Review for Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney. Game for Nintendo 3DS, Android and iOS, the video game was released on 12/04/2007 The version for 3DS came out on 22/11/2017
The truth, after all, is one: the years go by, but the emotions remain the same. Just like a good wine, too Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is not affected by the weight of the time passed, managing to keep its load of fun intact, also benefiting from a considerable technical restyling work.
This piece is not meant to be a cheery celebration of the old days, but a sincere, devoted tribute to Capcom's work. It's been about eight long years since EpicTrick's then-shaven editors reviewed the title, and even then it was praised (many). Far from wanting to re-review a production already examined in the course of our seasoned review, however, we cannot avoid summarizing, in a few lines, how intriguing the Japanese judicial epic is.
Compelling enough, a jumble of hilarious moments mixed with moments in which tension is the master, the fourth episode of Gyakuten Saiban keeps the name of a series worthy of attention high, as much now as almost two decades ago. Salt that fantastic blend of adventure, investigation and visual novel, making the young lawyer Apollo Justice rise to the headlines, shuffling the cards and describing the previous hero of the saga, Phoenix Wright, from a truly unusual angle, throwing in the cauldron references of a purely oriental matrix and evidently Western stereotypes, with often truly commendable results.
This re-edition is almost a revelation: practically unchanged in the play structure, it almost tastes like a remaster, such is the quality of the technical sector. If it remains undeniably true that the four cases making up the playful framework of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney have not undergone any mutation compared to what was seen on the Nintendo DS, before, and on iOS and Android platforms, after, a completely different discourse must be moved in the comparisons of a high-level graphic creation, offering watercolors two-dimensional palettes, graced by the gift of the three-dimensional effect offered by the portable console of the Kyoto house. While Nintendo 3DS screens don't stand out by gross definition, the increased image quality gives the designs a truly enjoyable look. Even the sound has received a special treatment, offering music and audio samples finally free from the excessive compression to which they were subjected at the time of the original publication.
At a purely playful level, the only real feature worthy of note is represented by the possibility of playing with the original Japanese version of the game, thus providing the possibility to all those who wanted to, to verify the differences between Gyakuten Saiban 4 and Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney (nothing transcendent, however, being mainly linked to the linguistic adaptation work to which the judicial prosopopoeic binary was submitted to be placed on the western market).
Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney for Nintendo 3DS is a highly recommended purchase, especially if you have never had the pleasure of playing it in the past. The opportunity is greedy, also considering the graphic and sound restyling to which the work has been subjected, compared with the original for DS.
► Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is an Adventure-Visual Novel game developed and published by Capcom for Nintendo 3DS, Android and iOS, the video game was released on 12/04/2007 The version for 3DS came out on 22/11/2017
