Spirit of Justice is actually the last main installment in the Ace Attorney franchise, so this could be my last Ace Attorney post in a while, since as I said before, my goal was to complete every mainline Ace Attorney game, said goal was already reached and Spirit of Justice is the culmination of all the reviews I´ve done to Ace Attoney -for now-. I´ve always wanted to play these games, and finally having done it in this wonderful collection, well, it´s awesome, I feel fulfilled.
Spirit of Justice is the direct sequel of Dual Destinies, and yeah, we play as Phoenix, Athena and Apollo once again, but the main plot is about Phoenix going to a foreign country and all of the story of this game revolves about said premise. In this country, the legal system is different, lawyers are hated and if you defend your client and it gets you into a guilty veredict, not only your client will be executed, but you too, meaning the lawyer gets the punishment as well, because of this, there are no lawyers in this country, which leads to the fact that defendants don´t have a way to defend theirselves. Despite the low crime rate within this country, it´s obvious this is a questionable method of doing things, this country is governed by a dictatorial regime, which implies there is a lot of corruption, since you can´t have free will perse.
Spirit of Justice is basically Dual Destinies but epic and I´m not even joking, I liked this game, quite a lot to be honest, it seems to me that it can easily compare itself to the old trilogy. First of all, SoJ uses all the gimmicks that worked in previous games such as the magatame or Apollo´s bracalet, and Athena´s widget, but also added a new gimmick called the Divination Séance, which is basically about what the deceased could see before their death, or even felt. In courtooms, we are able to give a glimpse of that, the final moments of the victim, we are able to see how they felt and what they saw, and it´s about finding contradictions in whatever they see or are feeling. I´m gonna be honest, I actually like this gimmick and even more than Athena gimmick´s, it´s not that easy to find contradictions in these things.
A thing I really liked about Spirit of Justice is that, yeah, it´s true that you play as three characters, but the main focus is Apollo Justice, I mean, this game is almost entirely about him and his background, giving him a good closure to his arc, which I highly appreciate, I don´t want to sound mean but Athena is almost a filler character in this game, she´s not that important which is sad but understandable, also Phoenix is a secondary character, yeah, he´s important to the plot but again, the main focus is Apollo, even the last turnabout, you play it as Apollo while Phoenix is there for supporting you.
Dual Destinies had some horrible cases, some of them being the lowest point of the franchise, in the other hand, we have Spirit of Justice with really good and solid turnabouts, there was just one turnabout which I found forgettable but not bad perse. I appreciate the fact that these cases are not extended artificially, I mean, they last what they have to last. For example, we have The Magica Turnabout, the second case of the game which is not justa filler case, it make us see another side we hadn´t see from Trucy, which is great; my point being, The Magical Turnabout is just a 1 day case, not two as almost every Dual Destinies case was.
We could also talk about Turnabout Revolution, see, while some cases are pretty short, there is this one turnabout which is one of the longest turnabouts in the franchise, it´s like 12-14 hours to complete, and not gonna lie, this turnabout is amazing, I do think that the first hallf is annoying, but the second half is fantastic, the last trial of this game took me around 6-7 hours which is insane, and I loved every single hour from it, from begining to end.
I´ll admit the characters from Dual Destinies are more likeable, for example, prosecutor Blackquill is better than prosecutor Nahyuta, prosecutor Nahyuta acts as an asshole and in the end he is not as fleshed out as he should be through the story, even so, there are some others who are pretty cool and have their respective character development, and it seems to me that Spirit of Justice treats in a better way their characters, for example, all of the respect the writers had when developing Apollo Justice through the game. Some old characters from previous game return such as Ema, it´s good she came back since it allow us to have scientifical stuff in the investigations, thing I liked about Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney.
When I completed Dual Destinies, I felt nothing more than joyness, because I didn´t have more reasons to touch that game ever again, but when I completed Spirit of Justice, I felt rather both empty and happy, mostly because of Apollo, because thank god he finally had his closure as a character. I genuinely think that Spirit of Justice is a great game and a love-letter to the franchise, it´s true that the fanservice might help somehow, but it doesn´t rely on fanservice only to be a cool game, a worthy installment to the franchise.
Almost forgot to talk about the DLC content, Time Traveler Turnabout or something like that, cool thing about this DLC is that it doesn´t sucks, the premise is about someone claiming to be a time traveler, it´s interesting to debate the whole thing about time travel, at the end of the day, it´s just us proving that there is no thing such as time travel through logic, actually pretty cool, not the bestest case of the world but I loved that it´s actually good, not like the garbage DLC from Dual Destinies.
All of the screenshots were taken by me