya is eager to defend him though, claiming he can’t be the killer because he wasn’t trapped on the Inner Temple side. However, Godot himself Objects, making it clear that isn’t something Maya can actually testify about. After all, for most of the time after the murder, Maya didn’t exist, she was channeling a spirit. However, Maya insists on testifying anyway, and Phoenix asks to allow it.

This is the kind of thing I mean. Even when his own guilt is on the line, he insists on a fair trial. I imagine we'll have some things to say about this in analysis.

Maya testifies that, even if she was gone, she did hear about what Pearl experienced. She was alone on that side of things, only getting company after the bridge was repaired and Godot found her. The Judge points out that testifying about what someone else told you isn’t really allowed, but Godot doesn’t mind, so apparently that makes it admissible.

Pressing the statement about him finding Pearl leads to a chance to ask him about his investigation of the Inner Temple. He mentions seeing the hanging scroll of Misty Fey covered in gravy, and that’s his mistake: if he’d never been to the Inner Temple before, how would he have known that’s who the scroll was showing?

A surprising slip-up from Godot, but then I suppose he couldn't have known the scroll was covered in gravy now.

Even then, Maya is still trying to defend Godot. She brings up that, with the Master’s symbol on the top, he could have known it was her just from that. But Phoenix points out that Godot didn’t just say it was Misty, he identified that kind of clothing she was wearing in the art. Thus, Godot was at the Inner Temple the entire time. Godot questions how he would have known about this murder plot, and thus snuck into the temple ground to try and foil it. Remember though: the plans were already open when Pearl found them. Someone had read them already.

"What remains, however unlikely" indeed. It stretches believability to think this man who only showed up a few trials ago was involved enough in Fey family affairs to have found and opened these instructions before Pearl, but it's the only thing left to believe.

It also doesn’t matter that the plans were hidden, because as a prosecutor he could listen in to Pearl and her mother’s conversation. When Morgan told Pearl where they were, Godot was easily able to get there first, read them, then leave them for Pearl to find. The next question is “Why?” Why would Godot go through all this trouble? Why would he want to protect Maya Fey?

Phoenix already figured this one out, though. There’s a very good reason for Godot to protect her, the same reason she’s trying to protect him. Despite Godot’s claim that Maya’s just a stranger to him, Phoenix knows that isn’t true. After all...Godot is really Diego Armando, and Mia Fey was once his girlfriend. Godot admits to that being his true name, and talks about how Dahlia poisoned him. While many newspapers at the time called it a murder, what was hidden was that Diego had survived, living on in a coma. He was like that for five years, when a doctor’s cup of coffee woke him up.

Obvious twist, but the coffee is a nice little detail. Explains a lot.

Waking up was terrible for him. After all, the news was waiting that Mia Fey had died while he was in his coma, leaving him feeling alone in the world. This just left him with two reasons left to live: Torment Phoenix Wright and Protect Maya Fey. It’s brought up again that his hatred of Phoenix is because Mia died on his watch, making it Phoenix’s fault. Once he became a prosecutor, Godot used his new authority to watch Morgan like a hawk, waiting for her next evil plan to emerge.

Nice to know he actually did productive and helpful things too, instead of just vindictively punishing Phoenix for things he couldn't control.

The thing is, Godot wasn’t in this alone. He had two accomplices helping him foil Morgan’s plan: Iris and Misty Fey. Iris was purposefully brought on to take the fall for any consequences if the plan went wrong, and he was able to contact Misty because...she was never actually off the government’s radar. Apparently, she was important enough that they still kept a good watch on her, even as she played the disappearance game. Godot also makes it clear that, even if Misty was completely absent from Maya’s life, she still thought about her daughters a lot. Which like...yeah. Great. Totally makes up for the abandonment.

This whole situation does kind of rub me the wrong way. Even aside from the idea that thinking about Maya does anything to make up for her absence, you can't play up her mysterious and total disappearance then just be like, "Yeah she was super easy to find."

Their plan was to make sure Pearl didn’t channel Dahlia. At first, that was supposed to be done by keeping her busy, making sure she couldn’t follow through on the plan, but that failed. So, Plan B was channeling Dahlia herself, and hoping Misty would be able to control her. That...we’ll get into it in the analysis. Godot’s role in the plan was to play defense, lurking around Maya to protect her in case anything went wrong.

Which, clearly, worked. Albeit in a rather tragic way.

The thing is...that’s all Godot is going to admit to. He admits Phoenix really is a good defense attorney, but tells him that he’ll need to prove that Godot actually killed the victim. Maya begs Phoenix not to get Godot arrested, because Mia told her everything before it was time to give her testimony. It’s clear that Phoenix understands her feelings, but tells her that Godot will still need to be charged for his crimes, regardless of who he was trying to protect. This is the last testimony of the trial, the game, and the original trilogy.

I have to say, though...the stakes of this last bit are kind of weird to me. If Godot killed Misty, it was in defense of Maya's life. Surely that's far from a murder charge. What's more, if you fail here, the Judge declares Iris guilty, which...doesn't make any sense at all? We're well past the point of blaming Iris for what happened, even if we don't know who actually did. The fact that we're going against the wishes of a traumatized, crying young woman to do this doesn't help it feel any better, either. It's just kind of a strange setup.

You are getting no argument there from me, friend. This case...is a bit wonky, in a lot of places. Sometimes I like wonky. This is not the kind of wonky I care for.

Maya says she was able to see three red lights behind her attacker, but after Dahlia was attacked, she hit back, and the lights disappeared. Then, there was a scream. Pressing everything for more details, it becomes clear the scream was from a man, the real killer. It’s hypothesized that Dahlia struck back with the sword, only to lose it and then be killed with it. But as Phoenix points out, that doesn't make any sense. Dahlia had already been fatally wounded, her blood spraying out, so the sword was inside her, and that wasn’t removed until later, when Iris changed how the wound looked.

It is nice to be getting the unfiltered truth from a witness for once. At least, from a witness who isn't also completely evil.

The sword-staff wasn’t what the victim used to attack the killer, but we know what was: the dagger. Dahlia used it to strike at her attacker, and since we know the blood isn’t hers, that pretty much just leaves the possibility that it belongs to the real killer. They just need to do a DNA analysis to see if the blood matches Godot. It isn’t enough to corner him, however. After all, he was the one handling that evidence. Isn’t there a chance that he’s meddled with it, before Presenting it in court? In unrelated news, he is very confident that the blood on that knife isn’t his.

"You can't prove I did it, what if I tampered with the evidence" is... a heck of an argument.

I would love to run it by a lawyer and see what they think.

Before they can go back to the testimony, however, Maya points out another issue with Phoenix’s theory: if Godot had been wounded, wouldn’t they have known? After all, Godot would have been stuck on that side from days after the crime, with no change in clothes available. So if he’d been cut, Phoenix should have seen blood or a ripe in his clothes when they met in the Inner Temple.

