dual destinies is a very odd game; it’s the 5th game in the series, yet it feels like a soft reboot… directly following the 4th game, which was a reboot in itself. my problems with the game aren’t anything ridiculous or wild, but they mostly have to do with the simple things - character development and case writing. the easiest things to mess up were messed up.

now, that’s not to say this entire game is a wash. the return of trucy, klavier and apollo is great, and they’re just as interesting as they were in the previous game. athena and simon are excellent introductions, and their character development is really well done throughout the game. a lot of the side non-culprit characters (FROM THE 3RD CASE ON, THIS IS IMPORTANT) are really solid and interesting! i love the trio of robin, hugh and juniper from turnabout academy, and pretty much every character from the final two cases is at the very minimum interesting.

phoenix, though… why is he here? he’s gone through not one, but two major character arcs, and now feels like a mentor-ish character who also steals the spotlight away from apollo, who at this point, is a character whose development i care about much more. apollo’s overreliance on phoenix feels like a step back from his attitude from AA4, where phoenix was a grand shithead who helped very little. it’s also odd to see klavier so little throughout the game; edgeworth and franziska consistently showed up in the following games in the series and had MAJOR roles in furthering the story and their own development, so why does klavier (a character who has a hell of a lot more to explore) show up so little? he only shows up for a brief period during turnabout academy, which is a damn shame.

let’s head on to the more important issue that plagues this game - the case writing is either boring or underbaked for most of the game. i think the easiest way to analyze this is going through case-by-case and looking at what makes or breaks each one.

the first two cases, in all honesty, are boring as all hell. they’re the tutorial cases, so i have to cut them a little slack, but previous games made these MUCH more interesting than they are here. case 1 is… sort of important? i guess? nowhere near as much as in AA4, but apollo’s injuries and general outlook throughout this game are defined here. case 2 is straight up filler with a comically evil antagonist and almost no worldbuilding other than seeing… one of trucy’s friends. and when i say COMICALLY evil, i mean it - this guy is the walking definition of villain. i could excuse a redd white, because that was the first game and he provided major plot value that was important to the overall context of the game. we are FIVE GAMES DEEP here - if we can’t hop into more interesting cases off the rip, i don’t know what the fuck we’re doing.

case 3 is where this game starts to heat up. athena’s development comes into full swing here, and that is very necessary for reasons i will explain later. it’s probably the best case in the game - the most interesting characters, the most interesting dynamics, and a killer… who has so little subtlety it’s comical. yet again, the case’s biggest boon is its killer. ANOTHER comically evil antagonist? oh boy! there’s this big thing about “the ends justifying the means” or whatever that’s shown as this SUPER AWFUL BAD THING and woah!! the character spouting these messages that go against the views of the victim is the killer?????????????????????? who could’ve seen this coming? i will say, athena’s mental snap at the end of the case is a big, emotionally resonating moment that i think lifts this case up from alright to truly good. it’s a very power of FRIENDSHIP!-esque moment but i think it works well under the circumstances of the case and athena’s development up to this point.

cases 4 and 5 basically connect into one long case, and… whoo boy, is this one interesting. i have similar thoughts with these two cases as i do with the final case in AA4 - great in concept, flawed in its execution. getting to see athena and simon’s shared story wrapped up here is great IN CONCEPT, until you realize that the case gets dragged out FAR too long because of it. getting to see apollo’s mental health fold as he realizes that his friend was killed and his colleague might be the killer, UNTIL that plot point is wrapped up faster than ever because this game Does Not Care About Apollo. i think the emotional moments still hit as they need to, but the mindless noodling around the space center drag the cases down a Lot in my book.

i think the final cases encapsulate what makes dual destinies fall flat for me: the character development is AWFUL, and the cases aren’t good enough to distract from that. i think i can nail down the reason for this pretty easily, though.

phoenix, maya and edgeworth had 3 full games to develop as characters, as the games were planned out to be a trilogy early on. neither AA4 or AA5 had that luxury, so they tried to create satisfying stories that could be happily wrapped up on their own, and because sequels came out afterwards, they didn’t know how to keep going. apollo gets thrown aside because they wanted athena and simon’s story to be wrapped up in a nice bow by the end of the game. this wouldn’t be a problem… if apollo actually got the development he needed in the previous game.

yeah, a lot of the problems with AA5’s character development are no fault of its own - they come from poor series planning and AA4 not focusing on apollo enough. AA4’s story focused more on the gavin brothers and their descent into madness and sadness respectively, and ended with apollo not getting much in the way of real development. then, for some magical reason, instead of creating a game that’d actually GIVE apollo the screen time he desperately needed, they crafted a game around 2 new characters and readded phoenix as a true attorney! so apollo, for the second game in a row, is shafted!

athena and simon’s story is actually handled really well, which is good, but the problem is that the great characters are created with awful cases to surround them.

AA5, on its own, is not a bad game. AA5 in the context of the ace attorney series, though, is a pretty major disappointment.