With the four previous Ace Attorney games sticking to the tried and tested formula, the newest game in the series goes about things in a different way. For a DS franchise that’s been quite successful for Capcom, you wouldn’t blame them for taking no risks in a niche series that the current fanbase are more than happy to gobble up in their thousands, but take a risk is what they’ve done with Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth.

The biggest noticable change from the rest of the series is the switch from first to third person adventuring; AAI is as close to the old-school point and click PC adventure games that the series will probably get, with the movement controls being placed on a square box on the DS’s touch screen, which translates into movements on the top display. The other big diversion from the Ace Attorney series is that AAI is purely investigative – there are no court sessions in this game. Considering that court was my favourite part of the previous four games, it’s fair to say I’m a little concerned that some of the Ace Attorney magic will be lost in this one.

The investigation phase is a huge shift from the original Ace Attorney games, and into the realm of classic Western adventure.

With investigation being the core focus of AAI, Capcom have made sure to give you broad detective skills that go beyond picking up evidence and presenting it in court. In AAI, analysing items and scenes is key to solving the puzzle in the form of “logic”. With logic, the player has to link evidence together as a visual equation on the DS’s lower screen. Sometimes the current evidence you have just doesn’t make sense, so piecing the puzzle together allows you to create a logical, coherent flow of the events of the murder, which you can then use as further evidence towards solving the crime. Just like in the original Ace Attorney games, this sort of gameplay is often prone to trial and error style gameplay, which will go punished in AAI in the form of a life bar. If you screw up your logic too much, your life bar will hit zero and it’s game over for you, much like the life bar Phoenix and Apollo have in their cross-examination phase in court. Thinking carefully is key in Ace Attorney, and I’m glad to see this will still be the case in AAI; your stupidity will go punished.

Making the right connections in Ace Attorney Investigations is the key to success.

After the investigation phase of the case is over, prepare for confrontations. This part of the game is very similar to cross-examination part of court sessions from the previous games. A suspect or witness makes statements, and you have to punch holes in it using your evidence to find the contradictions. After contradictions are found, the case moves forward as new information is revealed, or comes to a conclusion as the murderer confesses.

This is where you take all that evidence you've gathered, and catch the murderer!

Ace Attorney Investigation’s plot looks as interesting as the first four game’s. Set in between the events of Justice for All and Trials and Tribulations, Ace Attorney Investigations will introduce some new and old characters from the Ace Attorney universe. New characters include professional thief Kay Faraday, who acts as an assistant to Miles in various cases, and a new defense attorney named in the Japanese version as Kazura Himiko – who I can only assume will act in opposition to Miles in some shape or form. Returning characters to the series include hapless homicide detective, Dick Gumshoe, Officer Meekins (complete with Blue Badger garb) and homicide detective from Apollo Justice, Ema Skye, which suggests to me at least one of the cases will involve forensic investigating. As for the overall plot, we know very little – what we do know is that there are five cases: one in Edgeworth’s office, one on a plane, a building in the “Bando-Land” amusement park, one set seven years prior to the events of the game (old cases being a plot device used frequently in the series) and the final in a burned out building, with your assistant Kay Faraday accused of murder. Lastly, Capcom says all of this will take us fifteen hours to complete – a nice number, but I’m going to say it’ll take more experienced attorneys ten to twelve hours, if previous installations in the series are anything to go by.

See two returning characters: Ema Sky and Officer Meekins!

Overall, Ace Attorney Investigations looks like a nice diversion from the series – it’s similar enough in style and gameplay to get us excited for Ace Attorney 5, but different enough to be a spinoff, rather than the sequel. If you want to give it a try, there’s a flash-based demo on Capcom’s website. Unfortunately it’s all in Japanese (though if Ace Attorney: Apollo Justice is anything to go by, it’ll be in English soon enough), but even so it should give you an idea of how the game plays and hype you up for the English release, which is sometime this winter in North America, and probably early 2010 in Europe.

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