And I'm Sam, the Game Professor and friend of Roy!
Today we're finishing up our coverage of Turnabout Sisters, the second case in the first game, and I really hope you've been playing along at home. The final trial segment begins in the defendant's lobby, as Phoenix readies to defend himself. To his and Maya's surprise, Prosecutor Edgeworth arrives.
It's the first time we've seen Edgeworth outside of the courtroom, though he looks similarly grumpy.
Edgeworth lets Phoenix know that the Chief Prosecutor told has him that if he raises an objection, the Judge will take his side. He defends his policy of getting nothing but guilty verdicts by saying that it's impossible to ever be truly sure of anyone's innocence, so as a prosecutor he should try to find any defendant guilty, for the common good.
Edgeworth pretty handily proves all the rumors about him true in this scene, along with his weird ideology that basically condemns any innocents along the way for the sake of making absolute sure no guilty people escape justice.
Out of nowhere, Phoenix mentions that Edgeworth has changed, shocking Maya with the revelation that they already know each other. Neither of them confirms or responds to her questions, with Edgeworth merely saying that he won't go easy on Phoenix, leading to the beginning of the court session.
I admit I haven't played the game in a good while, and I'd actually forgotten about this detail. So that was a nice surprise! And kind of explains why Phoenix seemed to already know who Edgeworth was at the beginning.
As court begins, Edgeworth calls White as a new witness. The Judge doesn't ask why he didn't testify before, and Phoenix can choose to bring it up or not. Either way, the CEO takes the stand. This begins a running gag of Edgeworth asking for someone's name and occupation, then getting frustrated by how difficult the witness is.
It is nice to at least see that Edgeworth isn't exactly buddy-buddy with White; whatever his reasons for trying to convict Phoenix, it's pretty clearly not for White's benefit.
His testimony is pretty standard: "I was in the hotel room with April May, I had no idea she was a wiretapper, I was near the window filling out forms, I saw Phoenix Wright chase then kill Mia Fey." Now, I believe I've mentioned before that, even when Pressing doesn't lead to valuable information, it can still be done for entertainment. This testimony, and all of White's testimonies for that matter, are Press humor gold. They are side-splittingly hilarious.
I'm afraid I'm going to need you to fill me in, because for some reason whenever I play I always spot the contradiction and go straight for it. I should fix that.
I'll give a fantastic example later. Anyway, here Phoenix presses on the statement talking about Mia fleeing her attacker, and White clarifies that she ran left. However, April May's testimony says she saw Mia run to the right, which as Phoenix points out her version makes more sense: to the right was the door out of the room, escape; to the left, nothing but a wall. When asked to clarify what this contradiction means, Phoenix doesn't mince words: both are telling the truth, but because White is the assailant, his perspective means she was running to his left, April May's right.
I feel it's worthwhile to point out that White's sprite for when his lie has been pointed out is hilarious. He's pouting dejectedly, and he just looks so bummed that you're not letting him get away with saying whatever he wants.
It's really interesting: for an evil sack of garbage, White is characterized uniquely. He begins the trial super confident and ostentatious, but when asked for clarification he seems genuinely apologetic and put off for messing up witnessing. Then, when the contradiction is pointed out, he not only becomes petulant, but also begins losing his self-confidence.
Yes, it's very much like all he really has is this over-inflated ego, and if you start breaking that there's not much left of the guy. Which... well we'll save talking about his name for the final analysis. Definitely an interesting villain though.
So, he revises his testimony, of course. How does he try and explain the contradiction without making it clear he's the real killer? He claims Mia ran left, Phoenix hit her, then she ran right and he hit her again. This is clearly ridiculous, as the autopsy report stated she was hit once not twice. Phoenix points out this contradiction, and White claims he was confused, and is asked to testify once again. Before he does, White asks the Judge if he can leave, because his stomach hurts. Phoenix just tells him, "Deal with it." Savage.
