SupahEwok said:
I thought the writing was weakening in Dual Destinies, so if this game is even weaker... guess I'll finally be making a break with this series. Shame, but it had a good run. Guess I'll see about looking for that crossover game with Prof Layton.
I'll have to be the dissenting opinion here, I guess. I'm a huge fan of Shu Takumi's original trilogy, and like most I feel that while the technology that drives the games has improved in displaying the stories, the writing has suffered outside of Edgeworth's 2 spin-offs.
I enjoyed Dual Destinies because it's an AA game and honestly I'll play any game in this genre/series a couple times each, but the writing was a fucking trainwreck. The 3D animations were great, the rotating rooms for examination streamlined a process that could get arduous and tedious in the trilogy, and the production was better than ever...but games like AA live or die on their writing. The DLC chapter that both fit and didn't fit and was already in the game, the drawn-out and boring as hell Tenma Taro 2nd episode, Athena's story and its mountain of contrivances that applied to the double-feature fourth and fifth episodes...the writing didn't match the evolution of the technological advances at all.
Spirit of Justice isn't perfect, but to me it's the first time that it feels like the writing has not only come close to the bar set by the trilogy, and that the technological advances of DD actually work in service of the writing instead of just flashy-ness. At $30, if you liked the original trilogy I highly recommend it unless you were somehow turned off by the spiritual elements of them, as there isn't anything more ridiculous in that regard than the wild spiritual switcheroo of the 3rd game's climax. To me, the kingdom of Kur'hain and the nature of its legal system raised the stakes and made me pause a few times, even though I know its a video game and you can just retry if you lose.
I just respectfully disagree with Steven here. I never considered the series grounded in reality all that much, and having silliness and puns and mysticism to offset the grave nature of the crimes has always been what makes the series great. I'd rather have the psychic elements and an increase of the bizarre than crazy contrivances and a failure to establish a good overarching plot across all the cases. There's also more "meat" to this one, you don't get short filler cases and a lot of the extra hours are balanced more towards the "good stuff" to me.
P.S. While I didn't regret playing the Layton crossover, it's more of a Layton game than an AA one and it's a weaker game than any in either the Layton or the AA series. The mixture just wasn't executed well and a lot was lost in translation as well. If you didn't like Dual Destinies, I definitely recommend this new one over the Layton crossover for sure, or at least playing the two Investigations games with Edgeworth if you somehow haven't.
