neato!

i love miles edgeworth. thank you ace attorney investigations 1 and 2 for reminding me of how much i love miles edgeworth.

and franziska von karma. do u understand how much i love them singly and together. i'm sorry to the feys and gramaryes and gavins but the siblings that get me the most are miles and franziska. she's seven years younger than him and his elder sister (she was a von karma first). they call each other by their full names. they are each other's siblings but while manfred is franziska's papa he certainly isn't miles's. tween franziska stands up to manfred for miles's sake but she will never acknowledge her real motivation to anyone, including herself.

[passionately] that's his SISTER

games about families and the burden of inheritance, same as the mainline games. in the after-credits sequence of aai2 miles basically turns to look in the camera and say that.

eta from the next day: i went back through my aa5/6 playthrough threads from years ago and reminded myself of those games' messages around family and the burdens we inherit. i think aai2 has maybe the healthiest takeaway around family of this whole extended franchise (we carry these burdens but can choose to do so in our own way). miles took up all the emotional stability ace attorney has to offer, no more room left for anyone else

i love that assassins just kind of feel free to bully miles into investigating people. beautiful pear wigglers for my little man.

miles is soooo at peace with himself in aai2. it's so funny. he's like yes i know who i am and what my goal is and what i am prepared to give up. i look my father's ghost in the face and say thanks dad i've got my own path to walk, i can't replicate yours. and this is months after coming back from pretending to be dead in germany for most of a year, and a week before phoenix's seven-year disbarment

good luck being at peace for the next seven years!

it is actually really fun, chewy character work that miles and phoenix are so out of joint for so long. they're friends and then miles is gone and then miles is evil and phoenix is chasing him, then prosecutor miles edgeworth chooses death, then finally miles is like ok! i'm cool now! and i've never thought about suicide in my life! and the pre-game plot of aa4 happens to phoenix. they only move in parallel in short bursts their whole lives until, what, the end of aa4? honeymoon lawyer finale in aa5? it's great.

the first game is a little nicer to fresh prosecutor miles than it should be but here's the thing: i'm a sucker. and young miles edgeworth solemnly nodding along to manfred von karma's proclamations and rewriting them in his mind to be nobler is always gonna get me. i yam what i yam.

miles's only relationship strategy is to lie down and wait for death (someone more outgoing to decide what their relationship is). this is his only tactic except for the brilliant, shining exception of eustace winner. this kid is the only person miles has made a genuine effort to reach out to with kind thoughtful words. and he is going to be paid back for it in spades every time eustace messes up his carefully arranged outlook calendar to crash in miles's office, eat all his snacks, and get a pep talk that miles is having to tiptoe through to avoid making him cry.

in contrast. in mind chess with larry, miles is like "okay i won't provoke him" and then insults larry even if you don't pick the combative dialogue options. i love how they love.

larry wrote out that autograph to him. i love how they love.

i have an actual ds cart of aai1, so i didn't want to pay fifty-five canadian dollars for the switch port just for aai2, so i got the fan tl of that. and i need to say that the official tl blew "sebastian debeste" out of the water with "eustace winner." that kid is a eustace for sure. but "master jeff the master chef" is unbeatable. and the official tl team knew it. they didn't even try to compete in the same arena.

detective badd is just patrick page as hades in hadestown. thanks.

the punished kay amnesia arc in aai2 is just. bad. kay in general is kind of an athena, weird girl trying too hard to have a fun weird girl gimmick that ultimately doesn't really add anything to the experience of the game. but taking away kay's personality and then not giving her anything substantial to do afterwards except hit the crime scene recreation button is worse.....

BUT, at least nothing in aai2 is as frustrating as the end of the final case of aai1, where you go through like four separate rounds of the culprit going "aha you have nothing i am leaving now :)" before one more person bursts through the door with one more piece of evidence.

lots of things in the aai games prefigure stuff in aa5/6, but aai2's actor kid actually turning out to be the child of the ruler of an invented country with a weird relationship with the law going into apollo's third backstory in aa6 is. it's so much. they should make a mainline aa7 just to keep riffing on this game's ideas and give apollo a fourth backstory about an assassin who raised him.

it's so good when you hit the point where both sides on a case are working together to reach the truth. great synthesis of character arcs and a new driving force for the gameplay every time. we're not here to fight against each other so one of us wins--we're here to strive together to find the truth. great! lang giving a witness statement so that miles can pick apart his assumed logic: great!!!!! we haven't heard of collusion in japanifornia it's fine. forgive me for how this image is underwater. look at them smirking and leaning their heads in together. waow.

miles's dad, kind, unflappable, largely non-reactive dick tracy whose loudest emotion is "mild worry that his son likes the law too much to be popular in elementary school" is the closest this franchise, set in Gimmick World, has ever come to a character who is completely normal and gimmickless. this is who apollo justice desperately wants to be. the problem is that apollo justice 1) has the anime protagonist gene and 2) is trying too hard. on a quiet sunday afternoon gregory edgeworth is complacently ironing his overcoat and keeping an ear out in case miles needs help pronouncing "res gestae" again; apollo justice is nursing a sore throat after bellowing in his bathroom mirror about how normal he is for two hours.

what i'm saying here is that gregory edgeworth has cast-wide gap moe (in the same way 2ha has a cast that's 99% sadistic horny geniuses doing 8d chess maneuvers across three timelines, and 1% one arrogant but fundamentally decent jock who likes his parents and his teachers normal-style. and that guy is my favourite character.)

part of why i love these games is that they do a lot with a little. they squeeze every bit of juice out of what animations and sprites they have, and do it well.

gameplay thing: logic chess shouldn't be timed, the point of these games is you can put them down in the middle of a deposition to fold a load of laundry and it doesn't matter. bizarre addition. fuck it man put a quicktime event in solitaire

i love him. i'm killing him with my mind beams. me and everyone else in this game.

i want to replay aa1-4 except i think i'm kind of DS game'd out for now. we'll see. we'll see.