Ace Attorney Investigations Collection review: Elementary, my dear Edgeworth

The Ace Attorney Investigations Collection is the perfect way to experience these two great spin-offs

Ace Attorney Investigations / Capcom

When your protagonist is a character like Phoenix Wright, you always have to write scenarios to make him the butt of the joke. While he can often be quite sassy in his inner monologue, Wright is a bit too bumbling to be dishing out burns to everyone he meets, especially as it would just make him seem like a jerk.

With Edgeworth, there are no such problems. His sharp tongue and lack of interest in what other people think of him are two of his main character traits, which allows him to absolutely dunk on people in spectacular fashion, ripping into them during interrogations without seeming unlikable.

Ace Attorney Investigations / Capcom

This difference between the two protagonists is important because the Ace Attorney Investigations games are much more about going on the attack and driving forward to solve mysteries than in the main series. When you go head-to-head with someone in these games, there’s no careful questioning to find a mistake, it’s all about taking their argument as to what happened and finding a way to utterly eviscerate it to find the truth.

It isn’t just a narrative thing either, you feel it in the mechanics. Actually getting to walk around the scene helps. Even if it isn’t that different from how you investigate in the main series, it gives you the feeling of being the first one on the scene, looking for clues that Edgeworth can then connect with his “Logic” ability to push the story forward. Even if these sections are rarely difficult, they serve as an important step to making this gameplay loop feel true to Edgeworth’s way of doing things.

This is something that the second game’s “Mind Chess” sequences make even better. Here we completely forgo the usual formula of pressing statements and presenting evidence, instead selecting the right dialogue options and knowing when to stay silent to get people to talk. Not only do sequences like this serve a great narrative purpose – letting you uncover more of each character – but it gets around some of the most frustrating parts of the main series, like finding the one specific piece of evidence you need to show someone to get them to talk.

Ace Attorney Investigations / Capcom

This collection is in a different position compared to the others we’ve seen so far, as while the first game was translated to English, the second never was – at least not officially. This means that, unless you’ve played a fan translation, this is the first opportunity many people have ever had to play the second game in this series, which is why I think it’s worth highlighting how it is so much better than the first.

Ace Attorney Investigations 1 is by no means a bad game, but it is guilty of a lot of the series’ biggest frustrations. Cases can make ridiculous leaps in logic that you’ll never see coming one minute, and then the next suddenly make things so blindingly obvious that you solve the mystery too soon and the game isn’t ready for you. On top of that, two of the five cases drag on way longer than they need to – the final case in particular could’ve been at least an hour shorter and been way better.

That said, it still has that classic Ace Attorney charm that meant I still came away feeling positive about it. Even if they dragged on too long, I still enjoyed solving the mysteries which are full of memorable characters, fun twists, and puzzles that make you feel smart when you solve them. There’s just a base level of enjoyment I get from Ace Attorney games, and even though I think this one is sub-par, I still had a great time.

Ace Attorney Investigations / Capcom

By contrast, Ace Attorney Investigations 2 is one of the best games in the series. Not only does it innovate with new mechanics like the aforementioned Mind Chess, but it does a much better job at weaving a brilliant narrative that runs through every case, where no opportunity is lost to develop each of its characters.

In the first game, the main plot just happens around Edgeworth while he tries to make sense of it, and nothing really affects him as a character. In the sequel though, Edgeworth is the focus as the true main character, rather than just our POV. The original trilogy hinted at the idea that Edgeworth had some soul-searching to do, and here we finally see it. He confronts his career as a prosecutor, how it relates to his relationship with his late father, and how he can make the prosecution system better – as in the Ace Attorney series, prosecutors are almost always the corrupt and evil ones.

It’s not just Edgeworth though, all of the secondary characters – new and returning – get full arcs that make them some of my favorite characters in the series. I’m so used to characters like Eustace Winner remaining one-note jokes for the whole game, but this game gives him a whole journey of introspection that brings some of the game’s most powerful moments in the final case.

Ace Attorney Investigations / Capcom

Both games are improved by the quality-of-life features this remastered collection adds. Most important is the ability to skip through text without having to complete the game first. If you’re a fast reader you no longer have to sit around and wait for every text box to type out, which dramatically improves the pace. An average playthrough of the original games takes about 20 hours for AAI 1 and 30 hours for AAI 2. In this remastered collection, my playtime instead came in at 14 hours for AAI 1 and 19 hours for AAI 2 without skipping or missing any of the content.

It comes with a lot of fun extras too. It’s nothing game-changing, but if you’re a long-time fan you’ll appreciate the galleries, character profiles, and music selection. Plus, there are a bunch of fun achievements involving little easter eggs of fan in-jokes that all made me smile when I found them.

It makes the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection a worthy entry into this series of remasters Capcom has made. I can quite happily say that this is now the best way to play these games, as it takes nothing away from the originals while enhancing the overall experience significantly. While there is a noticeable discrepancy in quality between the two titles, they still fit together nicely as one complete story, and the frustrations of the first game are absolutely worth it for the brilliance of the second.

Score: 9/10

Version tested: PC (Steam)