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lesbianmarth · 4 years

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it’s been a while since i posted about aa but i just finished soj in its entirety tonight. here’s my new list so far

i still have to give thoughts on cases 4 5 and dlc so that’ll be under a cut. spoilers!

6-4: this was such a filler case, almost shamefully so. i don’t know why they thought they could manage to do this in the 4th case when every game with 5 cases has been pretty consistent about making the 4th case plot relevant, sometimes literally just a preamble to case 5. so yeah i think this one was kinda ass

the two things it had going for it: one, athena. in 6-2 i actually got confused about why i ever liked her, because in that case she felt like she was just acting the part of the Peppy Teen Girl With a Rowdy Streak that makes up almost every assistant character. But then as SOON as she started bantering with Simon in 6-4 i was like “oh, THAT’S why i liked her!” was nice to take control of her again.

two, uendo toneido. while i don’t think you can say the DID was portrayed with quite the necessary respect or kindness, it was handled better than i’ve seen other media handle it-- at least it’s not completely demonized. other people have written more on that in better detail so i’m not really the judge, but the basic point is that this witness was mad fun to read, and even the dumb jokes like the changing number of floor cushions were entertaining. thus why this case is in the “hard carried by one side character” tier.

especially since there was like nothing else going on. no connection to the main plot, only two other characters besides uendo, and for some reason the clown tits girl was here instead of the magic show case (and to be honest, she wasn’t enjoyable for me even BEFORE she did the standard aa female villain thing and changed her speech pattern as soon as she fell under suspicion). just a weird, nothing case stuck right around the point aa games usually enter endgame. And especially weird because...

6-5 part 1: inexplicably there are two separate cases in the final chapter and each gets one day of investigation and trial. such a weird setup, and it really shouldn’t work... but i think it kinda barely does. barely. it would still have been better to split it into case 4 and case 5 though.

i have a hard time articulating much on the first case bc it sort of blends together for me. the main thing is that the concept of it being a civil case where apollo and phoenix face off is really good. it was a good change of pace, even though you knew it was gonna be a murder somehow anyway. sarge was reasonably nice, i guess, paul atishon had some good animations and quirks (my favorite being when he tries to just walk away from the stand to avoid answering a question), and the logic of the actual murder was good enough.

but i especially got those strong “oh this is a FINAL case!” vibes during the segment in the cave, and that added so much to it even if not much of it was relevant in the first half of the case. the adventure feel reminded me of some of the (out of context bc i still havent played it) scenes i know from 3-5, which is a good association to invoke imo. and it did a lot to give apollo and dhurke time to bond.

speaking of which, dhurke, holy shit. what a KING. i don’t think i’ve ever liked a dad character in ace attorney this much. he’s so genuine and like down to earth that it’s impossible not to start liking him and believe how much he cares for his sons. the bit where he rescued apollo from the cave flood... i felt it in my heart

6-5 part 2: let me just get this out of the way: ga’ran sucks. her design after she goes full evil is so bad, she’s so malicious that it’s immediately obvious she’s going to be the culprit, her breakdown is ridiculous and just embarrassing to watch, and inga had already established way more charisma as a villain when he did the “those were orders of execution actually” bit in 6-3. with that said,

i actually liked it for the most part. the spirit channeling stuff was excellent imo-- they probably use it to similar or greater effect in 3-5 but as someone who again has not played that, i was surprised and almost impressed by how well it was applied. maya was relevant for something! it feels like it’s been ages!

rayfa was a little underutilized, i think-- her moment of determination where she stops letting ga’ran have control over her was alright but it fell flat bc it didn’t have any weight during the moment. i kept hoping she would like, wordlessly take of her shawl and do the little verbal preamble to the divination seance while ga’ran kept yelling at her to stop, but no, the script can’t be good like that, i guess. and since she didn’t get to be the investigation assistant for long, none of her charm in that role carried through.

but DHURKE!! oh my god! in a game almost devoid of emotional impact, his involvement in this case really hit. the way they painstakingly animated his death, the scene where he makes a promise with maya, and then the weight of knowing in hindsight that everything he did in the first part of the case was after he’d already died and just wanted to see his son again before passing on for real....... it hurt. i felt something during that section. this case would also be hard carried by him if not for the fact that i really liked the murder bits.