Phoenix brings up a few different ways around that, but they’re patently ridiculous and don’t really work as explanations. Godot is clearly unsatisfied with Phoenix’s performance, saying that Mia would have already solved the case. He’s daring Phoenix to just do it, to prove he’s Guilty. Of course, Phoenix steps up to the plate. It’s time to turn his thinking around, do the whole thing he’s been trained to do from the start. There’s only one chance, one shot to get it right.

And so continues my love/hate relationship to this series' "one chance" challenges.

This threat doesn’t shake Phoenix, he’s sure about his evidence, and that makes Godot scared for the first time we’ve seen in a long while. Phoenix is ready to prove how Godot was able to hide the wound, and in the process, make it clear he’s the real killer. He needs to show a way that Godot could have hidden his wound, and the answer is fairly simple.

Like a choice we talked about in an earlier case of this game, Godot responds identically for quite a bit, no matter if your choice is correct or not, and the music keeps going, which isn’t what usually happens when you get a choice right. But if you choose the correct answer, namely Godot’s profile, showing the big metal mask that covers part of his face, then his rant about how Phoenix will never live up to Mia’s legacy, how he doesn’t even care what Phoenix says, is interrupted.

Suddenly, we’re seeing the scene from Godot’s perspective, and watch as he catches a glimpse of a young Mia standing beside Phoenix, making him question what he’s seeing. He’s forced to accept the fact that Mia is living on through Phoenix, just as Phoenix and Mia’s specter together point dramatically towards Godot’s mask. That’s where the wound is, which explains why the lights went out when the scream happened. If Godot takes off his mask, and reveals a dagger wound, that’s case closed.

I do have to say, I like that moment. It's perhaps a bit blunt, but the realization that Phoenix is Mia's successor, not some shoddy replacement, is nice. It's a cool perspective shift, and the idea that Mia lives on in Phoenix, rather than simply being an instrument to help him win cases, is a nice change of focus.

Well, it's not the first time they've done it. There have been two other cases so far where Phoenix seems to resonate with Mia, hear her voice, without a spirit medium present. So this is kind of the end point of that.

Godot accepts defeat. He admits that part of his hatred for Phoenix comes from his role in the poisoning, in addition to the whole ‘letting Mia die’ thing. More than that, he hates that Phoenix...moved on. He kept living his life. Godot didn’t, he’s obsessed over trauma rather than trying to live his life. Godot says he was wrong to blame Phoenix...when he was really angry at himself. (Nice job calling that, Sam!) It’s his fault Mia died...somehow...and he’s been cowardly since. Hiding behind a mask, and a false name.

I'm still also calling that his misogyny led him to cast any adjacent man as Mia's "protector," but that part's not explored here.

At least not explicitly. But not only that, he owns up to the fact that even his plan for saving Maya was ultimately selfish. He did it because he’d failed to save Mia, but he also takes responsibility (kind of, we’ll get back to this) over the fact that the entire incident was his fault to begin with.

He could have shared information with others, instead of taking control and trying to engineer a plan that let him save Maya from direct harm. He asks for forgiveness, but it seems Maya and Phoenix are more willing to defend him than he is in defending himself. It’s also brought up that pure revenge was a part of it too. Seeing Dahlia’s silhouette in the dark, Godot knew it could have been either Misty or Pearl Fey channeling her. He killed her anyway.

It's...complicated for sure. I don't know that Godot did "the wrong thing" here, as it could easily be argued that he did what was necessary to protect Maya. But there could have been less lethal ways to do so, and his reasons for all this are nowhere near pure. Somewhat complex figure by the end, but still an asshole and not a particularly good person.

Also though, imagine if it had been Pearl? Oof.

At the very least, Godot can admit that he’s an arrogant person, which like...yeah. Extremely so. Honestly, there’s just a lot of blathering on here, so skipping past it, Godot officially reveals his real name, just as a streak of blood leaks out of his mask. He says it isn’t a wound opening up, since he can’t see red, those clearly have to be his own tears.

That's the melodramatic but still resonant Phoenix Wright writing I know and love.

Iris takes the stand to get her verdict. She’s not off scot-free, she helped Godot with the plan and will be charged later as his accomplice. But she accepts that, she knew it was a possibility from the beginning. Before her Not Guilty is handed down, Iris does want to apologize for Phoenix, for her hand in that case from six years ago. Phoenix reminisces about it, coming once again to how the Dahlia on the stand that day didn’t seem real. How could his loving girlfriend be ready to kill him? How did he misjudge her so badly?

The thing is, Iris reveals that the day Phoenix’s medicine was stolen was the second time he’d ever met Dahlia, the first being in the courthouse. The rest, their entire romance...that was Iris, impersonating her sister and dating Phoenix to try and get the necklace back. If she hadn’t, Dahlia would have just tried murdering Phoenix from the start. But the fake relationship became real love, and Dahlia’s impatience led to Doug Swallow’s death. Dahlia acted without telling Iris, knowing that if Iris heard about her plan to kill Phoenix, she’d be willing to commit or suffer fratricide to save him.

I like this for Iris. Not because it salvages some of Phoenix's past relationship (I have mixed feelings on that), but because it's the best example of Iris actually, realistically trying to keep Dahlia from slipping further into outright evil. It feels like the rest of her attempts were born of naivete and blind trust in an absolute monster, but in this one instance she was actually trying to save Dahlia from herself.

Hearing all of that, Phoenix feels rewarded for the faith he had in the ‘Dahlia Hawthorne’ he’d come to know and love, and it’s very very cute. Phoenix and Godot share a cup of coffee as the Not Guilty is handed down. In the Defendant Lobby, Phoenix wonders if justice was really done by Godot being arrested, but Mia appears (channeled by Pearl still) to console him. She praises Phoenix’s defense, saying he has nothing left to learn from her, and tells him it's goodbye for now.

It does all put a nice bow on the events of this game in particular.

Then, Maya shows up! She’s trying to cheer him up, in spite all that was done to her. Edgeworth and Franny appear, and they catch Maya up on what she missed while she was channeling Dahlia. Laurice arrives to join in too, but he’s still down in the dumps. Not going to blow-by-blow the conversation, but they notice Pearl isn’t there, and Maya goes to find her. They talk about how Maya can act so cheerful, and the right answer is that she feels like she needs to for Pearl’s sake. Now, Pearl knows how bad her mother is, and how she came so close to killing her beloved cousin.

I am both disappointed and glad we don't actually see any of Pearl processing that. It would have been very interesting, but also holy crap would it be intense. And again, Morgan Fey is the absolute worst.