Savage, but smart. Phoenix exerts a good deal of effort in this court session making sure that White and Edgeworth don't get an opportunity to regroup, and even the crowd is on his side pretty quickly.
They're calling for justice, and the Judge forces White to testify further. His new explanation is Mia dodged left then right, but he's completely off his game now, his confidence all but gone. Pressing everything leads to White reacting to Phoenix asking, "What did you do then?" with "I gave chase, of course!" He gets away with it, but this slip of the tongue is so freaking silly I love it.
And thematically relevant, too; the fact that he can make such a stupid and obvious mistake without being immediately questioned for it is proof of how untouchable he is. For now.
White vaguely mentions something falling, and when asked for clarification, he says it was the glass light stand, the shards of which are recorded as evidence. Of course, Phoenix points out, you couldn't look at those shards and somehow know it was a light stand, and it was too far from the window to be seen when it was falling. Which proves that White was in the office...during the murder!
Out of curiosity, do you ever present the glass shards as evidence? I don't think I ever did this time.
I think you do? Hold on...*Googles furiously* Yes, you do. Anyway, White is basically ready to confess at this point. Now, so far, Edgeworth hasn't done much, but that changes when he asks Redd White to admit his crime: namely that he is the one that tapped the phone. In doing so, he could have seen the light stand, removing the contradiction. Phoenix's argument loses all of its momentum, and White completely recovers his composure.
This is the moment where, for me, Edgeworth loses all my benefit of the doubt. At this point White is clearly the guilty party, but Edgeworth intentionally makes up this completely fictional excuse to get his verdict anyway. I can believe that he's just overzealous about putting criminals behind bars, but if that's the case he's completely abandoning those principles here for the sake of winning, and it's super not cool.
I'm willing to give Edgeworth some slack for two reasons: one, he's clearly under enormous pressure from his superiors, what with White's control over the Chief Prosecutor; two, his belief in a 100% guilty record is at this point basically unshakable. Still, super awful for him to do.
So since they're going with this story, White gives a short, simple testimony claiming that he snuck into the Fey & Co. Law Offices himself a week before the murder to install the wiretap, and that’s why he knew about the lamp. It’s simple, and far enough outside of the established facts of the case, that Phoenix has no choice but to press him on everything and hope he slips up.
Heck, you actually have to press him on everything twice. This is the first time something like that happens in the series, and later on pressing repeatedly in a specific order is required which really pissed some folks off.
Yep, and even so you don't actually find anything to call him out on. Nothing he says has any identifiable holes, at which point Phoenix is about ready to admit defeat when he realizes Mia is standing right next to him! So of course he immediately faints.
Phoenix regains consciousness in the lobby, thinking he was hallucinating, but Mia shows up again, and upon closer inspection it’s not Mia, but Maya! She has Mia’s posture and size and… cleavage. Of course. Point is, it’s basically Maya doing a Mia impression. Remember the stuff from before about the Fey family’s psychic abilities? The shock of Phoenix’s defeat was enough to awaken Maya’s latent abilities and let Mia in.
We'll get more into that cleavage later, in the analysis portion.
Mia asks Phoenix to look at the receipt on which Maya’s name is written in blood. It’s a receipt for one day before the murder, for the glass lamp White claims he saw the week before. Which, of course, is exactly what Phoenix needs to put the last nail in the coffin of White’s bogus testimony. Back in court, there’s nothing left to do but pass Wright’s “Guilty” verdict, but when Wright asks for one last chance, Edgeworth humors him out of spite. Which of course gives Phoenix the opportunity to present his last piece of evidence, proving White's cover story false and securing justice for Mia.
Or at least he would have done that...if it wasn't for Edgeworth.
Of course he's got to mess it up. Phoenix slyly says he knows the Judge must be under a lot of pressure, but also says that he can’t declare Wright guilty under these circumstances. To which the Judge, after a knowing pause, agrees. But Edgeworth throws out that “no concrete proof” excuse prosecutors love to throw around in this series, and asks that the verdict be delayed another day.