amara was good too--liked how they made her suspiciously serene and accentuated it with the lightning strikes to make her look like a hidden murderer character about to reveal herself, only to walk it back and confirm she was being forced to act that way. i thought it worked. nahyuta was boring though, i’m sorry-- i get the motivation with having to be a bastard bc his sister and mom were basically held hostage, but the only time i found him compelling in that mess was the bit where he removed his one fingerless glove and revealed he still has the dragon tattoo. that was it. athena was also completely unused the whole case (not even a single mood matrix? really?) and trucy one again went without any role of importance.

the ending also... yknow, a friend said they had to end it this way bc they never figured out what they were going to do with apollo (since following up on what they started in aa4 clearly wasn’t an option???) and just threw him on a bus to get rid of him. i agree with that-- he really feels thrown to the side, and with that i think trucy’s officially stranded with no hope of any character advancement. and the way they ended the game with phoenix and lamiroir deciding “yeah, maybe NOW we should finally tell those two they’re related” honestly felt insulting lol

but maybe the dlc case will let things go out on a high note...?!

6-6: it was okay.

it would’ve worked pretty well as a filler case in an older aa-- honestly i think it’d be one of the better filler cases, certainly worth replacing the shitty ones like 2-3 or 3-3 or, hey, 6-4. but whether i’d say it was worth paying for... eh.

the time travel conceit was done well enough, i think. the way they tied it back to sorin and pierce’s backstories was nice, and the twist about having two receptions was good, although they needed to treat that as a real twist with much more gravity. when the truth comes out it just feels like “oh of course that’s what happened” rather than a big surprise worthy of the Confessing the Truth theme. it’s sort of important because the case becomes a lot less interesting when you take out the time travel element.

far as characters are concerned, i think they needed more side characters to sell the whole thing-- another sprocket family member or another servant of the household. it felt a little limited-- sorin and pierce are pretty good witnesses and i like their quirks and their secrets, but the only alive woman (ellen) has very few traits and no connection to the deeper story of the case, so she falls really flat. the old aa characters didn’t add much- maya and edgeworth were just there for fanservice, ema didn’t get to do much other than acknowledge for the first time in years that she’s a big edgeworth fan, and larry is annoying as hell like he always is.

and oh my god i actually forgot while i was writing that, how they put in athena and trucy but only used them for brief slapstick where trucy would try to set athena on fire and shit. again-- no mood matrix? couldn’t even try once to fit those two characters into something?

i did like pierce’s transformation into his surgeon form though-- that was really cool. loved him doing surgery on a robot, taking xrays of the lawyers, and his breakdown was fantastic-- he would make a really good culprit if they didn’t whiff the last bit of pathos at the end. i don’t think he should’ve been aiming for revenge on sorin; it would have hurt much more if he was still loyal to the guy and never intended for him to be in danger, but the final “why’d you do it?” talk in the trial just felt flat and one-note, much like the one in 6-4.

... so that’s spirit of justice! not a super positive experience but i’m happy to say it’s done. as much as i want to go and replay dgs, i think when i do go back to ace attorney i’ll be replaying the trilogy for the first time since high school

#ace attorney #aa playthrough

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issuedsideways · 3 years

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might fuck around and make a list of tony’s alters*!! right now. why not. its hard to differentiate but i could take some stabs in the dark. ok this got long so its under a cut.

mark aside (because ive said enough about him), there’s at least the two who look young, no surprise. there’s probably at least one more young one (younger, with more focus on home/family/howard trauma) but he wouldn’t be relevant to this whole... plot, anyway. but we do see one who looks to be in boarding school, so under 15, and a slightly older one who still looks ~young, i want to say 17-20ish?? and he’s very “look how fine and okay we are! our life is awesome!” but is literally in a racing suit as if fast cars aren’t somewhere he gravitates mid breakdown. i love that for him. very in character.

