Hallo, alle miteinander, and welcome back to Wright Wednesday! This is the weekly series where we recap, analyze, and review the various cases in the Ace Attorney series. This week, we are covering the first day of trial in Recipe for Turnabout. My name is Roy, and I have never tried French cuisine.
My name is Sam, and I have. I wasn't a huge fan, if I'm being honest.
The day of court begins in the Defendant Lobby, where Phoenix has just finished explaining everything they’ve found out to Maggey. She’s getting down about how bad the situation looks, but Gumshoe arrives to cheer her up. After all, he’s the first witness of the day, and he’s on Phoenix’s side. Maya says something about Gumshoe being ‘on their side for once’, which has happened at least once a game so far, to the point where I’m kind of annoyed that she or Phoenix ever doubt that Gumshoe is their friend. Though, he is so invested in this particular case that he threatens to arrest Phoenix if he loses.
Talk about a fair-weather friend.
From there, we see court actually begin, where the Judge starts the trial by making sure this really is the right Phoenix, since in the last trial Xin Eohp apparently yelled at the Judge in a Brooklyn accent every time the Judge tried to check in to see if everything was okay. But Godot jumps in to say that whether Phoenix is a phony or not will be determined by this case. Not about whether he’s the real Phoenix Wright, but whether he’s a real attorney.
To be fair to the masked man, it has been made very clear that Phoenix’s grasp on the law is not very good. Also, the game makes a point to have Phoenix think about how clear it is that Godot hates him, even bolding those words in a different color, and it’s like...we get it. Godot hates Phoenix. We know.
You will never see me complain about the way this series gives life to its text, but yes, Phoenix's inner monologue going "Wow, this guy really hates me for some reason" is also part of the game just hammering it in real hard.
Gumshoe is brought to the stand to testify, though he’s so nervous that he messed up on the name and occupation part of things. He gives a rundown of the general facts of the case, to which the only new information we’re offered is that the victim, a professional programmer, worked at a local tech firm called Blue Screens, Inc. Our detective friend’s testimony is even more scattershot than it usually is, but even then the Judge feels pretty confident about ruling as soon as Phoenix is done with his cross-examination.
Admittedly, yes, the facts of the case don't change much at a glance. Which makes sense, considering Fauxnix apparently didn't do much to challenge the surface reading of events.
There are a lot of places to Press harder in this testimony. On the topic of the discrepancy in testimony, how Maggey saw two people at the table and everyone else saw one, Phoenix suggests that maybe from the angle the others were at, seeing the other man just wasn’t possible. But Godot has a photo to disprove that, one taken by Armstrong just after the murder. It makes it clear that he, and the other witness, definitely would have seen the other person.
I do appreciate how the game doesn't let Phoenix immediately swoop in and poke holes in the story, but lets it seem like a fairly airtight situation. Makes it more believable that it could have gone so wrong before.
Oh, be sure I'm going to talk more about that quality later. On the subject of the poison used in the crime, Pressing harder means that Phoenix brings up that there doesn’t seem to be any evidence the victim drank his coffee, just that he was poisoned and the coffee was too. A bit weak, but even that gets Gumshoe to try and root the theory on. Godot chimes in, annoyed that his witness is clearly leaning towards his opponent’s side, and tries to get Gumshoe to present a piece of evidence. When Gumshoe plays dumb about it, Godot does it instead, while also throwing a cup of coffee on Phoenix once again. The evidence is the victim’s coffee cup, which has a stain on it clearly showing that the victim had taken a sip. It doesn’t help that the only fingerprints on the cup are Maggey’s and Elg’s.
Pretty damning so far.
The last place where some Pressing harder is necessary is regarding Maggey’s motive. The truth of the lottery ticket stuff comes to light in court, which doesn’t look good for Phoenix’s case. Our protagonist tries to rebuff the claims, pointing out that just because the winning ticket disappeared didn’t mean that Maggey tried to take it. But once again, Godot steps in with new evidence: the winning ticket, which was found during a body search of Maggey Byrde. All of this evidence, combined with the fact the court already ruled Guilty before, is making the Judge a little gavel-happy, ready to end the trial already.