This is just the out the Judge needs, considering how powerful White is. He's so close at this moment to leaving the courtroom and disappearing, forever.
Phoenix can object, but Edgeworth is persistent and the Judge agrees to delay. But as White is preparing to leave, Mia hands Phoenix a note with a list of names. Which he proceeds to read out loud. It doesn’t take long for White to cry out that this needs to stop, right now. Mia tells him to confess or the list will be released to the press. So he does. The list of all the people he blackmailed into silence and suicide finally broke him.
It's unclear if it's the guilt, the fear of public disapproval, or what an investigation into these "suicides" would reveal is what leads him to confess, but he does. I really love how he confesses too, it actually makes him sound pitiful.
The case is done! So, Professor, why don't we begin the analysis with Phoenix?
Well this is a foundational case for Phoenix's character, much more so than the tutorial case. If he were a superhero, this would be his origin story. It's where he's forced to come into his own as a lawyer, act according to his principles under pressure, and prove his skill and dedication against impossible odds.
Phoenix loses the mentor who grounded him in this profession and is forced to find his footing. He defends a young woman he barely knows and in the process finds himself pitted against one of the toughest prosecutors in the city, yet somehow wins. He's gone from the greenhorn attorney to the greenhorn attorney running his own law office, with a new reputation to uphold.
We can also see here how Phoenix kind of fumbles through things. As a player, we use a lot of the aforementioned technique of just prodding at a testimony until we find a hole in it, and even then Phoenix only really succeeds because his mentor shows up, literally from beyond the grave, to provide him with the decisive evidence. The game is still very satisfying to play, and we feel like we've accomplished something, but in reality Phoenix kiiiiiiiinda just stumbled his way through this one. He's still a baby lawyer.
Even at his best, Phoenix is never going to be a great 'lawyer'. When all's said and done, Nick barely knows anything about law. His strengths are his investigative skills and his ability to go out on insane limbs that prove to be right. This becomes more evident later on in the series, when we see what actually good defense attorneys are like.
For sure. But in any case, while the tutorial was an effective introduction to the game and its characters, this is the one that actually turns Phoenix into the ace attorney we know and love.
While we don't really know it yet, Maya has already taken a few steps down her road in this game during this trial session. The reveal of her being able to channel Mia is the foundation for further drama, but her connecting with Nick and choosing to work alongside him is just as important.
We don't really get the full weight of this decision until we come face-to-face with Maya's upbringing in the second game, but it's definitely a pretty big decision for Maya to leave her village, her family, and her training for the sake of helping out a lawyer in the city. That she would make such a big life change, even right after the loss of her sister, has some pretty big implications for her character.
Maya has a lot of baggage in her past and in her future, and rather than facing either she's trying to do something completely different: befriending Phoenix and changing jobs. Despite this and many of the other stresses she faces in her life, Maya always chooses to put on a brave face rather than burden Phoenix with her problems, whenever that's actually possible.
Ultimately most of her character development is ahead of us, but we definitely see some of her defining traits in this introductory story arc.
So...Mia came back from the dead. We better address that, huh? Mia's return is a great twist, and it proves how impossible this case was to win: Phoenix literally needed magic to win! On the other hand...
...it definitely can come across as a deus ex machina, and something of a thematic foil to the whole "Phoenix's mentor dies and he has to figure out how to make it on his own" thing. You know, the central theme of the whole case. I don't really mind it in concept, and it doesn't affect my enjoyment of the story, but thinking about things on a narrative and thematic level it does kind of take the punch out of Phoenix's early arc to some degree.