Gumshoe arrives, and it looks like it’s a group party to celebrate! But bad news, Maya returns, and she can’t find Pearl anywhere. Even the family in Kurain haven’t heard from her or seen her. Phoenix asks everyone else to go ahead while he and Maya find Pearl. Phoenix has a good idea of where she is: namely, Hazakura Temple.

Bikini confirms that when they arrive, and soon they find Pearl in the Training Hall. There’s a touching conversation, and Bikini comes in to share some insight into Misty. This leads to the revelation the charm of the Master had a photo inside, one of a toddler Maya and child Mia putting back together the Sacred Urn together, a connection to her daughters she took with her everywhere she went.

I do love that, apparently, that urn is no stranger to being broken by mischievous but well-meaning Fey children.

Phoenix does some internal monologuing about what defense means, before they take Pearl with them to go and join the celebration. But it’s made clear that Maya’s coming back to Hazakura Temple later to train, and signs up Pearl and Phoenix alongside her for it. Of course, this leads to an Objection, and the ending credits. For the first time, we actually get a really cool bit in the credits where they show off who voiced the defense attorneys and prosecutors, in addition to all the bits of “where are they now” epilogue. We end the game off with Larry’s sketch of everyone, with Mia, Misty, and Godot watching from above. The end! We did it! Let’s dig into analysis, Sam!

Alright!

There's a lot to talk about here, for sure. Lots of little details, callbacks, and character moments. I doubt we'll get to them all, so let me start with my general thoughts about how this all resolves. Or more specifically, what it means.

Looking at it from the lens we've been using for most of this game, with the running theme of masks and hidden identities, there are a number of obvious ways this case fits in. From the revelation of the literally masked prosecutor's identity and motives, to Iris having posed as Dahlia during Phoenix's college relationship, to Dahlia unwittingly using Maya as her vessel. But obvious though they are, they're so numerous and varied that it's a bit harder to pin down exactly what this case has to say on the subject.

So this is just one of many possible ways to interpret this, most of which probably even fit perfectly well alongside it. But my big takeaway where this theme of masks is concerned is that this case, for the most part, plays it the same way previous cases did... until the end. Godot's mask served a number of purposes, not all of which were bad, but the game makes a point of characterizing them as selfish regardless. Dahlia obviously hid her identity behind her twin sister throughout this whole ordeal, and even more blatantly after she escaped the sacred cavern and testified in her name. Morgan, for her part, designed this plan so she could accomplish her goals while hiding behind both Pearl and Dahlia. All these instances were selfish and hurtful in one way or another.

But then, right at the end, we get Iris. Who had hidden her true self from Phoenix for six months, out of love for her sister first, then for Phoenix himself. Whose mask served a selfless purpose, rather than a selfish one. Arguably the only person in this game to do so. Amidst all these hidden agendas and malicious plots, there is one genuine, loving thing hidden behind a mask.

Phoenix's ramblings about a lawyer's purpose near the end of the game feel kind of out of left field. Like, if you've ever seen an episode of a kids show that's not written well enough to actually get its moral across in the story, so someone just spells it out at the end? And it doesn't actually have much to do with the story you just saw? It feels kind of like that. When struggling with his mixed feelings about the overall outcome, he says that today produced "one possible answer" about what it means to defend someone, but doesn't actually say what that answer is, and the case is so convoluted that it's not exactly obvious what he means. Later, he drops the line, "What makes us human is how we fight for others," which feels kind of out of place in this whole saga despite how clearly poignant it's meant to be.

So, honestly, it's kind of messy. But I do think it manages to paint a picture. In a game full of selfish people hiding who they are, what they've done, what they live for, the harm they've done...we do have one person who hid who she was for a different reason entirely. Out of love, trust, and to protect the people she cared about. By centering selfless action in that line about fighting for others, I think Trials and Tribulations is trying to say that what it comes down to isn't just the act of hiding yourself behind a mask, but whether your intentions are to protect yourself, or to protect others.

Is it weird and kinda sloppy to use one running theme for the entire game, only to use it as a tool to make a different point at the last minute? I'd argue yes, definitely, though I could see someone arguing that it's an interesting move. For that matter, Misty Fey's role in all this is so messy that she could be an argument or counterargument to this reading, since the game clearly tried to emotionally soften her absence, but...well, didn't really.

It's a messy case, for sure, with its fair share of ups and downs that contribute to it and detract from it in a variety of ways. That goes for its quality as well as its meaning.

Sam, I think you just stole my award for longest single point, and as such I tip my hat to you.

I'm amazed you were even able to pull that much meaning out of the game's largely ancillary theme, and I think you covered it pretty well.

That said, I do feel like I was able to pull out something from Phoenix's little monologue at the end, so hear me out: This has nothing to do with the rest of the game, but...could we read Godot as a criticism of Phoenix's own philosophy, or at least a perversion of it?

As he's said more than once, Phoenix stands in court to save people. He looks at those backed into a corner, with no way out, and offers his assistance in trying to reach a point of safety. Why does he do that, though? What is his motive, aside from not being able to see people in trouble without lending a hand?

Godot is the flip side to that coin. Godot is also motivated by a desire to save, a desire to protect. But it's warped by jealousy, possessiveness, and misogyny. Godot protects Maya because he couldn't protect Mia, because he thinks she, as a woman, needs to be protected by a man. It feels like the game kind of gives Godot a pass because he did this all in the name of protection, but that almost makes it worse.

Look at the depths this man sunk to, the lows he was willing to plunge, just to relieve his own burdened conscience.

This whole read is a little rough, I literally came to it for the first time on this playthrough, but I think it does finally give some more thematic weight to Godot that I can kind of get behind.

I can definitely get behind it. I like that read. And actually, I think it dovetails just fine with my read as well. It still plays to that selfishness vs. selflessness dichotomy: the lawyer who works to protect others, and the prosecutor who works to assuage his own guilt for failing to protect one person. 

The fact is, I think any read on this case will be a little rough. It does a lot more than most, but also with a lot less focus. So there's a lot of content and meaning in here that doesn't neatly fit together, and we could use the pieces in a variety of different ways to form any number of different pictures. And, more than likely, there would always be a few pieces that don't quite fit. It makes it kind of fun to talk about, sure, but also a little overwhelming. Not to mention kind of disorienting in the big picture, since the previous game of the trilogy was far more thematically focused despite being significantly and unambiguously worse.

Okay, I think we're at a big turning point here: we're covering themes and messy plot stuff at the moment, but do we just want to get into the weeds on that? Or dive into character specific stuff first?

Hoo boy. I don't know, I feel like the character stuff inevitably leads into that. Pretty sure this is gonna be a winding and unfocused discussion regardless.

Let's start with the characters, then?

Sound like a plan. We'd better begin with the man of the hour, Godot slash Diego Armando. I'm very interested to hear your full thoughts on the man.

Well... mixed at this point.

