Random Cat Productions (Tbh-I-Am-Soup)

Why does every m/m ship consist of Price and McKinley??? I mean I love yaoi but Cunningham is RIGHT THERE

Just three freakazoids

I’d wager that if you asked the playerbase of Ace Attorney Investigations 2 about standout moments, one of them a lot of people would point to is the Logic Chess segment with Sebastian Debeste.

In the game’s fifth case, “The Grand Turnabout”, Miles Edgeworth and Kay Faraday visit the house of Sebastian and his father, Blaise Debeste. Inside, they find Sebastian bound and gagged, having been kidnapped and left inside his own house. This kidnapping and the revelation in the previous case, “The Forgotten Turnabout”, that Blaise was responsible for murder and untold corruption, has brought Sebastian to an emotional nadir, and to help Sebastian regain his confidence (and give out some pertinent info), Edgeworth initiates Logic Chess.

(All images courtesy of Longplays HD.)

The sight of Sebastian bawling his eyes out, hunched forward, bending his baton out of sheer frustration and verbally trashing himself for being so witless is upsetting, even given (or perhaps because) how consistently irritating he is during the earlier cases, and seeing Edgeworth bring him back from the brink and set up his triumphant return to the court hours later is quite the emotional payoff.

It’s certainly the moment I revisit the most when I think about AAI2, which makes some of the more mechanical details about the segment when you look back at it… kinda weird? But also strangely resonant?

Let’s start with the lead-in. This exchange between Edgeworth and Kay immediately precedes the Logic Chess segment:

KAY: He’s completely shut off his heart…

EDGEWORTH: Indeed. If it’s come to this…

EDGEWORTH: …I suppose I have no choice but to use that.

KAY: Ah! You mean!

EDGEWORTH: I hate to do this when he’s in such a fragile state. It’s like kicking a man who’s down…

KAY: …Will it be alright?

KAY: His mind might break if you corner him too much, y'know?

EDGEWORTH: Yes. I am aware of that. I will try to be careful.

EDGEWORTH: (Good grief. I wonder how this will turn out…)

EDGEWORTH: (I’ve never held back against anyone before…)

Edgeworth and Kay both sort of address the main thing that’s structurally weird about the segment, which is that, in theory, you’re trying to stabilize a severely emotionally distraught boy through Logic Chess, something that has been exclusively deployed in the past with the purpose of extracting information from uncooperative parties.

The main flow of Logic Chess segments involves gathering information by asking pointed questions at the right time to make the witness reveal some info, then using that info to verbally corner the reluctant witness into revealing even more info. As the chess metaphor implies, it’s an inherently adversarial process that involves Edgeworth playing “Gotcha” by using his opponent’s words against them, repeatedly, in short spans of time, with the intention of “winning” by getting the opponent to confess something they would rather not have.

And it’s not as if Edgeworth is above pushing some sensitive buttons during these segments, either; in just the last Logic Chess segment against Justine Courtney, he observes that any mention of John Marsh makes Courtney lose her calm, then continues questioning an increasingly distressed Courtney until she reveals that John, her son, is being held hostage in exchange for a wrongful verdict. (He means no ill will by it, of course, but he is still doing something explicitly emotionally destabilizing for his own ends, even if those ends are very justifiable.)

Point being, Logic Chess is not exactly an appropriate angle to use when you’re ostensibly trying to help someone who has seen their role model and father outed as an emotionally abusive murderer, then been bound and gagged by complete strangers and left in his own house.

Now obviously it works out, because Edgeworth recognizes that Sebastian’s on the verge of an emotional meltdown (and, I dunno, maybe empathizes with someone realizing that their father figure was a colossal scumbag) and adapts to fit the situation. Instead of firing off incisive questions with the intent to trip his opponent up, he simply answers the questions a distraught Sebastian poses him. He also adapts his correction of Sebastian’s words to be more reconstructive rather than dismissive, all with the purpose of getting Sebastian back on his own two feet. (And getting some information along the way, of course.)

These changes, however, do raise the question of why this part of the story had to specifically be a Logic Chess segment, instead of, for instance, a typical investigation with deductive Logic. What is the purpose of retrofitting the Logic Chess format onto such an emotionally charged scene?