I'll get more into this on a later episode, but for now all I'll say is that Mia possessing Maya is a plot device that has the potential to completely ruin not only the impact of her death, but also any reality death can have in the series. What we can definitely talk about now is that cleavage we mentioned earlier. Now, a quirk of spirit channeling in this series is that the body completely changes to match the spirits original body, but the hair and clothes stay the same. Which, considering the size difference between Maya and Mia, leads to wardrobe malfunction.
Yeah. It's one of those things that makes enough sense to not be completely absurd, but it's also clear that the only reason that explanation exists is for more boobs. And that's mildly annoying.
It only gets really absurd next game, when it gets fairly creepy as well. Anyway, why don't we talk Edgeworth? This part of the story gave a better glimpse into his character, the basis for the arc he will go down. Edgeworth is a fantastic prosecutor, but he is willing to side with his superior's orders over his own self-professed ideals, and in the end he loses a case for the first time in his career.
There's definitely a bit of a classic thing going on here; the upstanding lawyer prevailing against lies and cover-ups through his dedication to justice, and the antagonist operating off an extreme and corrupt ideology. Edgeworth is a bit more complex than that, but in this case we mostly just see the seeds of his later conflict, like how even he bends to corruption if it means accomplishing his goal. And I do think it's significant that this contributes to his first ever loss.
There'll be more development on this front next case. Next up, let's finally talk about Redd White. I'm just going to say this wright (heh) now: he's my favorite villain in the series. He's not the most devious, or the most successful, but he is just so entertaining and has textures to him that some other antagonists don't really get.
For sure. He's one of those characters where if you try to fit him into any one villain archetype, he comes across as really bad at what he does. The reason, of course, being that he's a way more flawed person than that. He's not particularly clever, he just has a lot of influence, and he thinks that's all he needs. This makes him more obsessed with flaunting that power than actually making smart decisions. He's an interesting character, which makes him a better villain in my book than if he always did the best thing to make life hard for Phoenix.
I've done a lot of theorizing on the character. Redd White made his deal with Grossberg back in his early twenties, and from then to the present day he built an empire on blackmail and coercion. He's clearly intelligent when it comes to his business, but it's rather telling that his first response to the threat Mia poses was to kill her himself. He didn't hire an assassin, he didn't threaten her, he just killed her. The way White wears the many rings on his hands often looks like brass knuckles, and before Phoenix even comes close to accusing White of murder he demonstrates his perceived untouchableness by socking Phoenix in the face. Combine those facts with his habit of making up words to sound smarter than he is, and the way he flaunts wealth around in ostentatious, gaudy ways, and I think White is clearly a New Money kind of guy. I think he used to be a blue collar criminal, a brawler, and through Bluecorp escaped into the world of the upper class. I could be entirely wrong, but that's always the impression he gave me.
Well, this case happened in-game in the year 2016. So...
That is... uncanny. Someone please write fanfiction about Redd White becoming president. The world needs this.
Also, fun fact, in Japanese his name translates to Small Medium Large.
That... wait what? I'm unsure what that means!
Me either! Anyway, I think it's worth talking about how freaking fantastic the pacing in today's trial was. The first three testimonies are incredibly easy, and they get easier with each victory. White gets more and more pitiful, Phoenix's ego rises, it's a huge rush...one that is completely squashed when Edgeworth jumps in and changes everything. It may be one of the most tightly controlled paces in the series, and I am very happy for it.
I know I keep talking about the way the game's music and gameplay contributes to a rush of excitement and emotional investment, but man does this case showcase it real well. That build of momentum as you continually crack White's lies and the crushing blow of Edgeworth shifting the tracks and undoing all your hard work make this case such a roller coaster, and those emotional highs are a big part of why I love this series.
I think the use of Cornered, one of the most well-recognized and amazing tracks in the game, as Edgeworth truly begins his counterattack is so freaking perfect, it's a killer moment for sure.
Oh man I love this soundtrack. But I'm sure we'll be talking a lot more about how good and exciting the music is in the future.