I still find him somewhat meh as the game's main antagonist (insofar as the prosecutor counts as such in the game with Dahlia Hawthorne wound throughout it). It takes until this last case for him to rise above my previous "mystery box" characterization; he's nothing but a strange, mysterious asshole until the flashback case, then any and all of his character development is shoved into the back half of the game's final case. It just doesn't work for me as well as getting to know Edgeworth or Franziska over the course of their respective games before their character development caps with the final case. 

But, as far as the things we learn about him here, I do think they successfully made him a more interesting character. His motives were complex, his methods shady but not as malicious as they first seemed, and his relation to the long-term legacy of these games and characters helps imbue his arc with some of the emotional resonance that the game itself never managed to give him. 

In the end, he kind of reminds me of Severus Snape. Surprisingly pure motivations, technically good intent, still kind of a terrible person. Though thankfully without the baggage of being created by an influential transphobe.

I think that Snape is great comparison: complex character, but too many fans overlook the really awful parts of who they are.

It's interesting, because while this case's final part definitely raised your feelings on Godot, they lower my own. I'm guessing this will be a re-occurring thing I'll be bringing back a lot this analysis, but the structure of the case kind of tips my hand: I have to compare him to von Karma.

After all, they're both prosecutors who turn out to be the final killer. Clearly with Godot, they're trying to not go for the "wow, super duper evil" route, but something more complex. Like with Acro in Turnabout Big Top or Mimi Miney from Reunion and Turnabout. However, I don't know how well that really works. It feels like they skip over the ways these revelations paint him in negative colors, especially with how Phoenix and Maya are falling over themselves to defend him.

Not only did Godot kill Misty Fey, but he engineered that entire set up just as much as Morgan did. He read the notes for the plan first, he could have taken them or burned them or anything. His excuse is that Morgan would just keep trying, but I cannot accept that as a rationale for actually letting a murder plot go through. Hell, even stopping it the way he did, how does that stop Morgan from hatching more evil schemes, if you thought she'd find a way if you'd nipped this one in the bud?

Clearly, the more accurate answer is that Godot wanted this plan to start just so he had a chance at saving Maya from danger, even if that meant killing someone. And like...that is so inherently selfish and crappy, and the fact that he used Iris and Misty for those motivations says a lot. Once again, it really feels like Godot doesn't see women as full people. They're to be admired, hated, or used, and that seems to be about it.

It does feel like the way he incorporated his accomplices into the plan might be informed by his disregard for women. 

I definitely agree with you about all that. I guess what makes that work for me is that he did it with supposedly pure intentions, but the selfishness at the core of it all tainted it and resulted in the plan as it was. The fact that he could have done this in a safer way is what makes him a terrible person, but it's also what makes him a more interesting character. All this happened because of him, on some level, but not because he was malicious: because he was doing it all primarily to assuage his own guilt, not to functionally stop this plan and keep people safe. The way that selfishness snuck into his plan on such a practical level is something I find very interesting.

Most definitely. My issue is more how he's framed in the case near the end, almost as though it's doing everything it can to assure us he really was a good guy, deep down, which honestly isn't something I know I believe.

I agree, this doesn't redeem him, and it's weird that the game sort of pretends it does (not the only time this case does that, either). But it does a lot to separate him from the villains who do terrible things out of purely malicious intent. And in a case with the two most extreme examples of such pure, violent malice, that goes a decent ways.

And I do think this suffers from my other complaints about the character, too. There's just not enough meat on Godot's character development for this finale to bring much nuance to the character, because he's been kept secret the whole game before this point. This might have read better had they used that time to flesh him out a bit, but as it stands it feels like they reduced him to a reveal, then tried to redeem him as though he was an actual character instead of just a plot twist.

I still feel like his design, presentation, and dialogue are enough to at least get me to lukewarm to kind of liking his character, but he's honestly not as well done a character concept as he could be. What I do find interesting is that we can kind of take a second pass at him, so to speak...because the creators did.

When they created Rise from the Ashes, we talked about at the time how Ema and Lana Skye paralleled the Fey sisters. However, that wasn't the only design parallel...Officer Marshall was meant to be the Godot to their Maya and Mia.

Oh. That's...very interesting. I guess I can kind of see it?

Relationship with the older sister that is mostly kept vague, was good in the past but more morally dubious in the present, attempts a scheme that hurts an innocent person, you can definitely see the influence. Weirdly enough, we weren't the biggest fans of Jake Marshall, but I do think he kind of executes the same concept in a better way. He's abrasive and directly confrontational, like Godot, but he's kind of more fun and the largely hinted at relationship between him and Lana feels a lot more...solid, if that makes any sense, than the one between Godot and Mia. (Though Lana/Mia is clearly still far better than either of them.)

That comparison does add a different dimension to Marshall, I suppose. Marshall is definitely a better person than Godot, and it plays to my criticisms that we got to know him and uncover his secrets gradually over the course of that case rather than all at once in the last segment.

I think we've mostly gotten the coffee out of our systems, so to speak. Who should we discuss next?

Well, while we're on the antagonists, maybe it's time to talk about Dahlia.

It's funny, because we've already talked about her a lot, but this segment does give us some new ground to cover. The fact that she never really deceived Phoenix, that her sister had to do it for her, just kind of piles onto the fact that she really is kind of a failure. Her life and death have been a series of fumbles and cover-ups, and even from beyond the grave she wasn't able to get what she wanted. Which is great because the things she wants suck.

I have to admit, it was extremely satisfying to see her framed that way. There's something rewarding about seeing that, despite her clearly competent manipulation skills and extreme malice, and however much harm she has managed to do, she never did quite manage to get everything she wanted out of a situation. Not to mention, the realization is such a direct strike at her ego that her spirit is blasted out of her (borrowed) body. She definitely deserves that.

The whole case really just hammers in how terrible a person she was, and is. Her sociopathic narcissism caused so much suffering, and she makes it perfectly clear that it was intentional, and it doesn't bother her in the least. It also makes me feel for Iris, whose unwavering belief in her sister's capacity for good made her an easy target for Dahlia's manipulation.

Iris is as good of a person as Dahlia is evil, in my opinion. This is a bit of a side-note, and unrelated to Dahlia (largely), but I still think it's a huge wasted potential to never bring Iris back after this, especially as it relates to Pearl. That is a girl who kind of defines herself by her family and those close to her, and her mother and one of her sisters are basically evil incarnate. Seeing how she relates to and learns from Iris would be lovely. But that's just an area for fanfic, I'm afraid.

Honestly, playing this case after having played Apollo Justice and Dual Destinies just made me more annoyed that the next games drop so many of the characters from this first trilogy. I feel like there's a lot more to explore with most of these characters, but the following games give me the impression they all just kind of faded out of Phoenix's life offscreen. Which I have trouble believing, and don't like as a narrative decision regardless.

