The show must drag on
(This
review contains minor spoilers!)
Last week’s episode of Ace Attorney has
the dubious honour of being the first thing on this site to ever receive my
lowest possible score, thanks to how boring, useless, and skippable it was.
Considering that, how did this week fare?
Well firstly, I don’t know if the
budget’s been slashed or something, but the animation quality’s continuing the
nosedive I first noticed last week. Character movement is choppy, the facial
expressions are weak, and shots often linger for awkward amounts of time with
very little going on to warrant our attention. There’s even a scene where
Edgeworth throws a spear for Phoenix to catch. We see him hold out his arms, and
then the spear magically appears in his hands, which then, in a single frame of
animation, fall to the floor under the weapon’s weight. If you blinked, you
would miss it, and that’s completely inexcusable.
There’s also the continuing problem of
the characters. I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but I actually really
like the way the show portrays Edgeworth. He’s the one thing that feels like he
jumped right off the game screen and transitioned perfectly into the anime. The
voice actor for him always does an excellent job as well.
Aside from Edgeworth, all the
characters continue to be as bland as stale bread. Phoenix, Maya, the Judge,
and even the witnesses have all been reduced to one note personalities, and
none of them really make even the most exciting of court cases fun to watch.
That’s the main problem with Ace
Attorney: It’s not fun to watch.
I can see it being enjoyable if you
haven’t played the games, but if you have and you enjoyed them, all that’s
waiting for you here is a watered-down version of the storyline. I remembered
playing through the first game, I kept going back to it because not only was I
invested in the storyline, I was having a blast uncovering the mysteries.
Here, I just feel like I’m watching one
play by numbers murder mystery after another, with nothing to really take away
from it.
If I must say one good thing about
this episode, the conclusion is one I didn’t remember from the game, and is a
very satisfying wrap up to an ultimately boring case. I still don’t think it’s
worth sifting through all the garbage to get to it, though.
With the final case on the horizon,
Ace Attorney has one last chance from me to pull it together and really prove
itself as able to exist on its own without resting on the laurels of nostalgia
for the games. With that, I wish it luck.
FINAL SCORE
3/10
Bad
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