Capcom's infamous Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (2001) for handheld consoles is an interesting courtroom mystery and crime fiction series that does a great job in making the episodic cases connect to the next one in an overarching plot that is not really a one linear story. There is quite a bit of impressive foreshadowing from the Fey family connected to the final case (DL-6) in the game to Miles Edgeworth's and Phoenix Wright's (and Larry Butz's) past throughout the cases in the game. Sadly the mysteries themselves are fairly obvious. Two of the first cases tell the story in a way where the player has to get used to the gameplay system and just follow the story, knowing who the true culprits are. In detective stories (Detective Conan has quite a few of these types of cases) these cases usually focus on why and how the culprit killed the victim, so the mystery shifts to trying to use it's time on introducing different motives and methods in the place of potential culprits. However Ace Attorney 1 is done in a way where you just linearly follow the story and the "why" and "how" don't really matter and aren't really even focused on, truly making a bit pointless since because of the lack of overall content it'd do a better job if the culprits were hidden anyway from the player. This is mostly the same with the final case of the series which is very interesting, with twists and turns, but in the end the culprits shouldn't come as a surprise because they've either been figured out before the next trial (a negative of the investigate - trial with it - investigate - trial with it aspect of the story as they don't introduce enough new things during trials most of the time. You should be able to see over half of the twists coming with common sense) or are just obvious, only possible culprits in the courtroom at the time. There is also some broken logic in the game where the characters think too hard of the events that are unfolding (spoiler hint: "Special bullet" in DL-6) and avoid the obvious conclusions and the game takes it to even further with the power of Plot (main character has to win to progress).
The characters are fairly average, the faces everyone makes and the objection shouts are fairly entertaining and a sell point of the game no doubt. The cases get progressively better until the end, which is nice and I personally prefer such structure instead of ending the good part where the player/reader/watcher is at the edge of their seat on a mid-way climax of the story and then a slow, boring way to the end that gets progressively more snoozy along the way.
Looking back, the game was pretty disappointing. Some of the twists in the 2nd to last and last cases were good but other than that I find very little to say about the game as a whole. There wasn't much actual, overall content in it compared to the later games such as Trials and Tribulations or Dual Destinies (the story was mildly disappointing for me imo).