I mean, that's something we can discuss more as the games go on, but I will say now that I 100% stand by dropping most of the cast for Apollo Justice, as that fits the thematic point of that particular game. However, I do agree that, as Dual Destinies and Spirit of Justice brought back more old characters, they flubbed it badly, both with their choices for who to bring back and the way they handled their returns. But those are stories for another day.

Dahlia is bad, so sad, anything else to talk about with her?

I feel like we've pretty much covered it! The setup for her as an effective antagonist happened in previous games, and I guess I do just want to say that it did pay off really well in this case. I, at least, had enough investment in Dahlia as a villain that this case's slow realization of her involvement hooked me really well.

I guess as a general rule I feel like this case is a better resolution to this specific game than to the trilogy as a whole, but I'm sure we'll get into that in a bit. Point is, Dahlia is still a great antagonist, and I think this case did pretty well meaningfully incorporating her and wrapping up her role in the story.

We just touched on her a little, but I'd love to hear your final thoughts on Iris.

I really like her! By the end, I felt kind of like Phoenix, like there was some semblance of Dahlia's kind persona that wasn't entirely false, because it existed in Iris all along. Though I have to say, Phoenix believing in their connection the whole time despite not knowing it was her is...a supremely Phoenix Wright thing to do.

I'm a little mixed on the revelation that she was the one dating Phoenix. It's a purely personal thing, I think. I just feel like it softens the blow of Dahlia's "betrayal" in retrospect. But it also brings other things to the story, like we talked about before, so I'm not complaining about it. 

In the end, I like her, I think the case did a good job playing on the question of trusting her, and I think the ending with her and Phoenix is really cute.

I cannot remember if I've said this in a previous Wright Wednesday or not, but Iris is, hands down, my favorite new character of this case, and this game. In fact, she might be my favorite character in the original trilogy who only appears in one case.

To me, she and Phoenix have genuine chemistry, and they're just cute as hell. But more than that, Iris is a really fascinating person. Her good heart and empathy for others led to her being an accomplice to horrible crimes, and she was willing to go to jail for murder if it meant doing something to atone for what she did.

Where Dahlia does terrible things and feels no remorse at all, Iris is a good person who sees herself as a monster, blaming herself for the evils Dahlia committed. She's such a wonderful blend of kindness and strength that I feel like the series needed more of, honestly, in its female cast. She isn't a "strong woman" in the way Mia or Franziska were, but she was a badass nonetheless.

You know, that's true. For some reason, I hadn't really thought of her in relation to the series' overall... uh... middling track record with its female characters. And it's true, she has an admirable strength to her that we don't see often, let alone in Ace Attorney. I'm having trouble thinking of any kind of tropey sexism the game throw her way, and frankly that's...exceptional for this series. Good job, Trials and Tribulations.

Her and Dahlia also kind of make for an interesting look at Nature vs Nurture, as much as that binary debate is largely played out by this point. Was there just something different by nature between them? It seems so, as even though they had largely different upbringings, Dahlia is the one who split them up for selfish reasons, or so she claims.

I think it'd be easy to claim Dahlia is sociopathic, at the very least, but I don't want to get into "mental illness made her a monster" territory. But it's pretty clear that Dahlia had no internal sense of other peoples' worth or pain. Meanwhile, nearly everyone in her life was abandoning or mistreating her, so I can see how she never had much reason to learn to care.

You also have to wonder how much of Dahlia explanation of her past is a construct based on who she is now. It's not uncommon for people to warp and reinterpret their memories to better fit the person they become.

That's certainly possible, but what we know from Iris' accounts seems to match up with Dahlia's own story pretty well. I suppose it's possible that Iris learned her narcissism after an abused and neglected childhood, but she really does come across to me as someone who tended in a direction and leaned into it rather than ever challenging it.

Not to say this is just "who she was," but that she allowed herself to go down this path rather than putting any effort into examining and changing her behavior.

The revelation that Dahlia was posing as Iris is actually why I wanted to avoid discussing Iris last week. After all, the information we were getting didn't come from Iris, but from the worst person on the planet. Though that does make it an interesting look into Dahlia's head. Is that how she thinks Iris thinks? Is that how she wishes Iris was? Or is that just her own perspective, filtered to fit her disguise?

I would actually be interested in replaying that segment just to keep that fact in mind and see how that knowledge affects my understanding of the character.

I've seen with quite a few people the entire Dahlia pretending to be Iris conversation actually colors their opinions of Iris so negatively they end up hating her, even after it's revealed that it wasn't her saying that and that Iris was working to stop Dahlia.

That...doesn't make much sense, honestly, but alright.

I'm not going to say that anyone is right or wrong for liking or disliking character...but yeah I seriously don't get that.

Anyway, moving on from the twins, why don't we talk about Maya? Just to start with...I am once again voicing my feelings of disappointment with how little is done with her character arc.

That aspect of the story just reinforces my opinion that this case is an excellent conclusion to this game, not so great a conclusion to the trilogy. This story is central to her entire deal across all three games, and she's put on a bus for nearly the entire thing. Her only real role aside from heightening the stakes revealing Godot's secrets at the end, and putting the central figure of this trilogy-long story out of that overarching narrative and into the short-term one is...a bad choice. One made all the more frustrating by the fact that the games just. Keep. Doing this to her.

The single good thing I can say: I really like her answering the "Name and Occupation" question with pausing, then saying "Assistant Manager at Wright and Co Law Offices". That moment says a lot about the kind of space Maya is in. Sadly, the game does nothing further with that. The trial ends, and Maya just goes right back to spirit channeling, despite it's deep connects to all the trauma in her life and the multiple attempts on her life.

Yeah, and even with that ending, we get shockingly little actual closure for her. Literally just, "I have to be strong for Pearl," and that's it. Nothing about processing her mother's death, or the negative associations with her powers and family, or any of the trauma from this while ordeal. It really does drop the ball for her, and that sucks.

And what's worse...for all the danger she was in, it never felt half as real and urgent as in Farewell, My Turnabout. I think, at least partially, because none of this was in Phoenix's/our hands. She was going to be alright or she wasn't, as the story would dictate, and our role in the story had nothing to do with it. I wasn't at all invested in her danger, despite absolutely loving Maya, until this last case when we thought she might have killed her own mother. And for a case as climactic and emotionally resonant as this one, that's a real failure.

I have harped on and on about how badly Maya gets treated throughout this series, and the fact that this is basically all the ending they give her is just pitiful. Oh, sure, she comes back later...but that is it's own barrel of issues.

Sam, could you have guessed, when we talked about the shortcomings of Maya's arc across the first game, that it would in fact be the most satisfying and well-realized character arc that Maya Fey would ever get?

Definitely not. It's kind of infuriating.

And I didn't actually know she came back later! Even if it's sub-par I'll be excited to see her again.

