no. 1 ahtal-ka enthusiast

okay so he's rigid and perfectionist but also has zero impulse control when the things he takes to be fact - to take for the obvious example, his perfect record - are disrupted. obviously there's the impulsive, non-premeditated murder of gregory edgeworth, where he's reeling from his first ever penalty, but then there's everything else that comes through from that. he either adopts or at the very least mentors miles edgeworth for like a decade, seemingly on a whim, for surprisingly nebulous reasons. there's even decent evidence he gives a shit about miles, despite the later framing-for-murder deal; like he's doing it partly to ruin gregory's life and reassert his control, but he could've done that far more easily by teaching miles to be legendarily garbage at lawyering or to obviously present false evidence or the like, and instead takes time to teach miles the reasons for prosecuting manfred actually believes in.

and speaking of framing for murder, he goes completely overboard at the 15-year DL-6 anniversary, despite the fact that he's fully in the clear for the crime and there's no indication that fact will ever change. and you can attribute all that to a combination of perfectionism and spiting gregory, sure, but it's still kinda weird - for someone so controlled and seemingly put-together in nearly every aspect of his life, he's nonetheless completely hopeless at just leaving well enough alone, quite possibly because he's so tamped down on anything that isn't a part of being perfect at all other times.

he never does things by half measures; never fails to commit; never wavers even in ridiculously massive life-altering decisions like taking the goddamn child of a guy you killed under your wing. he makes really kinda spur-of-the-moment choices and sees them through to a ridiculous degree. his worldview wavers exactly once and the consequence is so disastrous that it never happens again. if not for the earthquake, if he'd just had time to internalise the lessons he could've learned from the loss of his flawless career, if he and gregory had talked - and I'm sure gregory would have wanted to - then he probably would have caught some unnecessary feelings of his own, with how utterly blindsided he was (you can interpret that as gay or not, I more mean the like disruption of worldview side of the feelings but also who knows? maybe he was gay as shit and that's why miles worked out that way. manfred von karma's love life is a deep mystery).

DL-6 defines the lives of so many ace attorney characters but I think it's easy to forget (or at least I wasn't remembering very well) how much manfred himself is included in that list, because unlike pretty much everyone else his career goes on the exact same way before and after, right up until the moment he chooses to jepoardise his innocence in DL-6. but his family doesn't, and his thoughts likely don't either, even if he's completely unapologetic for what he did. there's very little indication of what he's thinking and I doubt there's supposed to be, but that's what makes him interesting - he defines like most of the original trilogy through one connection or another but a lot of why is a mystery, beyond the obvious rage and resulting irrational haze of the penalty that caused him to kill gregory in the first place. so you get left with the contrasting impulsiveness and rigidity and calm and commitment and fury and a puzzle with a lot of missing pieces. he has the supreme dedication to a cause of early-era phoenix, too, just in the exact opposite direction, a trait he passes onto miles and franziska but one they never quite match in fervour. he also has style; I feel like I gotta credit his fashion sense somewhere. cravat-wearing earring-having hair-slicked style king.

Love the Monster Hunter artwork, love your little post on old-school games. I played tons of World and Rise with my friends because they can't stomach the old games, so my journeys to G Rank in 4U and most recently, my romp through Portable Third, have been basically solo. You're speaking to my heart and I appreciate that a lot! It's so awesome to talk about the old games in a way that's appreciated rather than, "wow, you really had to put up with that?"

oh my goodness, thank you!! Monster Hunter was the game of my childhood, and by that I mean hundreds of hours of giving myself carpal tunnel playing Generations on the 3ds (it should've been Tri but it took me forever to make it through because as a child I was scared shitless of Lagiacrus lmao) and it was always solo, and that's really given me an appreciation for the Old WaysTM, especially with Generations being a kind of compilation of everything old-gen that came before. I actually bounced off World completely the first time I ever played it, and didn't pick it up for years, it was just so... different. Love it now, but there'll always be something about the specific art direction and weird old lore and clunkiness and the beautiful, lonely quiet of old monster hunter. The feeling that everything was so much larger than you and your little human world. It's part of why I'm so stupidly excited for Wilds, actually, because everything looks bleak and weird and massive again, and it feels a bit like a homecoming.

But yeah! Sorry this is a bit of a ramble, it's just always nice to hear other people appreciating the old games and what made them special! I think it's something in the atmosphere, maybe, something that actually gets lost a little with areas that don't have to pretend to connect to each other with loading-screen paths you only ever see each end of, something in the slowness and the smallness and all the rough edges that showed through wherever there was a lack of polish. Old-gen always hinted at more, more than you could see or know for sure; it's why I love strange areas like Tower and their skyboxes that just go on forever. And that more, the part of the game that only half-exists, it kinda leaves a mark if you let it. If there was less to 'put up with', there'd be less to make you stop and take in the view.