there’s also uhh. cave!tony, actively bandaged. he absolutely never left the cave, and wont. theres no... yknow. there’s no adjusting to that that’s a clean split kind of thing. i dont know how long 616 was in the cave but i’m assuming also a couple of months?? like mcu?? more than long enough to end up with a permanent split who can’t really... i mean we all know he didn’t like. get therapy. he cant reintegrate. he’s probably either the old host who “died” in the cave, or he split in that environment, but either way, he doesn’t make it out.

there’s at least two iron man splits, the sort of... early grey one and the red&gold one are shown, and i dont know enough about early comics canon to make a guess at why they’re distinct, exactly, but i’m guessing some sort of near-death-or-actual-death event that puts a nice clean line in between them. or a team change, could be less dramatic than that? unless the grey one’s JUST the mark I, in which case nvm because the difference then is obvious. escape vs be a hero, you’d need two. notably theres not a super modern iron man split shown, i’m assuming once he stopped doing the secret identity thing that stopped being a split type he’d need, but prior to that he’d need an active, functional iron man split at all times. and he’s got at least the two. (whether or not you want to call mark an iron man split... shrugs! he’s not quite the same tho, since his job is not to pilot the suit, necessarily.)

there’s an actively drunk one, and he’s an important split, because he’s obviously going to hold onto a lot of the desire to drink/etc. i know tony does the “keep a bottle nearby to figure out how bad he’s doing” thing but honestly that’s also a “how close is this tony” meter, imo. he’s necessary but he’s also, generally, possible to keep away. if he’s holding onto the majority of that impulse it’d be, honestly... well i think it’d look like the way tony approaches his alcoholism actually (and the whole crown meant specifically to control, yknow, hulk, in ts:im? was also clearly aimed at this one, on tony’s end.)

we’ve got this very coherent seeming business-y tony also, who i’d peg as “The Tony Stark” -- as in, the face, the name, the one who’s “on.” especially in the early days when the “host” tony was drinking, having a split whos job is company things, PR things, etc, that’s going to go a long way. he seems like that, but i’m stabbing in the dark. i could be missing sth obvious.

we’ve also got the one in eScape in ts:im who doesn’t show up on the page in im2020 but because the kid shows up in both, i’m really... willing to extend this to him also. he has no reason to show up re: mark anyway but he seems coherent and specific and extremely out of time. probably an old host but cut after the alcoholism spiraled out of control? since he clearly drinks without much concern. but, fwiw, he doesn’t seem to line up totally cleanly with any “real” time period, and was actively being manipulated by motherboard, so...? i dont know.

i’d argue there’s also The One Who Died In Civil War II but he wouldn’t show up in this whole convincing-mark thing because. well. he’s “dead.” like hes in there but he’s Deactivated, so to speak. host change.

the new tony, post-mark, is someone distinct! new host. but a shaky one so far and i think this tracks with what i’ve read of iron man vol 6 also (which is only whats on MU), tony has no idea what he wants or what he’s doing but he’s trying a bunch of things, that are all very different from what he was doing before but also falling back on things that are familiar, like hosting big parties, even when it’s incompatible with his new goals. this would track with it being a whole host-switch since pre-CWII and post-mark tony are just... not going to be the same person, imo.

i am on the fence a little about if ts:im tony and IM vol6 tony are the same person or not, and i was leaning towards “yes” because i feel like ts:im tony didn’t have enough time to stabilize, like, there were too many breakdown events happening in rapid succession while mark was building up in the background. but he had a relationship with jan that was going well, he was really trying with the eScape, etc, so i want to give him that distinctness, at least, and IM vol6 tony also did the thing where he changes his appearance up a bunch, which is kind of a red flag for host changes, especially... right after the year-long interruption that was mark’s whole... thing.

i’d have to read a LOT more comics to say any more than this, because i’m sure i’m missing some obvious ones who should exist but aren’t present/relevant re: mark. but. here are some of my thoughts anyway!!!! tony& gives me life.

#speaking of issues #*or word of your choice. headmates/system members/etc i'm using alters here because its a personal preference but i dont mean anything by i #infinite serotonin from DID tony!!!#this is a tag now i just use. repeatedly.#but its TRUE.

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