Moving on to her sis, Mia. I...I don't know. This is, once again, something we've discussed at length before, but I feel like this entire set-up would have worked so much better if Mia wasn't on spirit medium speed dial and hadn't been coming back all the time. Like...Godot is so pained over her death, but she's right there! She is there, in the court! You could have just asked Maya to channel her every once and a while so you could hang out with her. It's...it just runs into that strange problem where the series wants her to be dead, for drama, but they also want her being brought back with magic, so she can swoop in to help Phoenix all the time.

I think the direction this one took for her was better than before. It sets up the idea that Phoenix is her successor, and frames him as carrying on her legacy rather than depending on her guidance. I actually really like the moment when Godot sees the two of them side-by-side. Honestly, something like this should have happened at the end of the first game, but barring that, I could also accept it as a good way to end the trilogy. The story has to move past her active involvement at some point, and I think it should have been long before now. 

Not sure I agree about the Godot thing, though. I agree the series' way of bringing her up as a triviality kind of cheapens the idea of her being out of reach in death, but I feel like it would be super awkward and inappropriate to ask her younger sister to let Mia take over her body for the sake of meeting with a former romantic partner. Once to let them say goodbye, maybe (which I'm kind of surprised didn't happen here), but I think it would kind of suck for Maya to partially exist as a vessel for her dead sister to continue some kind of half-life. It's weird when the game does it to pull Phoenix's ass from the fire in court, it would be super weird to do it as a way for Godot to keep in touch with his dead lover.

You're definitely right that the logistics of that would be odd, but I'm not suggesting that is something I wanted to see played out. More that Godot's vengeance quest squares oddly with the fact Mia is still around.

I guess that's fair, but I don't really see it that way. He just woke up and found out she was dead. Aside from the shock and emotional trauma of that experience, he definitely wouldn't have known that Mia showed up in court half the time Phoenix defended a client. We don't even know how much he knew about the Kurain Channeling Technique, or Mia's involvement in it, let alone the possibility that Maya could channel her.

I do agree the stakes are weird since the games treat the act of channeling Mia so cavalierly, but I think it's entirely understandable (however unreasonable it may be) for Godot to act out in response to her death.

Another thing I've been bouncing around in my head is just how I feel about this conclusion, considering this game has put Mia in the spotlight more than any other in the trilogy, even letting us play as her for two cases. Aside from those cases setting up Godot's motivation, and giving us a chance to see her in her youth, it feels like all we really get from them here is Mia confronting Dahlia to destroy her spirit.

That makes sense, Dahlia is more her arch-enemy than Phoenix's. But I suppose I just found myself wishing we could see more of her thoughts and feelings on all this. What does she think of her ex-boyfriend doing all this? After the flashback cases humanized her, this case kind of took Mia back to being a smiling, all knowing mentor who doesn't completely feel like her own real person.

It's strange how absent she is from the core emotional narrative here. She and Godot interact very little considering their history.

I also just...it sucks that they primarily reintegrate her into the story through her relationship with a guy, y'know? Or rather, I suppose, with two guys: how she saved Phoenix and how she dated Diego.

That...actually hadn't occurred to me. But yeah, it kinda does.

I think all of these things just kind of roll up into the larger ball that is "The series doesn't know how to effectively utilize Mia as a character without either reducing her to a plot device, fanservice, or a prop to a man's story".

That pretty much sums it up. Of all the things I've noticed replaying the trilogy, the series' apparent inability to write women is definitely the most disappointing.

Moving into less relevant characters, strangely enough, is Phoenix himself. This is the last game where he's the primary protagonist, and...is it just me or does he feel almost incidental to it? The first game was all about him growing into his job, the second was his morality being confronted...but even through we got to see him in the past, and I think the game gives a good sense that Phoenix has largely grown as a lawyer, I don't think he really has much of an arc. Godot's whole thing is his personal vendetta against Phoenix, but he figured that all out off-screen. You could argue the whole Iris thing resolved a trauma from his past, but...I don't know, it just feels a bit weak and shallow.

That's certainly true. But I have to admit, it doesn't bother me a whole lot? Phoenix's character growth has always been rather subtle, in my opinion. These games are usually more about the other characters in the story than him, so the last case of the series bringing a bunch of those characters in and largely being about them reads fine to me.

That's entirely fair. Speaking of bringing in other characters, Franziska! I actually really love how she's used here. Both how she is the one who ends up saving Iris from the Sacred Cavern, working tirelessly in the process, and her whole thing in the end. For the first time in a while, I don't feel like they did anything to make Franziska, like, super antagonistic. She was just chilling, and it feels like a mark of how far she is starting to come. But I could just be letting my love for her overtake my senses, what did you think, Sam?

I agree! Her role here is subtle, but important, and continues her cooperation from earlier segments.

It is also...*drumroll*...the last time she's been seen in the main series! She has some appearances in the Investigation spin-offs, and I look forward to analyzing those again fairly soon, but...honestly, in my estimation, this is kind of the peak of her character arc/character writing? Which sucks. As always, I feel like the series did Franziska dirty.

It seems that the later games made some poor choices when it comes to which characters they do and don't keep around.

I don't know if I entirely agree with that? But that's a story for a future date. Speaking of the future, that's going to have a lot of the Judge we love, and I was so happy to have him back in this segment after his brother plagued us. I especially enjoy that moment when he talks about how he's actually done a lot of research into the Kurain Channeling Technique, and he's come to learn he needs to just accept each case as its own little reality. I love it when the Judge gets to sound wise.

It retroactively helps with some of the times I've felt that he seems weirdly accepting of spiritual things that shouldn't be admissible in court.

So...something that bothered me in this case, as part of Godot's plan, was this idea that Misty could have "controlled" Dahlia's spirit while channeling it. This is not the first time this idea has come up in these games, but we've never seen it actually happen, and rules we learn later make it pretty clear it's impossible. I just find it so odd that they keep bringing it up as an idea, but also show no evidence that it's possible.

I guess it might have been a matter of desperation? Like, if anyone could control the spirit they're channeling, it would be the head of the Fey house. But yeah, pretty definitely not how it works at all based on what's happened in these games.

Do you...are you ready to talk about the plotting of this case? We're been dancing around that a bit.

I think it's about time we get to it.

...I kind of feel bad? Like I'm dissing this case a lot? But I will have nice things to say later.

The long and short of it is, at least for me (and some other people I know), this case is just too stuffed. It is too heavily plotted, too complex a mystery, and that pushes out room that could have been used for better character work or thematic coherence. There is a difference between story and plot, and there is not enough of the former and too much of the latter. At least for me.

