Ace Attorney vs Professor Layton (series comparison)

Aside from being handheld games with visual novel style these two series share a lot in common. Both of these series have completed two main trilogies. The first trilogy and the first game in the second trilogy in both of these series are drawn in 2D while the last two games in the series (the last 2 games in the second trilogy) are done in 3D on 3DS. The quality of these games is also waning and peaking at similar rates. 

I decided to make a comparison list of the 6+6 main games in these series.

First Trilogy VS series

1. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney VS Professor Layton and the Curious Village

AA = +1 for von Karma, +1 for Edgeworth

PL = +1 for atmosphere and OST

-Both games are solid and never on the bottom of the game lists. The games introduce us to the cast and the settings of the game series and are in that sense quite astounding games for pulling in players over the years. I prefer AA1 for its story and PL for its gameplay. Since I prioritize story, Ace Attorney wins round 1.

2. Ace Attorney 2: Justice for All vs Professor Layton and the Pandora's Box

AA = +1 for von Karma 

PL = +1 for the changing setting of the game. The train aspect is very enjoyable and you wait to get answers to questions laid right at the beginning.

-Both of these games are possibly the worst in their series. I used to hate both but after replaying, Pandora's box is superior due to being times quite enjoyable. Professor Layton wins round 2. 

3. Ace Attorney 3: Trials and Tribulations vs Professor Layton and the Unwound Future

AA = +1 for story, +1 for Godot, +1 for plot twist, +1 for ending and last case

PL = +1 for story, +1 for antagonists, +1 for the setting, +1 for ending and the wrap-up of potlines.

-These last games of the first trilogy are often argued to be the best games in their respective series and it's kind of easy to see why. The stories in both of these games are intimate, they go to the past of our main characters and escalate from there to an emotional ending. The character writing in these games feels better. I used to prefer AA but after replaying I noticed some problems in the writing that take the game down. On the other hand I've grown to appreciate Unwound Future a lot more now. It's the best written PL game and the way it wraps up is great. It's less than 50/50 chance for Layton series to have an ending that doesn't disappoint but this game's way of wrapping up everything was just great. Professor Layton wins round 3.

Second Trilogy VS series

1. Ace Attorney 4: Apollo Justice vs Professor Layton and the Last Specter

AA = +1 for breaking the status quo a bit, +1 for story

PL = +1 for the story, +1 for presentation and ending

-This is 50-50 for me. I don't like Apollo Justice really while I enjoyed Last Specter. Last Specter is also presented better and it's enjoyable to find out how our main characters met. Both of these series also go to a bit more overarching elements in the series that are handled with later on. I think AJ might be better written if I looked at it with unbiased eyes but I just don't feel like replaying the game. I got to like 3rd-4th case on replay and had to stop, it bored me to tears. I feel like the writers changing back to Wright diminishes AJ more as well as it has this filler or side story taste to it. Professor Layton wins round 4.

2.  Ace Attorney 5: Dual Destinies vs Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask

AA = +1 for story, +1 for plot twist, +1 for reintroduction

PL = +1 for story, +1 for splitting the game in past and present, +1 for presentation

-Both of these games suck in different ways. I think Dual Destinies is manufactured, very mechanical and plays it safe for the series. The game might be the most boring AA game as well to some due to being just average cases, but I recall it being competently written and the ending being acceptable. For Professor Layton the game is actually intriguing and tackles Layton's origins. It had potential to be a great game but it had an awful ending that gives a shit taste in my mouth. The presentation of the game is great, it has this atmosphere to it with the art and OST being used well. Because of the cringeworthy ending I just can't give it a win. Ace Attorney wins round 5. 

3. Ace Attorney 6: Spirit of Justice vs Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy

AA = +1 for story, +1 for plot twist, +1 for setting and OST

PL = +1 for story, +1 for enjoyment, +1 for worldbuilding and characters

Ace Attorney OST are mostly computer generated trash but Spirit of Justice finally brought some real tunes to the series. The game started out unimaginably slow to introduce the player to Khura'in, a rural village with its messed up court system that you have to fight against. The game has some pretty meh fillers to it and it's longer than it should be but it is immersive and has a great ending and a lot of proper writing. It shows the evolving writing of the main game series. 

