For the first time on Fandom Friday I need to review an Ace Attorney game, which is a unique challenge to take on. As an episodic visual novel, it's always much easier to talk about the individual cases in these games than the game as a whole, especially when the quality of the cases can vary wildly. Still, I'm going to approach this as best I can: in two distinct ways. First I'm going to talk about the game for those who haven't played it, reviewing it as a potential purchase to spend your money on. After that I'll talk about it's place in the series and how it holds up next to the other games in the franchise it helped create.If you're new to this blog and haven't played the games before,is the story of Phoenix Wright (obviously), a fresh from the bar exam attorney trying to defend his clients as best he can while also pursuing personal goals near and dear to his heart. There's an overarching story to the game, but on the whole the story is made of four cases, each a different trial with different mysteries to solve.It's best to think of the game as a detective mystery, except instead of being on the scene fresh after the crime, trying to find the culprit, the police have already done all that and arrested the wrong person, and it's up to you as the defense attorney of the wrongfully convicted defendant to figure out who really did it using both the evidence provided by the police and whatever you're able to find on the scene.While it's definitely on the line, I would classify the Ace Attorney games as visual novels more than video games. What I mean by that is there is about a full novel's worth of reading in this game, and player interaction is fairly limited and mostly exists to allow you to uncover the mystery with the protagonist. Despite the often dark subject matter and high stakes, the game also uses classic comedy anime tropes and jokes to make the experience fun, especially when combined with the off-the-wall character designs, personalities, and names. The game also has a great soundtrack, and in that regard the series only improves with time. If you enjoy mysteries at all I'd recommend giving it a try, and if you like, say, the comedy inand how it was able to balance that with the series parts, than I'd also recommend giving it a try. If you want to play the game, it's currently available on 3DS as part of theas well as on iOS and Android in the same collection.The original game of the franchise definitely sits at on odd place in the hearts of fans. For some of us, it's held on a golden shrine, the ultimate example of how to write for this series that all other entries fail to live up to in some regard. For others, it's a low starting point for the series that later games made important refinements to, and it was only with those refinements that the series truly rose to greatness. I'm definitely somewhere in-between.Again, I'm not going to cover the merits of individual cases, that's for a later series (hint hint wink wink say no more), but if we're talking about a game as a wholehas some of the best pacing I've ever seen. Let me make it clear I'm talking about large scale, case-to-case pacing, I'm well aware of the difficulties the game faced in terms of in-case pacing and I'll come back to it. From tutorial to shocking swerve to status quo establishment to epic finale, the narrative moves from case to case smoothly and in a fantastic arc, one I don't know has ever really been replicated since.Of course, I can't avoid the elephant in the room with this game: dear sweet Holy Mother is the actual day-to-day pacing poorly thought out. There's a reason 3-day cases never came back after this game ended. I'm not saying it's impossible to make work, but it often required a Day 2 plot detour to keep the mystery going, and the investigation segments dealt with confusing layouts, clear cases of "you forgot to do something to trigger this flag so goof around until you did a good", and far more tedium than interesting storytelling. Plus, you can't present profiles, which is just depressing.I also think there's so discussion to be had on the narrative choices in this game that may have hampered the series more than it helped it, though I'll get back to that in an editorial some day. On the whole, the first entry in the series does a lot of interesting things and put a good foot forward, and I would earnestly put it above several of the later sequels and spin-offs. Still, I do think that many of the later games improved the overall formula in areas that made the experience as a whole more engaging, and as such I'd put this as my 5th favorite of the current eight Ace Attorney games. (isn't an Ace Attorney game, it's a Professor Layton game that happens to have Phoenix and Maya in it.) Next week, I look at a novel from Eastern Europe that mixes detectives with fantasy is a dark, postmodern way. See you then!