And I'm Sam, host of Games as Lit. 101 and friend of this blog.
Now, last time we covered the aptly titled First Turnabout, so today we're starting the second case of the series, Turnabout Sisters. It's our hope that you're playing along with us, especially if you're newcomers to the Ace Attorney series. Last time, Phoenix took his first case, defending a childhood friend against murder charges, with the help of his mentor, Mia Fey.
Turnabout Sisters opens with a conversation between Mia Fey and her sister, in which Mia asks her to hold on to the Thinker clock from the last case, which Larry had given to her. She's replaced the inner workings of the clock with some important documents that she wants to keep safe. But someone else was listening in on the conversation, and before Mia's sister can come to pick up the statue and its unknown contents, someone comes into Mia's office, takes the evidence, and murders her with that same statue.
We're going to get more into this during the analysis portion of today's post, but the death of someone who was being set up as such a major character is a big deal. I've always seen it as great hook, though my partner pointed out in our playthrough that the moment lacks the emotional weight it could have had, considering the player barely got to know Mia.
When Phoenix comes into the office to meet with Mia and her sister for dinner, he comes across the body as Maya, Mia's sister, is crying over her. After a bit of investigating Phoenix hears a cry of alarm from out the window, and sees that a woman is calling the police about the murder in a hotel across the street. Then the police show up, and we're introduced to Detective Gumshoe, a well-meaning but dim-witted detective who sees that Mia wrote Maya's name on a receipt in her own blood, and immediately surmises that Maya must have been the murderer.
I should mention this is the first time the player sees Fey and Co. Law Offices, and it's an important opportunity, oddly enough. The room Mia dies in is never seen by the player again, and the main office room is seen from an angle here that isn't repeated, and allows for observations that I'll come back to later.
Phoenix visits Maya in the Detention Center to see what he can do to help. This is the point when the game makes its first turn into more fantastical territory with the reveal that the Fey family, including Mia, are a long line of spirit mediums, and Maya is in training to become one herself. She also tells Phoenix about the phone call between her and her sister, and that her phone is set to record her calls, but the police still have it. The game lets the player choose whether they will offer to represent her in court, but regardless, Maya remembers that Mia praised Phoenix but, citing his inexperience, recommended a lawyer named Marvin Grossberg instead. So rather than wait for an attorney to be chosen for her, Phoenix heads out to see Grossberg and ask for his help.
It's up to the player to choose where to go next, which is often the case with Investigation segments. Speaking of which, how do those work, gameplay-wise, Mr. Professor?
Mister Professor?
But yes, investigation gameplay. The gameplay of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney doesn't all take place inside the courtroom; the player will search areas and talk to witnesses outside of court as well. At any given time during investigation, there are four buttons on the bottom screen of the DS: Examine, which allows the player to tap on areas in the room for Phoenix to make observations about them or sometimes take them as evidence; Move, which allows the player to go to a different location; Talk, which shows up when there's a character in the area to talk to and allows the player to question them on various subjects; and Present, which works in a similar way as presenting evidence in court and allows the player to show someone evidence or bring up topics related to it. The goal of these segments is to gather all the necessary information to build a case for the next court segment, and the game won't move forward until the player knows everything they need to.
Supposing Phoenix heads to Grossberg's Law Office first, he finds that the man himself is away, but his office is lavishly decorated, with a large obnoxious paintings hanging on the wall. From there it's to Fey and Co, where Gumshoe is leading the on-site investigation.
Gumshoe is one of my favorite characters in the whole series. We won't really get a holistic understanding of his character until later in this game, but he's a genuinely well-meaning detective who serves as something of a minor antagonist for much of this game due to his bumbling nature and his unwavering loyalty to the law, but he's basically the dictionary definition of "adorkable" and I just want him to live a happy and fulfilled life.
He mistakes Phoenix for Maya's lawyer, and as such gives him the autopsy report, though he won't let him see the crime scene again. Gumshoe thinks this is an open-and-shut case, both thanks to the eye witness, who Gumshoe lets slip is still in her hotel room across the street, and because Prosecutor Edgeworth will be the one in court.