Azran Legacy on the other hand might be the most enjoyable Layton game out of them all. Things immediately pick up unlike in the other games and you basically travel the world to many locations including old ones. I think all the settings in the game are great. The variety is a huge plus to me. Instead of a train and couple towns, there's just more special settings to the game. The storylines are also enjoyable as you learn about the world of the verse through dialogue, newspapers and adventuring. The game should have been longer though as it wrapped up in a flash. Its rushed ending diminished the impact since there was a lot it had to go through but it doesn't ruin the game (unlike Miracle Mask). Ace Attorney wins round 6.  

Top 10 Games of the Decade (2010-2020)

End of the year means end of the decade.


Honorable Mentions: Witcher III, Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Skyrim, Devil May Cry 5, The Wolf Among Us


10. Zero Time Dilemma (2016)

- When you take the best of VLR and condense it to a more manageable game you got one of the top 10 games of the decade.

9. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015)

- One of the most memorable beginning and ending sequences for any game ever. Kojima had a touch that no one can replicate.

8. Persona 5 (2016)

- Even when the story drags to hell all the time for no reason the boss fights still feel legit. Akechi fight was the best boss fight in the Persona series akin to the Demi-Fiend boss fight. It took all the usables I had to barely beat him.

7. Digimon World Next Order (2016)

- Digimon World 1 on PS1 is one of my favourite and most nostalgic games (along with 2003 from Digimon). Turn that into a current gen game with remastered soundtrack and +1 digimon to care for and I'm in there. 

6. Telltale's The Walking Dead (2012)

- This game was so good that when I got to the momma's dinner party I told about that shit to my friend and he's been playing this junk series for like 4 years even after I dropped out.

5. Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy (2013)

- I used to GRIND the Professor Layton games. Although Unwound Future (2008) has the best written story in the series, I hold Azran Legacy at a pretty high level despite its rushed ending because of its worldbuilding and use of more main characters than the previous games as well as the fact that the game starts the same way the other games in the series end with grand stuff happening right off the bat. It's a good game to end the second trilogy with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtgquM4JKR0

4. Ace Attorney 6: Spirit of Justice (2016) 

- Spirit of Justice is also the last game of a second trilogy and it shares a lot of similarities with Azran Legacy as well (supernatural stuff happening more than previously and the game feels like Atlantis animated film or something). The game has a lot of far too slow pacing instead of rushing but other than that the build up to the plot twists was done much better than previously in the main series. The way how you slowly get towards the truth however just feels intriguing. When the game ending hits you just feel like "wow. fucking hell." This game sadly doesn't have interesting antagonists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF0UO7_UzC0

3. Last Window: The Secret of Cape West (2010) 

- Very enjoyable game. This just leaves the player with a message.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6amyBkxpmXw

2. Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age (2017)

- Although the story in DQVIII: Journey of the Cursed King was better, this isn't far from it. DQXI has some fantastic presentation of the scenes and each of the cast gets fleshed out very well. Worldbuilding is fantastic as always and the journey feels right. The game doesn't feel like a rip-off, you get all your money's worth in one go, play the game and then just are left with a fulfilled feeling.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcH3WWrNAEY

1. Miles Edgeworth Investigations 2 (2011)

- Take half a dozen of the best AA villains and put them in a game with pacing and plot twists flying off the rails. In this game you don't investigate and go to court to talk about what you've already seen, no, here you investigate and have to shoot at all cylinders immediately. The game never stops and Edgeworth is ridiculously impressive here. I finished the fan translation right before AA6 so the downgrade was noticeable from Edgeworth to Wright. 

GK2 is the greatest game of the decade.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDDziqDSNFk

NaNoWriMo 2019 - All aboard in the November rally!

IT'S TIME TO RUMBLE! 2019

It's friday, first of November now and I'm planning on writing a story for the global NaNoWriMo "competition" once again. I want other people to get motivated to join as well. I started NaNoWriMo the first time in 2016. Ever since I was little I've had the passion to want to write about mysteries and such so it was perfect for me. During my time at restaurant and catering school I spent the first two years planning for different stories. The first story that I created was called The Lifebar. It was a generic story, a tale about a group of people that have been invited to a party at a hotel-restaurant that owed a lot of money to all the people invited. We've heard this concept too many times: a group of people get locked up from the outside world due to a storm or other natural disasters and the killing begins, locked room ideas and no way to contact the police with a phone. That's basically what the story was supposed to be about, but it came out worse. I think I managed to pull one interesting disappearing trick with an elderly lady in it however.

