Games of the Generation #9 - Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations

The Wright stuff

It's sometimes difficult to draw the line between a great game and a great story. Games are an interactive medium sure, but like all media we need a reason to partake and inhabit them. Increasingly as the generation has gone on, there's been an obsession with 'defining' a game, and questioning whether certain pieces of entertainment count at all.

None of which matters in the case of Trials and Tribulations, because this is a game. Sure, it's a game more intimately tied to its narrative than almost any other, but at the end of the day, it has mechanics, progression and reward just like any other game. It's just that that progression comes from careful thought and puzzling rather than shooting people. It's that the reward is nothing as trivial as a new powerup or a new plaything, but is instead a chance to move closer to the mystery that beats at the heart of each of the game's five cases, every one a superb example of how to write a compelling story.

Trials and Tribulations cheats in its storytelling of course, because we've already had two games and thousands of lines of dialogue to learn to love these characters. But that shouldn't take away from the incredible job the writers at Capcom (and their truly stellar localisation team) did in bringing such an endearingly goofy cast of characters to life. Each of these people is someone you'll root for, with likes and dislikes, tics and habits, hopes and dreams and salary cuts. It's incredible how a half dozen sprite animations and some canny writing results in more personality than a million grim stories of war-torn futures.

That's not to say that there's no darkness in Trials and Tribulations of course. In fact, the game is positively infested with it - it is a game about murder after all. This time though, we're going places we've never been before, into a tragedy that runs in a murky undercurrent throughout the hours you'll spend here. For a game which features cross-dressing French chefs, cartoon master thieves, spirit mediums and cyborg lawyers, this is an astonishingly grim, mature tale. It's often unflinching in the wickedness of its criminals, and the complexity of the conspiracies they weave. The ending of Case 4 remains one of the most shocking moments in all of gaming, an impossibly tragic conclusion that will stay with everyone who's played it forever, for reasons both good and horrible. Despite, the cartoonish excesses of the art and dialogue, this is a tale with a vicious, ugly streak.

If all that's a little too much, it's worth also remembering this is one of the funniest games ever made too. Words are Phoenix's weapons and they're the game's also, one liners zipping and crackling like fireworks as our spiky haired lawyer struggles to tie down his friends and foes alike. Whether it's Pearl  lambasting him for straying his affections from 'Mystic Maya', Edgeworth imposing yet another salary cut on the long suffering Detective Gumshoe, or a certain doppelganger promising that "I atta beat you so hard, it'll feel like youse were smoochin' the express train!", there's humour and pathos behind every line.

What we're left with then is (surprise!) a contradiction. How can a game be so free and fun, and yet so sad and meaningful? How can what's basically a point and click adventure be one of the best games of the new millennium? The thing is though, this one's easy to solve. It's because we want to be a part of this tale, to face evil head on, confront it, expose it and ultimately triumph over it. It's because we want to battle for the truth and fight alongside our friends in a world where there truly can be justice for all. To craft one of the very best games ever, all Capcom had to do was remember the power of stories.