Now, it is once again time to review this case. Last time we covered the standards for tutorial cases in the series, but thanks to the great design of this first game, there are standards set for every case depending on its placement. Second cases, or perhaps Establishing Cases, exist to set up the game, introducing whatever new elements will be prevalent in this installment as well as showing off reoccurring characters such as assistants, prosecutors, and detectives as well as laying the groundwork for the game's overall thematic elements as well as its overarching story, if it has one.
Of course, it also needs to have an enjoyable story on its own, with fun twists and turns and be fun to play, but of all the cases in an Ace Attorney game, Establishing Cases have perhaps the most to do in terms of responsibilities for the game as a whole.
Even more than the Tutorial Case, Turnabout Sisters has to introduce and establish a number of important characters, most notably Maya and Edgeworth. And it does a pretty excellent job with both, and I'd argue Edgeworth in particular. We get an idea of him as something of a mythical figure in the law community, and get to see a little bit of what actually lies under all the legends and rumors, and all of it serves to portray him as a powerful antagonist. So as an introductory case for two of the most important characters in the series, I think it did a pretty good job.
I'll 100% agree on the subject of Edgeworth. This case gives him the best introduction any prosecutor has ever gotten, with only a few other cases coming close to giving their prosecutor as much pomp and skill. On the subject of Maya, while she definitely sticks into the memory and her backstory is clearly established, you only get small tastes of the personality Maya will be known for later on, so I do feel that's a slight flaw. Gumshoe also doesn't quite shine yet.
Yeah, I do agree that Maya could have gotten a bit more characterization. And it's true that Gumshoe didn't get much attention, but I'm personally fine with that; he comes across as little more than a flunky until later, and I feel like that effect works rather well.
Thematically this case does an amazing job setting up Phoenix's growth as a lawyer and the corruption he fights, the two main themes of this particular game. DL-6 is also brought up for the first time, and done in such a way that a less astute player might not expect it to ever be heard from again, a plot point without larger meaning. But boy howdy is that not the case.
For sure. This case plants a lot of seeds, not only for this game but for the rest of the trilogy. We come out of it with both a solid idea of where these characters are headed and a lot of things we don't actually realize will become important later, which is pretty much exactly what a good introduction to a story should be.
As a story in and of itself, I love this case. The pacing is basically perfect, the characters are incredibly memorable, the stakes are high, and it's just plain fun to play. My biggest complaint is the near complete lack of unique Present conversations in the Investigation portions. I love Presenting everyone my badge and hearing them complain about it, or showing a witness the murder weapon that killed their best friend so I can be admonished for doing so. Everything Present related not necessary to the plot in this case leads to generic "That's not the right evidence!" conversations.
On its own I agree the story stands up rather well, but I will admit that playing through it this time some of the writing, and even the gameplay surrounding it, bugged me on a couple occasions. Most notably in the first day of trial when I had to present evidence to establish a fact that we had already established mere minutes beforehand. But those are nitpicks, and overall it's an enjoyable case with a lot of great moments and memorable characters. And I never got stuck trying to figure out what to do next, so that's something I'll miss during the next case.
We rate these cases on a 1 to 10 scale, with 1 being the worst cases in the series, 10 the best, and 5 or 6 the average.
This is the case that made me excited to play the series. The characters are memorable, the story exciting, and I've never been bored replaying it. That's why I give Turnabout Sisters a 9 out of 10. There are cases I like more, but not many of them.
While I already talked about how the first case made me interested in the game, Turnabout Sisters is the one that really cements everything I love about the Ace Attorney series. While I do have a couple problems with it, they're ultimately pretty unimportant next to the general quality of the case. So I'd give Turnabout Sisters an 8.5 out of 10. There are other cases that do more, some that do better, but few that do what they do quite so effectively.
Next week we'll be starting the third case in the series, Turnabout Samurai, and for the first time see the hero of Neo Olde Tokyo. Auf wiedersehen.
See you all then!
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