Gumshoe asks if Phoenix has already heard of Edgeworth: if you have him says yes Phoenix talks about the famous Miles Edgeworth; while if you have him say no then Gumshoe says mostly the same stuff, with Phoenix internally telling the player he already knew all that. Miles Edgeworth is a prodigy, having passed the bar at age 20 and in the four years since then he hasn't lost a single case. Dark rumors surround him, tales of the Demon Prosecutor's coached witnesses and forged evidence. Gumshoe hates those rumors, and believes Edgeworth is just doing his job as good as he can.
It's a nice way to both set up Edgeworth as an intimidating antagonist and illustrate the way Gumshoe looks up to him as a noble arbiter of the law.
Once Phoenix presents Maya's note to Gumshoe, he gives the phone without a problem, having checked it over without noticing the recorded conversation. From there Phoenix goes to the witness, April May's, room at the Gatewater Hotel. She's a flirty woman with a penchant for fanservice and a distaste for lawyers, enough that she refuses to tell Phoenix anything. She also has something suspicious in a dresser drawer she won't let Phoenix see.
I have to say, her face when she catches Phoenix snooping in her drawer? It's perfect. She goes from her cutesy presentation to looking like she's just barely stopping from going completely unhinged, and it's a great little implication that there's a lot more going on with her than she's letting on. The sprite art in this game is excellent.
Once Phoenix decides to visit Grossberg's office again, he finds the man is actually there this time, his loud clearing the throat signalling his presence clearly. He's a robust man, and while at first he claims to have nothing on this plate, once Phoenix brings up Maya he reverses the stance, claiming he's far too busy to defend someone tomorrow. When Phoenix asks how he knew when her trial was, Grossberg only says that he can't help, and that neither will any attorney worth their salt in the city. He also makes a point about bragging over his ostentatious painting, to further drive its existence into the players mind, for later.
When Phoenix heads back into the detention center to tell Maya the bad news, he at first tried to lighten the mood, only for it to fall completely flat. Maya has been abandoned once again, a regularity in her life. Her father passed away when she was young, her mother disappeared after being called a hoax, and her only sister left her in their village so she could become a lawyer, so she could try and discover who was responsible for their mothers fate, some man named White.
Maya's exposition here is important to this case, of course, but what's really interesting is how this issue is actually relevant to the entire trilogy. But for the moment, it's mostly just Maya's backstory.
Visiting hours are almost over, and it looks like Maya will be stuck with a public defender. You can choose whether or not Phoenix volunteers, but saying no just leads to a fake bad end before Phoenix realizes he could never leave someone alone in this situation. He knows what it's like to feel like an innocent defendant, after all.
Phoenix Wright has a lot of false choices like this, which I don't necessarily think are an objective evil in games, but some of them do work better than others.
So then, Maya accepts Phoenix as her lawyer, but before the day can end he heads to the Gatewater Hotel again, and finds that April May is in the shower, unaware of his presence.
Thankfully no, the game isn't quite cheap enough for that to lead where you're thinking it might.
A bellboy comes in, surprising Phoenix, but once he leaves Phoenix investigates the drawer...and finds a wiretap. With this trump card in the Court Record, Phoenix is ready to take this case on with confidence.
Now, since you're Mr. Literary Analysis, I'll leave it up to you whether we should build up to what will clearly be the main topic for today or whether we just get it out of the way now.
You know what, let's just do it.
Fridging is annoying. It can serve a plot alright, but as we alluded to earlier that's basically all it can do, especially when presented this early in the story. And it just happens too often, making it not really the best thing in the larger context of storytelling and pop culture.
Um, Mr. Professor, what is fridging?
Sorry, got ahead of myself.
"Fridging" is a narrative trope where a character is killed off for little more reason (if any) than traumatizing another character and moving their arc forward. It was coined by comic author Gail Simone, based on a Green Lantern comic in which the protagonist's girlfriend was murdered and stuffed into his refrigerator. Similar to the whole "damsel in distress" thing, it just treats the fridged character (usually women, to the surprise of no one) like more of a plot device for the advancement of the story and the main character (usually men, also to the surprise of no one) than an actual character in their own right, which is less than ideal for a number of reasons.
