Ace Attorney

Episode 14

Did you forget about Ace Attorney? The show took a break last week before starting fresh with a brand new opening and ending sequence. The opening, which hints at three of Phoenix Wright's cases from the games—Kurain Village, Turnabout Big Top, and the Hero of Heroes competition—sets limits to Ace Attorney game fans' expectations. We won't see Apollo Justice or Trucy or Ema or Maggey, but we'll see plenty of Franziska von Karma and Pearl. This pair is definitely the highlight of today's episode, though the rest is a lumpy mixed bag of cool music, okay characterization, and meh animation that we've come to expect from Ace Attorney.

“Reunion and Turnabout” is an unusual arc in the Ace Attorney canon because it's the first time that the supernatural is introduced as a potential cause for a murder, rather than its solution. When Maya channels the spirit of a vengeful nurse for a surgeon client, the surgeon ends up dead and everyone thinks Maya, overpowered by the spirit she was channeling, is to blame. It's a plot that risks overturning the plausibility of the Ace Attorney world. Oh, so ghosts can commit crimes now? How can Phoenix convict them then? But by the end of the episode, it's already becoming clear that a ghost wasn't the culprit at all (why would a ghost need to throw a key into the incinerator, for example?) and this is actually shaping up to be one of the series' most fascinating cases.

While I remember the case being interesting in the games, the anime seems to be covering only the bare minimum, and reluctantly at that. Phoenix is reunited with Maya at last, but there's only the barest emotion in his flat expression and “Mystic Maya's” blank face. Returning characters Lotta Hart and Gumshoe add little, as if they are only there to offer up some familiar faces in this out-of-town case. Kurain Village is rendered in surprisingly detailed art, which only serves to make Phoenix and Lotta's barely animated forms more cartoonish (see their clipped crime-scene sneak-in, where they are little more than triangles with eyeballs). Morgan Fey did not make much of an impression on me, with a calmer demeanor than her more fiery game personality. As usual, the most enjoyable part of the episode is the music, tense before the murder, sweet and quirky with Pearl and Phoenix's first conversation, and motivating in the visiting room with an incarcerated, but hopeful, Maya.

I'm hopeful too, because we're about to see a lot more of two of Ace Attorney's neatest characters. With Maya stuck in police custody, Nick needs a new assistant, and who better than her spiritually talented little cousin, Pearl? He'll need somebody in his corner, judging by the nail-biting lead-up to Franziska von Karma's introduction as Nick's latest opponent. Yes, there's a lot to look forward to next week, but this week was just average, setting up the barest minimum of pieces to help us process the fascinating trial still to come.

Rating: C+

Ace Attorney is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Lauren writes about geek careers at Otaku Journalist