Considering he'd already ruled Guilty anyway, I can't blame him. This all seems pretty decisive.
There does appear to be a bit of a wrinkle, though. Godot, not happy with winning as things are, throws in more evidence: the apron the defendant was wearing at the time. Everyone immediately notes the strangest things about it as a red stain on the front, but Godot doesn’t mention that, instead talking about a brown coffee stain briefly before going into the pocket.
The police searched it at the scene as they responded, and found a bottle of the poison, Potassium cyanide, was in the apron. Both the apron and the bottle are added to evidence, but the Judge asks Godot why he hasn’t talked about the red stain on the front, which looks like it could very easily be a bloodstain. Godot acts incredulous, immediately saying, “No one told me anything about a bloodstain!” He angrily asks Gumshoe about it, but the detective clarifies it’s not blood, but ketchup. Still, it’s quite odd that Godot didn’t seem to even realize the red stain was there.
Is it possible the red hue of his visor has him seeing in red? So it would have blended in with the rest of the apron for him?
That is an interesting theory, one that will be put to the test later in this game.
The Judge asks Gumshoe to give another testimony, this time about the aftermath to the crime. This time, we do get more new info: Victor Kudo called in the crime at 2:25pm, the victim had no ID but they could figure out who he was easily anyway, and “nothing else was missing from the crime scene”. The trick here is to ask about the second one, to which we find out they were able to find the victim’s identity fast because he had just been to a pharmacy, and his prescription bag was on the table. It had enough information to find out who he was.
Now, you have two options to check for more info, and the wrong one is to ask about the victim’s health insurance. So, of course, as I’ve been doing with Wright Wednesday, I went down the wrong path first. Phoenix realizes that to go see a doctor, he should have had his insurance card on him, so if he didn’t have it, the card must have been stolen. Godot ends that train of thought though, clarifying the victim has no health insurance. Once again, we see for all that the Ace Attorney universe is so different from our own, it’s also basically the same too.
Yeesh. Kind of grim considering Japan is better about that than we are in the US. That reads as an intentional worldbuilding detail.
The right thing to do is ask about the medicine, but we can’t find out too much: the bag is empty. No one knows where the medicine went. That contradicts Gumshoe’s closing statement, about how nothing was missing from the crime scene, though even Phoenix admits it’s a small hole. The Judge does recognize this as a new direction that the last trial didn’t go down, and Phoenix tries to suggest that perhaps it was the medicine that poisoned the victim.
But Godot is ready to counter that idea. Elg had recently been in a fight, one that left him with a ruptured eardrum, and the medication was a topical ointment to help with healing it. There were traces of it in the man’s ear, so he clearly took some before dying.
Again, I love how resistant this case is to Phoenix's blundering.
Things are looking dire once more, but Phoenix points out that, if the victim had just applied his medication, where is it? Isn’t the prescription’s disappearance a clear issue with the prosecution’s case? Godot is forced to back down from the confrontation, and then it becomes clear the guy didn’t plan on a second witness, he thought Gumshoe would be enough. But luckily for everyone else, Gumshoe took the time to prepare Victor Kudo as a witness, so he’ll be called next, after a recess.
During the recess, Maggey is upset that Gumshoe seemed to betray her, and Phoenix prepares for Victor Kudo to throw birdseed at him again. When the old man takes the stage, he says he saw it all while eating seeds with a "Javaccino."
I know nothing about coffee, but even I know that is wrong.
Kudo says the victim was reading the sports paper, and claims to have seen Maggey put something in his coffee. The victim took one sip before collapsing, and Kudo affirms that the server in question was indeed the defendant, Maggey Byrde. When asked to elaborate, however, he can only go on moralizing rants about the indecency of the uniforms. But he claims he remembers more, so he testifies that she had a ribbon in her hair and her apron ties were loose. These are all things, Phoenix points out, That could be seen from behind Maggey, raising the question of whether Kudo had seen Maggey's face at all. But when asked to elaborate further, he simply says nothing caught his attention from the front.
