#psyche lock

like the psyche locks in the 2D games have penalties for getting things wrong, Pearl is like “make sure not to present the wrong thing to someone, or else you’ll get hurt, and you’ll damage your soul”, so it gives you some kind of consequence for messing up, and it makes you think a little more about what might be the right piece of evidence to present

the psyche locks could also just happen at any time, like you could get a psyche lock, and maybe you’ll have all the right evidence you need right then and there, but for most of them you’ll get to a statement where you don’t have anything that fits, so you need to back out and go and investigate some more to get what you need

but in the 3D games, they only happen after you have all the evidence you need, and they’re WAYYYY too easy, there’s no consequences for getting things wrong anymore; really, if you truly didn’t give a fuck, you could just go down the list of evidence and present stuff until you got it right lol. and all of the statements are SO obvious, you barely have to think on any of them. and again, you just have everything you need from the get go, you don’t get to examine any of the areas to find what you might need. which for Dual Destinies I kinda get, since you don’t get to examine any of the areas in that game for some reason? but like, they could’ve let you do that for Spirit of Justice, but idk,

Apollo’s Perceive mechanic is also kinda like this, where in his game you had to find the statement in the witness’ testimony where you might find their habit, and then sometimes you would have to present some evidence to them to counter their claims, and you would get a penalty if you got it wrong. but in the 3D games, they just give you the statement you need when you’re talking to someone, no thinking required there, all you need to do is find their tell, and when you present evidence to them, again, you get no penalties, which makes them a lot easier than they were before

as for Athena’s Mood Matrix, most of the time it’s just too easy. again, there’s no penalties for getting anything wrong, and most of the time it’s pretty obvious what emotion you’re supposed to choose. it’s not a bad mechanic, I liked it a lot tbh, it just wasn’t really challenging like, at all lol

It just feels like when the games became 3D, the difficulty level dropped by quite a bit, like there are still a lot of moments where you do have to actually think about something and look over something carefully but, at the same time, there’s a lot of hand holding tbh, and I kinda don’t love that lol

3D psyche lock... save me 3D psyche lock...

a continuation.