To be fair here, Mia's death is also significant to Maya, but on the whole I definitely think this could have been done better. Part of my opinions on this are tied to things shown later, so we'll get to those as they happen, but for now I'll just say that it may have been better to save Mia's death for either the end of this game or a future game, though there are pros and cons to both of those approaches as well. Part of me respects the nerve it took to unexpectedly kill a main character, while the other part of me sees it as wasted potential and poorly executed.
Yeah, this particular case is complicated by the fact that Mia is more of a mentor figure than a damsel, so her death has more significance than it otherwise might. Of course the mentor who dies is itself kind of a cliche, but a different (and arguably better) one. She has importance to Maya, and she inspired Phoenix beyond simply being a person he cared about. She's not even done playing an active role in the story, really. But it feels more fridgey because of how early it happens, which...well yeah, it's complicated. But I agree that one way or another, it could have been handled better than it was.
On the subject of character arcs, we see Phoenix lose his mentor, struggle to figure out how to proceed, and get specifically called out early on as a bad choice due to his inexperience, a main aspect of his development for this game. There's also a brief flashback to him as a child, while he feels sympathetic to Maya, which is really just foreshadowing for later on.
While the first case set up the basic identities of the characters, this is the one where we really start to get a feel for Phoenix as an ambitious and empathetic but still inexperienced lawyer who has a lot still to prove. We start getting a better picture of who he really is when he's tossed into this situation before really being ready for it.
This is also our introduction to Maya. While she isn't yet the character we'll grow to know and love, which is understandable as she is clearly grief-stricken and terrified for her life, we do see the beginning of her arc for the game. Maya is a spirit medium in training, so much so that she's unable to provide any evidence of her powers to Phoenix. Without spoiling anything, Maya's relationship with her powers and her self-esteem are the bread and butter of her development.
Across the whole trilogy as well; this is some major setup for the difficulties that Maya will be facing all throughout the series. The metaphorical and literal ghosts of her past and lineage play a major role in the overarching story of the three games. But for now, the main thing we're seeing is just how much both Phoenix and Maya looked up to Mia, and based their own self-image on her to some degree. It's a pretty solid setup for the whole "forced out of the nest after losing a mentor" thing, overall.
I should say now that I feel later games in the series dropped the ball on this character beat, but that's something to talk about when we get to those games.
As I eluded to earlier, I noticed something interesting this time around that I never had before. In the beginning of the case, you can examine several items of Mia's that are unavailable after this point, and the shared thread between them is that Mia's philosophy was to spend money on clients, and to save money behind the scenes. I think this clashes quite well with Grossberg, Mia's mentor, who spends insane amounts of money on things that clearly serve more to inflate his importance rather than make himself look more professional.
Good catch! It's definitely easy to see where Phoenix got his altruistic attitude and passion for justice over money or glory, and the contrast with Grossberg is a nice bit of development to throw in so early on. The game paints a major ideological difference between Phoenix and the prosecution, but it's nice to see that his approach differs from other defense attorneys as well.
Grossberg's an interesting character I'm sure we'll have more to talk about later. One last thing: upon returning to Fey and Co, four things become examinable in what will become Phoenix's home base: the window, the plant, the poster, and the bookcase. Each has a description that changes every case they appear in, and it's fun to keep tabs on them. The window doesn't say much yet, just that across the street is the Gatewater Hotel. The plant's name is Charley, and Mia loved him very much. The poster is of a movie that made Mia cry, but that Phoenix can't remember the name of, and the bookshelf contains many legal books none of which Phoenix has ever read.
I do love those little entries when you inspect certain things. Definitely one of the game's adventure genre elements more than its visual novel roots, and it's a nice touch.
Now we haven't finished this case yet, so no review portion today. Next time we'll be looking at the first day of trial, and with it the real introduction to one of the most popular characters in the series. Auf wiedersehen.
See you all next time!
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