Boy howdy, I do love that his perversion is once again relevant.
Considering the big freakout the Judge had a moment ago about the supposed bloodstains on Maggey's apron, this seems unlikely, and what's more, Kudo insists he'd never forget such a dirty apron…before being informed Maggey had been wearing it the day of the murder. Clearly, he either hadn't been paying attention at all, or simply hadn't seen Maggey from the front. So he has one more chance to tell the court everything he remembers, this time about the victim.
I love that this is no longer about proving Maggey's guilt through testimony, now we're just quizzing this old man.
Kudo describes the victim as an annoying young man rustling the pages of his paper and listening to his radio, and says he took a sip from the coffee with his free hand when Maggey brought it to him. This testimony sounds more credible than the previous one, but Phoenix is confident he can throw doubt into Kudo's memory. And indeed, the old man insists that the victim picked up the cup with his left hand, but the lip marks on the glass clearly indicate it was his right.
He sticks to his guns here, testifying a number of details related to which side was which on the victim; his HMD, his earpiece, and the hand he used to pick up the coffee; all on his left side. But Phoenix points out that we recently learned the victim had ruptured his left eardrum, and it would make no sense for him to have an earpiece in an ear he couldn't even hear through. Godot tries to reason his way out of Kudo's predicament, but to no avail; Phoenix counters his every move, and the Judge is left with no choice but to end the trial for the day.
That sure was something, huh? Sure is the end of this trial day.
But wait! Kudo has been withholding important evidence! The Judge caves to hearing it, and the old man says--with a caveat that even he knows it may not be important--the victim knocked over the vase on the table when he fell over dead. The vase broke, soaking the tablecloth. When Phoenix points out the crime scene photo with an intact vase, Kudo remembers…It was his own table. He was startled, stood up quickly, and soaked his own table with the liquid from the broken vase. Oops.
This part gave me Moe vibes,
Moe? What? How?
OH THE CLOWN!
I thought you meant moe, like the anime character archetype.
Yes, Sam. Moe the clown. Not moe.
That makes significantly more sense.
Kudo is escorted out, and the Judge feels uncertain about a verdict after all that wasted time and the loss of half their witnesses. Before adjourning, the Judge passes out a final testimony from Kudo: "When the incident occurred, I broke the vase at my seat. I'm sorry." That last apology makes me kind of sad for some reason.
That apology given, and that Sam sad, let's talk about analysis. What are you thinking about, Sam?
Well, here we are again with masks and secrets. Between Armstrong hiding his past, Kudo hiding both his perversion and his waning perception stat, and Godot with his secret Phoenix hate, the theme continues.
But we also already knew about most of that, and this trial is weirdly...meandering. It reminds me a little bit of Turnabout Big Top, where the first trial didn't actually move the story forward in any particularly meaningful way, but that comparison isn't fair. It does serve to really set the tone for this case, establish how much more difficult it is than simply doing the job properly where the Phony Nick failed to, and get things moving in general. But we also don't really prove anything aside from the case being less airtight than it previously seemed.
I absolutely agree. This segment feels like it's playing a dangerous game. It's doing something both the Filler Cases before it did, namely using the first day of trial to not get a lot done. But this case does something with that, like you said, in how it uses the lack of momentum for effect. The case isn't moving on because we can't really get into the real mystery yet, it can't move on because the way forward seems impassible. I mentioned last time that this is one to the toughest situations for any defendant so far. The case stacked against Maggey is a very strong one, and even the small holes Phoenix finds in this segment aren't really anything the prosecution should necessarily worry too much about.
Exactly. It can't help but feel tangentially similar to the big pile of nothing that was the first trial in Turnabout Big Top, but it's actually done well. It comes across like a way to build tension and establish stakes, and to move the prosecution onto weaker footing so we can strike later, rather than a way to drag out a badly-written mystery.