I'm...somewhat conflicted on this note. I agree that it's a bit overstuffed, but that's a pretty minor sin in my book. The bigger issues we talked about before (such as Maya's lack of meaningful inclusion and a generally weak conclusion to the Fey storyline) aren't things I feel can be fixed by just having less complicated plotting. Narrative decisions like killing Misty Fey (which I honestly feel is kind of unnecessarily cruel), having Maya locked away for most of the story, and weaving in an entirely new storyline with Mia, Dahlia, and Diego really compromised its ability to meaningfully address the trilogy-wide storylines.

I've already said that I feel this case is a good conclusion to Trials and Tribulations, but a lackluster conclusion to the Phoenix Wright trilogy, and I really think that's part of the issue here. It did a great job concluding a bunch of stuff this game introduced, but in doing so, found itself little time to conclude the larger story it was trying to tell. And even then, it made other decisions that made it even harder, like making one of the central players of that story into the victim and stuffing the other in a cave.

All that to say, I see where you're coming from. I just don't think refocusing would fix it. The entire case, and perhaps the entire game, would need more foundational and structural change to fix this particular issue. In my opinion, anyway.

That is a really interesting perspective, and I can definitely see what you're talking about. It isn't really the perspective I'm coming to this with, and I do want to elucidate more what I'm talking about. I do think this is a good case, on the whole, but I don't even know if I'd say it works very well as a final case to this game, let alone the trilogy itself. Let me look at some of the other Finale Cases, to point to what I'm referring to.

Turnabout Goodbyes is a pretty simple story. Behind the melodrama and Edgeworth's angst, the mystery at its core doesn't have a lot of moving parts. That's good, it allows the case to shine more on the characters, their struggles, and the story of DL-6 and its lasting ramifications.

Farewell, My Turabout is also a pretty simple mystery. In fact, the entire back half is much less about any sort of murder mystery solving, and far more about the ethical quandary that Phoenix is facing. Once again, the mechanics of the murder aren't nearly as complicated or intricate as other cases, and that reshifts the focus onto the interpersonal dynamics.

Comparatively, cases like Turnabout Samurai, Turnabout Big Top, and Recipe for a Turnabout all have much more detailed murder mysteries. And that's okay! They're Filler Cases, having more dense plotting fills out the time and makes them more crunchy.

Bridge to the Turnabout, meanwhile, is trying both at the same time. It has the kind of very complicated plotting of a Filler Case, combined with trying to pull off a level of character and story importance of the other Finale Cases. Because of that, I feel like whether you're talking about this as a capstone to this game or the trilogy, there isn't as much room for the kind of storytelling those past Finale Cases had, because we have to keep in mind the snowmobile and the trick of the flying Iris and a million other plot details that leave so much less time for character interactions and conflicts that actually mean things.

Mild spoiler for my coming rating, but I do think this is a weaker Finale Case than either of the ones we've covered before, and part of that comes from how much time is spent on the mystery and the plotting instead of the story and the characters.

That comparison to previous Finale Cases is interesting, and I can see where you're coming from. That said, I also think it makes sense that they would try to make the final case of the trilogy more ambitious in that regard. After all, it's not just more complex than previous Finale Cases; it's also significantly longer. It seems clear to me that they tried to make this case bigger in every way they could. I think they could have had time to do all that if they really wanted to.

But the more I think about it, the more I feel the issues you mentioned there still come back, at least to a not-insignificant degree, to the decisions made at the beginning of this case and game. Focusing more on Godot's character, for instance, wouldn't have mattered all that much if he's still a mystery box that we only find out about in the final moments of the case. Maya's character can't get much meaningful development if she's stuck in a cave the whole time. Closing out the mystery of Misty Fey can only be so resonant on an emotional and character-driven level when she's dead before we even know who she is. It feels to me like this case was essentially set up to fail at these things from the get-go, and some drastically different decisions would have had to be made to sidestep those problems.

I definitely get what you mean about them purposefully aiming to make this case larger, longer, and more complex out of ambition, I just don't think that idea really worked in-practice. That said, I do think there are later Finale Cases that are able to pull it off, so you might be right that the issue here is more a foundational problem with where it focused and how it chose to resolve long-standing plot threads.

I do also want to throw in again that...I just don't feel this is a satisfying mystery? And that's okay, I don't really come to this series for excellently told murder plots, I'm here for the melodrama and the comedy and the characters. But so much of this case is spent unraveling how this crime happened that...it would have been nice if it worked for me? As always, neither of us want to become CinemaSins, I'm completely willing to just accept it and move on, but the whole swinging body thing...I just...how did the body disengage from the rope at the apex of the swing? It was just tied to the body! I can't stop thinking about that stupid plot point, and that's honestly more my problem than anything else.

I admit, yeah, that particular point stuck with me too. Clever idea, sure, but the fact that it let go at the end instead of either dropping the body into the river or just swinging back down under the bridge with the body still attached is...strange. And unexplained.

A lot of people have pointed out how Godot can't see red on a white background, and the man who killed Mia is named Redd White. So like...it's symbolic that he can't focus his anger on her actual murderer. I think that is a cool parallel, but I also have to point out it's a coincidence, since Redd White's counterpart in Gyakuten Saiban is named Small Medium Large.

Yeah, neat detail but definitely not intentional.

One strange thing I noticed is there are frequently points in this segment where Phoenix, Godot, and the Judge will reference the day of trial before super casually, and it feels like they're working on firsthand knowledge of it? Despite the fact none of them were there?

I mean, I could see the casual tone being kind of weird, but they were obviously filled in on the events so they could easily reference them. Would have gotten old for them to reference their lack of firsthand experience with all the relevant information every time it came up.

I get that, but I think there is a way to reference things happened without implying you were there when they did? Which is what it felt like to me.

Guess it never stood out to me, because honestly I didn't notice it.

Or I could be seeing something that wasn't there. Either is equally likely. Did you have anything left for analysis, or can we move onto review?

Nope, I think I'm analyzed-out. And I'm excited to get to the part where you anger the internet!

Even though this isn't the fourth case of its game, Bridge to the Turnabout is still the Finale Case of Trials and Tribulations. The Finale Case of each game is the one where everything comes together. Plot, theme, and characters unite in a grand, well, finale. This is the big finish, so the case needs to end things satisfactorily while also tying everything up for that game as a whole. A great Finale Case is able to expertly pay off the potential of its game, give strong conclusions to the character arcs being focused on, have larger stakes than is normal, and lastly just be a good case in and of itself. How does this particular case handle all of those aspects?

Well...I do think it handles some of that really well. It brings back important characters and does some cool stuff with them, it tells a story that has its weaknesses but emotionally invested me a lot by the end, and I think gave a pretty strong conclusion to the story of this game even if it didn't do the same for the story of the trilogy as a whole. So...honestly I'm having trouble placing this on the rating scale, personally. I feel like the case worked better for me on an emotional level than it actually is on any other level, and it's hard to quantify that divide.

