Video Games

REVIEW: The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles

Editor’s Note: This review is for the Nintendo Switch version of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles.

As someone who played the first three Ace Attorney Games, and loved them, I know giving The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles a chance in the west was a no-brainer. Just like Ace Attorney, this is a port of a previously released title. The original arrived on Nintendo 3DS, although it never got a western release.

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles follows the ancestor of defense attorney Phoenix Wright. The main character is a Japanese student named Ryunosuke Naruhodo who studies law in Great Britain. During his time overseas, Ryunosuke gets included in several causes, some more mysterious than others.

Like The Famicon Detective Club, the game is all about moving from different places, investigating, and interviewing people for all kinds of clues. However, the game focuses more on the courtroom.

Inside the courtroom, it’s all about pressing the witnesses on statements that do not add up and presenting evidence. There is also the Jurist system which is new to the series. As the name implies, there will be six random NPCs (non-playable characters) that the player needs to convince on top of the usual judge. Like the witnesses, there are times that it is necessary to press some members to see if it is possible to change their minds.

The game approaches every case similar to how a television season contains several small arcs that are connected. During each episode you meet several colorful characters, be it re-occurring or newly introduced. My favorite of them all was the over-the-top detective known as Herlock Sholmes.

Although The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles proves that Capcom continues to be one of the masters with these types of visual novels, it contains something that bothered me. Unlike the Pheonix Wright games that pair traditional 2D animation with its character models, The Great Ace Attorney goes with 3D models. Due to it looking better in handheld mode than when docked, it could be a casualty of the game being a port from Nintendo 3DS.

The Great Ace Attorney is a game perfect for casual to hardcore fans alike. If you haven´t tried an Ace Attorney game, let alone a visual novel, this is a great introduction point. I enjoyed every minute of it.

The game is out now on Steam, Playstation 4, and Nintendo Switch.

Latest posts by Isak Wolff (see all)

Co-host of the Amateur Otaku Podcast. A writer of many things. Loves everything nerdy from anime/manga to comics and video games. Fire Emblem is the greatest of all time.