Day: October 21, 2015

Another Turnabout

/ skoce / 1 Comment

I don’t think I gave Ace Attorney Justice for All a fair shake the first time I played it. I fired it up immediately after completing the first game, so coming down from the high of that experience I played through this one and found it to be just more of the same. Which it is, but with a little time between games it drags a little less. Also, spacing out the games helped me focus on the narrative that of this game. I have always felt that they got the subtitles mixed for the second and third games. Justice for All felt more like the triumphant finale than the middle chapter, where Trials and Tribulations seemed perfect. However, after replaying JfA, I have realized that they got it right.

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There are plenty of problems with Justice for All. It returns the most annoying witness from the first game, Oldbag, and somehow makes her even more annoying. To top that, they also came up with a new witness that is even more annoying in Moe the clown. The second case, while actually very good, does hew a little too close to the first game’s second case, with both of them featuring Maya as the defendant. Other than that, some sections seem too drawn out and some of the leaps in logic are a little obtuse and harshly penalized.  

Still, there is a strong central story that shines through. JfA features a pair of prominent newcomers, Maya’s niece Pearl and new prosecutor Franziska von Karma. Pearl is a nice piece of comic relief and is mostly there to give Phoenix someone to play off of when Maya is indisposed. Franziska takes Edgeworth’s place and the player isn’t quite sure is she is more in Edgeworth’s mold or her father’s. Still, she provides a great adversary for Phoenix for fight against.  

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Despite being absent for most of the game, Edgeworth looms large in this game. His fate is central to the game. After he was defeated by, and then defended by, Phoenix in the first game Edgeworth disappeared. While he left a note claiming to be dead, he actually went on a journey of discovery. Both Phoenix and Franziska are upset, he at Edgeworth and her at Wright. His return at a pivotal moment really pushes the last case over the top.

The early cases, mostly ignoring the tutorial-esque first case, set up some conflicted murderers and rather unsympathetic victims. The real victim of Case 2, Reunion and Turnabout, is Maya. She is not just framed for a murder; she is framed for a murder by her very own aunt. The game goes out of its way to make the murder victim as unlikable as possible. The interminable Turnabout Big Top, is one never-ending tragedy. The murder that makes up the case is the one intentional act in a sequence that ruins the lives of most of the circus performers.  

The whole time Phoenix is backed by his rock solid belief that his clients are innocent. He knows there is no way that Maya killed anybody, even though it seems almost impossible that anyone else could have committed the crime. He also has the same belief in the slightly less trustworthy Max in the next case, who also proves to be innocent. The last case, Farewell My Turnabout, Phoenix takes the case because Maya has been kidnapped by one Shelly de Killer. De Killer says that the client is innocent, but he is still blackmailing Wright to get that verdict.  

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This is when we see the meaning of the subtitle. After Von Karma is non-fatally shot, Edgeworth returns to take over as prosecutor. As the trial progresses, a shady deal that Von Karma had struck comes to light, a deal designed to ensure a guilty verdict whether or not the defendant was guilty. So far the game has consistently shown the lengths that prosecutors will go to get a guilty verdict and Phoenix has been the righteous bringer of justice. Now, Phoenix is tempted to foist the conviction off on someone else, who is also likely innocent, just to get a not guilty verdict. Is he any better than the people he faces?  

That is the question the finale is dealing with: is Phoenix really after justice for all or just a not guilty verdict. While it has to work hard to engineer the situation, it turns out really well. Ace Attorney: Justice for All is the least essential feeling game of the original trilogy, but it is still well written and a ton of fun.

Viewer Beware!

/ skoce / 1 Comment

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Goosebumps is exactly what it proposes to be.  That is not an entirely good thing, but it is hard to fault the film for it. A film based on a series of somewhat spooky children’s books was never going to be more than a children’s movie.  Goosebumps goes strongly for humor rather than horror, but it is otherwise cashes in mostly on nostalgia for those old books.

Instead of adapting any of the dozens of books in the series, the Goosebumps movie is about the books themselves.  That allows it to feature many of the monsters that have appeared in the series at the same time.  It stars Dylan Minette as Zach Cooper, who moves from New York City to Delaware.  Living next door is the enchanting Hannah, played by Odeya Rush, and her reclusive and abrasive father played by Jack Black.  When Zach and his new friend Champ suspect something has happened to [], they break into the house, avoid the bear traps in the basement and find that his neighbor is actually RL Stine, famous author of the Goosebumps series.  Then they open a locked manuscript and free The Abominable Snowman of Pasadena.

That line about the bear traps should be the biggest clue that this movie is playing things for laughs rather than scares.  It uses all sorts of horror imagery, but is all jokes.  It works surprisingly well. It allows the movie to have sets like an abandoned carnival in the middle the woods and have characters spout lines like “the school is just on the other side of the cemetery.”  It is spooky themed silliness.  See, the monsters become real because Stine wrote his books on a haunted typewriter that made whatever he wrote become real.  Unfortunately, as they chase down the snowman, Slappy the evil ventriloquist dummy escapes and takes all the books with him.  As more and more monsters escape their books,

Your enjoyment of Goosebumps comes down to three things.  The first, and least important because most of it is self-explanatory, is a familiarity with the series.  There are numerous references that fans of the series, even if you haven’t read the books since you were in grade school, should pick up on.  The next is a tolerance for CG tomfoolery.  The CG is reasonably well done; though it never really fools the viewer into thinking any of it is real.  The giant insect, Sasquatch and werewolf all look similarly fake, but they share an aesthetic that makes it seem deliberately a little cartoony and not a failure to look realistic.  There are some fun shots, but it is all pretty cheesy.  Lastly is how much enjoyment do you get out seeing Jack Black mugging and talking in funny voices?  Because that is a big source of this film’s humor.  As a big fan of Black who grew up reading Goosebumps books, this mostly works for me.  The target audience is parents who read the books and their kids and this movie is likely to satisfy them.


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