The pragmatic answer, I suspect, is that it effectively puts the impetus on the player to bring Sebastian around through Edgeworth. It’s one thing to advance the text as Edgeworth builds Sebastian back up; it’s another to directly control what Edgeworth says as he goes through the process, however limited in scope it may be.

The more interesting read to me, though, is that it’s a Logic Chess segment because this is genuinely how Edgeworth would approach a situation like this, given the constraints of the matter. Put another way, the Logic Chess structure is Edgeworth’s intuitive response to the predicament before him. Edgeworth, probably cognizant that he doesn’t have the approachability of, say, Kay, and that he doesn’t have the time to properly think through a well-formulated speech, instead falls back on the interrogative mindset of Logic Chess, so to speak, and adapts it in order to help Sebastian in his own way, while also gathering info he needs urgently.

Related to the above is an element that’s always present in Logic Chess segments, but really stands out in Sebastian’s: the wrong answers.

Often times during Logic Chess, especially during segments where the correct response is to wait and listen, you’ll be offered the choice to butt in with something obviously and comically incorrect. These serve two purposes: first, they’re brief injections of levity into what is often otherwise a somewhat tense confrontation, and second, they clearly signpost to the player this is not the right option and you should pick something else.

It really kicks into high gear with Sebastian’s Logic Chess segment, however. I mean, good lord, this is the very first choice you’re given.

Again, you almost can’t help but laugh given just how audaciously mean-spirited and wrong that choice is. Signposting what to say is one thing, but what’s the point of making it so obvious?

Well, if Logic Chess involves choosing what Edgeworth says, then the choices, logically, must be whatever goes through Edgeworth’s head. After all, if Edgeworth doesn’t think about something, he can’t exactly say it out loud, can he?

This kind of interpretation about dialogue choices isn’t new in the slightest. In fact, arguably the entire point of dialogue choices in more traditional visual novels with multiple routes is to provide multiple options with outcomes leading to different routes which are all, crucially, possible. While each choice is often representative of different mindsets that lead to different actions being performed by the character, the common thread is that all of them are in play, at the same time, through one character. As such, by construction, dialogue choices imply that the character making the choice has interiority, with multiple impulses and thought processes contradicting each other and only one prevailing as a result of deliberate choice.

So it then stands to reason that there is something in Edgeworth’s head that would make him even fleetingly consider saying something as tactless as “You’re a failure as a person.” Such an idea might be a bit ridiculous with other protagonists, but with Edgeworth?

Edgeworth was taken in by Manfred von Karma when he was 9 years old and was raised and mentored by him for the next 15 years. However much influence Gregory Edgeworth had on his son during those first 9 years, von Karma’s influence over the next 15 were at the very least enough to mold him into the infamous Demon Prosecutor that crossed Phoenix Wright’s path in the first Ace Attorney. And given what we’ve seen from both Manfred and Franziska, however high their standards are for prosecuting, they apparently do not exclude denigrating people they deem to be beneath them.

Hell, early Edgeworth himself isn’t above taking potshots at Wright, and this is without even mentioning this somewhat infamous line from “Turnabout Beginnings”.

So it makes sense that such responses would be crossing Edgeworth’s mind. More importantly, it implies that after the events of the first Ace Attorney, Edgeworth hasn’t necessarily freed himself of von Karma’s influence. The Demon Prosecutor he used to be under von Karma’s tutelage hasn’t fully gone away. Rather, he makes an active effort, however trivial it may be, to avoid reverting to old, harmful ways and always makes conscious decisions to be a better person, having himself been brought back from the brink in the earlier Ace Attorney games.

So, in total, this means that the use of Logic Chess itself is evidence of Edgeworth recognizing that he’s not exactly the most suited for the task of building Sebastian’s self-worth back up, in multiple ways, but making a deliberate, concerted effort to do so anyway in the only way he can, all the while consciously rejecting his old mindset that was sculpted by his father figure to help Sebastian do the same.

makin notes about all the runners + redesigning the whole plot and their developments/relations