I absolutely know what you mean. Starting with my positive thoughts: This case has a lot of stellar moments, from touching to heartbreaking to hilarious; it's extremely narratively ambitious, trying to find some way to weave together the Fey plot of the series thus far into a story that also encomposes the plot of this whole game; it also is the climax of an arc that has been building up for three games, and therefore has a lot of set up; it introduces one of my favorite characters in the original trilogy; and it does all of it with a confidence I kind of have to admire just on principle.

I can agree with all that for sure.

But...all of that said. There are negatives, mostly in the details. As you've said, a lot of foundational parts of this case don't feel like they work. Godot's characterization, Maya being a damsel, the death of Misty Fey, a weak supporting cast, an overstuffed and clunky mystery plot, a lack of thematic depth, poor use of returning characters, and finally the gravest sin of all, not being a particularly good capstone to either this game or this trilogy. I do feel like it would be unfair to hold that higher standard to this case, just because it ended up being the end of the trilogy, but the case's ambition and the way its written makes me feel like the writers were trying to write a fantastic finale for the first three games as a whole, and this just isn't that, at least not for me.

Yeah, I get that. I guess the stuff that worked, worked better for me than it did for you. But I also agree with pretty much all your criticisms, and then some. 

It doesn't help that one of my biggest complaints, which I've only talked about a little so far, is the death of Misty Fey. Not even because it weakens the resolution to the trilogy or anything; we've talked about it from that angle because that's how it affects the analytical and thematic reading of the case, but it's not the only problem with it. It just feels...weirdly cruel. This series doesn't generally do tragedy for tragedy's sake, and tends to end things on optimistic notes. This case does try to do that, but it can only go so far when it decided to resolve the conflict of Maya's mother who abandoned her in disgrace by killing her before they even get to really meet each other. It just feels really dark and mean, in a way that clashes very harshly with this series' overall tone for me. 

So... I guess what I'm saying is, my opinion of this case is based on a lot of subjective feelings about it, some of which clash with some of the more concrete praise and criticism. Which makes it hard to assign a numerical score.

But then, I suppose that sums up my habits for these kinds of stories anyway; I'm very emotion-centric. A few good, emotionally-resonant moments can overcome a multitude of sins for me, so I'm not surprised the stuff that worked for me feels so significant despite the case's many flaws. But there are a good deal of flaws, some of which are also emotionally important to me. So...*shrug*

I absolutely agree on Misty Fey. The way the character was handled throughout the trilogy just feels odd to me in general, and the fact that they just kind of killed her after we got to spend ten minutes with her...yeah, it's pretty cruel. It leaves me feeling like Maya deserved better, deserved more, but not in a 'well written tragedy' sense and more of a 'this story isn't well executed' sense.

Also, it's absolutely fine that more subjective things like that are coming into your feelings on the case. Honestly, I think that's the way it is for everyone. We can try to be objective and rational, but our feelings about these kinds of things infect those arguments, and are frequently the secret basis for them in the first place.

If you're wondering what Sam meant by "numerical score"...then wow this is a strange case to jump into Wright Wednesday on, but I'll explain anyway! We rate all cases on a scale from 1 to 10. This isn't an attempt to describe the objective quality of any case, but a relative scale on how much we enjoy cases compared to the average for the series. 1's are the least fun to get through, 10's are the best experiences, and while things like 5's and 6's are the average Ace Attorney cases.

Bridge to the Turnabout is a lot of things. It's ambitious, it's dramatic, and it's high-stakes. But it's also oddly focused, too clunky, and strangely mean-spirited. Keeping in mind that these are relative scores, I have to put this case quite a bit behind the last two Finale Cases we've rated, which got 9's from me. Instead, this case gets a 6 out of 10. It's above average, but it honestly doesn't work for me just as much as it does. I readily welcome my expunging from the Ace Attorney Fandom and the trial for my execution.

As seems to often be the case, I'm going to a similar place but a bit higher. Some of what this case did really worked for me, despite all the things that didn't, but its flaws definitely put it beneath the stellar cases that ended the previous two games. So I'm going to give it a 7 out of 10. I think it's a good case, all things considered, but it's way too spotty, especially on fulfilling its duties as a Finale Case. 

And in all fairness, I think if I were simply playing it for fun, I probably wouldn't be nearly so bothered by all this. For that matter, I remember it very fondly from the first time I played it. I think your average player would probably have a better opinion of it than we did replaying it under a microscope. But yeah, looking at it in-depth at least, I've got to give it a good, but not great, rating.

Glad I won't be the only one seeing the hangman later! But now that we have talked about this case, we can also discuss what we think of Trials and Tribulations as a game.

Well, if we're comparing it to previous games...

Obviously, Justice for All isn't in the running. One great finale case doesn't make up for all the mediocre ones, let alone Turnabout Big Top. But compared to the first game... I think the two are comparable in quality. And Trials and Tribulations might edge out Ace Attorney for my favorite of the trilogy. 

Turnabout Memories is unquestionably the best tutorial case of the trilogy, and Turnabout Beginnings is one of my favorite cases of them all (and my highest-rated so far). The Stolen Turnabout is far better than any of the other filler cases in the series (which I know you don't consider it to be, but it still makes more sense to me to compare it to fillers), and while Bridge to the Turnabout has a lot of problems it still works pretty well for me. Recipe for a Turnabout isn't very good, but then neither are Samurai or Big Top. Especially Big Top. 

There's something to be said about its failures in following up with the trilogy-wide storyline, and that might carry more weight than the quality of any number of cases. But still. I feel this game was a bit more consistent, and occasionally top-tier, and that probably earns it the spot of my favorite of the trilogy. But it's close.

My feelings are fairly similar. If we're just looking at the cases themselves, averaging out how much I enjoyed them, Trials and Tribulations is definitely the front runner so far.

That said, I do think it is worth pointing out that this game is a lot thematically weaker than both games before it, and while the way it tries to tie the plot of the cases together is ambitious, it also ends up feeling a little hollow for me.

I've actually gone back and forth over whether I think this game or the first one is better, but I do have to hand it to this one, just because of how damn strong some of these cases really are.

Of the games we've covered, this one is definitely my favorite, but I should say that out of the currently released six main games and the two Investigation spin-offs, this is my third favorite.

The first one also has a special place in my heart. Not only because it's so good, and because it's my first Phoenix Wright game, but because it's one of the earliest games I played that taught me just how creative and interesting games can be outside of the usual "shoot/slash some dudes then watch a cutscene" formula. But I think it would be hard to make an argument that it's actually better than this one, despite being legitimately close to it in quality.

That is it for our coverage of this game, but just so you know there is a little bit of a special treat coming between now and when we start Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney. What could it be? You'll have to wait and find out. Until then, auf wiedersehen!

This next one will be fun! See you all then!