Speaking of, I realized there was something I failed to talk about last time that I'm kicking myself about. Something interesting about the mystery of this case is that, as difficult as it is, it isn't a Whodunnit. After all, we already know who did it.
Well, the case doesn't completely go out it's way to say it, but to the player more than the characters, we have been given more than enough clues to tell who the killer is. We saw their distinctive silhouette in the opening flashback, which we matched to a Phoenix lookalike purposefully giving Maggey a bad defense, which we can then put on the mysterious red guy with a scooter we met. He is obviously the killer.
What we don't know, is how. Despite being the most popular type of mystery, Whodunnit's aren't the only kind in the genre. Not as well known are what you could call a Howdunnit. We know we did the crime, we know Maggey is innocent, but all the evidence makes that conclusion impossible to reach. We spent a whole day in court and barely found anything at all. This isn't the first time the series has done something like this, as we knew from the start that Frank Sahwit, Redd White, and Richard Wellington were the killers of their cases, but it is the first time the series plays it like this. It isn't a simple mystery, with the difficulty coming from other factors, it's a hard case even though, or perhaps partly because, we know Whodunnit.
I do love when mystery stories subvert that usual Whodunnit formula; Knives Out and Dial M for Murder are two of my favorite mystery movies for that reason. And yes, it very much changes how we approach this case, despite this kind of hand-tipping via silhouette being quite common in this series.
What did you think of the conflict forming between Maggey and Gumshoe?
I feel like it's a little forced, honestly. I can see how emotions are running high in this situation, but when she said he betrayed them it actually took me a minute to even figure out what she was talking about.
I wouldn't argue against you there. It definitely feels a bit contrived to me
This is the last segment that focuses much on Victor Kudo, so I feel like we should talk about him at least a little more. Like I said in the recap, he definitely gave me Moe the Clown vibes at points. That weird combo of annoying, not relevant to the main story of the case, and really persistent.
He's basically just a bunch of annoying tropes that aren't handled too well. Not the worst character, but I'm glad he's as much of a one-off as he is.
Oh, for sure not the worst character in the series. That said, I did feel like the way they played with his memory here was something noteworthy we hadn't discussed before. A lot of our time with him feels like it's all about making him an unreliable witness, to make the prosecution's case weaker. But later on, we're going to establish that what he ended up sticking with at the end was all actually true, and that's kind of a reoccurring thing in this series.
Part of it is the needs of the gameplay, but it is so strange that witnesses are contrarily shown the be lying or misremembering things, but then we get to the "real truth" at the core of their testimony and that's treated as gospel, as though the person hadn't already been shown to be a poor witness.
I'm hoping that when his last testimony becomes important, it's because it fits into something else that was already established, rather than just being used to prove something as though it's reliable on its own. But we'll see.
There is more about that in the coming weeks, but in a more general sense, this is just an odd facet of this franchise. Characters will lie on the stand, cover up where they're not remembering things correctly, but at the end of the day the game wants to treat whatever things they said last as absolutely true things that can't be discounted.
I only feel like this is a thing worth digging into a little because, well, media does have an effect on how we see things in the real world, even if not always in a way we'll notice. As an example, a lot of people's thoughts on torture are informed by popular media more than reality. In that way, the fact that Ace Attorney witnesses are counted as reliable, no matter how much they're shown to not be, is a bit of an issue. I don't know if we have time for it here, but I would recommend doing some research on what science has shown about witness testimony and how reliable our memories and perspectives can really be.
That's fair, it certainly doesn't get too deep into that particular topic. I feel like it would have to fundamentally change the nature of the gameplay and mystery writing, so I see why it mostly steers clear.
Very true. That's part of why I felt odd how much this segment pinned on the old man's bad memory, when it would largely be vindicated in the end. That said, I think we're both running dry on analysis. Even for a middle of the case segment, there isn't too much to discuss quite yet.
Pretty much! Think of it as saving room for later, because I expect we won't be able to stop talking once we hit the final case.
Next time, it's back to investigating, and hopefully we'll learn a little more about what's going on here. Auf wiedersehen.
Until then!!