The Lifebar gave me motivation to keep making another story. I didn't write during 2017 for some reason, think it was just a lack of motivation along with severe tinnitus from a car accident that I got. Anyway, my second story was going to be a direct continuation to my first novel called The Two Suns, telling a story about two girls that want to find their father and a bit more. The Two Suns was closer to a more complex idea for a story. I didn't manage to pull any single good twists in the time I wrote it but I was happy with what I did. Problem was that in 2018 I had a lot of work to do in University of Applied Sciences as well as having to run around the country dealing with government corruption. This was what caused me not to get to my goal and I stopped at 35 000 / 50 000 words. You clear NaNoWriMo if you manage to get over 50 000 words in November, by the way. One minute over and you lose. Didn't manage to post my 35k words in time either (posted them couple minutes too late), but luckily it wouldn't have mattered as it was below 50k anyway.

The past year I've gotten myself very familiar with Child Protective Services and their little schemes. Their unlimited power. You see, CPS is not exactly what the name suggests. They are not heroes by any stretch of imagination. They break laws and take children from perfectly normal families without any care in the world. They tend to ruin people's lives, cause them to lose their houses to the debt the CPS causes and tire the families out so that they can say that they don't care about their children because the mother hasn't gone to all the meetings week after week for over half a year to where the child is (it's not rare for the child to be taken hundreds of kilometers or miles away). The moment the child is taken, the CPS plans to get drugs for them through a doctor and either get a statement from the doctor or fabricate statements that don't exist and use them in the court. The reason for the drugs is simple: money. Even though it's true that taking care of a calm child that is drugged to hell is easier (they take easy children from families), money is the biggest aspect of drugging children. You see, each child gives the factory the child is taken to about 100k €/$ a year. The harder the child is to "heal" the more money the factory gets from government and the county. The county then tells public that it costs them a lot of money to put one child in foster care, so it's not true that they make money with it. This is not really true as there are tax returns. In other words the government - the tax payers - pay a huge sum for each child, up to over 200k €/$ a year for heavily drugged ones I believe.

Furthermore, there are countries where the county pays extra money to CPS workers the more children they take from homes. The less children they take, the higher chance of them getting fired is. This means that the CPS business is run by governments who make the laws. Stupid CPS workers then break laws and literally constantly switch from one county to another to try to avoid legal issues. This is hidden by CPS supposedly being in crisis. They fill foster cares with children that cry about wanting to go back home and leave them there. What a fucking joke. In Minnesota especially last year in 2018 there began a civil lawsuit against CPS that hundreds of people signed. The civil lawsuit claims that CPS's laws are against human rights and that their actions towards unwanted child placements are akin to kidnapping. 

To take a child immediately with police force there needs to exist something called immediate danger. Taking out child trafficking and visible violence, this kind of concept doesn't really exist. The main problem with claims about immediate danger in normal families really existing is that most of the stories come from Child Protective Services or officials that work with them. Thus these claims can not be trusted. I find it worrying that courts always trust officials over anyone else, no matter how nonsense their claims may be. For example an official can write: "an animal in a dirty small cage in the back of a car" under a picture that shows a massive clean animal cage in an open space of a truck and a small dog less than half the size of the cage in it. The official's words are the truth compared to reality in courts. There are countless examples, for example if you're in court being accused of telling others someone is a chronic liar, and then the person lies in the court and fights with your witnesses because of the lie, you still get sentenced. There would have to be heavy discrepancies with law itself or you'd have to have a lawyer to tell the court that this is ridiculous to survive. Or if you drive a car 10 km/h and another car hits you and a police tells you drove at insane speed - you get sentenced. No one ever investigates anything, or even if they do it's not based on reality (for example if a police does a crime, no other cop is going to investigate it, and prosecutors or courts really don't care either - they're in it as well because "our country has the best officials"). Police claim takes priority over reality in these types of cases. 

The story I'm about to tell in this year's NaNoWriMo is me writing a novel about government and county officials, not just CPS but the whole instance, and how much of a corrupt group they are globally. There are dozens of instances that are supposed to look for people's rights, yet none of them actually exist and they all claim that there really is no one that can take account for when an official does crimes. One layer after another they hide the existence of the crimes against families. I wonder why?

United States alone has over 600 000 children in foster care. Read about it here for example. It's impossible for that many families to cause immediate danger to their children all of a sudden. This has gotten ridiculously out of hand, speak out people! It's time to stop this absolute insanity!

I have my material and mindset, a will to create something impressive.

Time to get to work! Good luck everyone!