Phoenix Wright / Gyakuten Saiban

[Sharingan]

Anyone played this game / series?

It's an adventure game in which you take on the role of a defense attorney, and, through investigation and questioning witnesses in court, must prevent your clients from being declared guilty of crimes they may not have committed.

I like the series a lot. It's definitely a novel game idea - I mean, are there even any other lawyer games out there? The games also have a lot of humour, fun characters, while at the same time containing plenty of tense moments and plot twists to keep you on your toes. Makes good use of the DS's stylus controls, too.

Heartily recommended to anyone looking for an original title, that requires a bit of thought and logical reasoning to play.

[Submeg]

Hmm, sounds interesting. How do you control the action and find out facts etc?

[Sharingan]

There's basically two distinct subgames, an investigation part and a trial part.

In the investigation part, you move from one location to the other, questioning people who were around the crime scene at the moment the crime occured (usually murders) and examining the scenes for possible clues. Examining happens by pointing to parts of the scenes with the stylus and pressing the 'Examine' button. When there is something of importance, things will be added to the Court Record (a repository of notes and pieces of evidence). The things you find out then have to be used to build your case in the courtroom.

The courtroom/trial part is where you (the defense attorney) and the prosecutor duke it out in a verbal battle. The prosecuting side will be trying to get a guilty verdict for the suspect, while you have to use your wits, evidence, witness accounts and everything you've heard during your investigations to attempt to counter the prosecutor's arguments, and thus clear the suspect's name.

It's possible to control the game fully with the D-pad (considering it's basically a port from the original GBA game), but with the stylus, things are definitely a whole lot more intuitive and straightforward since you can simply point and click on any and all selection boxes/buttons/objects.

[Submeg]

interesting....I've never heard of it, so looks like a good lil game...but GTA4 all the way atm!

[Demon Cleaner]

I know the series but never played them, as I don't have a DS. Similar on the PS2 is Harvey Birdman.

[J T]

I've played the first Phoenix Wright game on the DS, and it was utterly brilliant. It's quite like a point-and-click adventure but it is done so humourously and with great characters. Sometimes it dosn't feel all that logical and you almost are guessing what piece of evidence to present and when (at times you can get ahead of the game but have to wait and go through all the steps), and it's very linear but that is easily forgiven for something so compelling and fun.

The last trial is one specifically for the DS, so it uses the touch screen a bit better. I've got the second game waiting to be played, but so far I just really haven't gotten into it.

[Sharingan]

The second Phoenix Wright is still a good title, but doesn't quite reach the level of the first episode, mainly because of less interesting characters and less compelling cases. In terms of illogical moments, the second title has more of these as well.

It's a shame they didn't implement the feature from case 1-5 that allowed you to rotate pieces of evidence so as to see what's on the back side.

[J T]

That was indeed a neat feature in case 1.5. I also really enjoyed the luminol spraying and the finger print dusting (although I was at that bit on the tube so I attracted a few funny looks by blowing repeatedly on my DS screen )

Actually, I got to the second case on PW2, but got a bit bored by the slow start, I hadn't even gotten to the courtroom bit, the crime scene examination was going very slowly