I have very few objections to Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy

I’m on a bit of a nostalgia kick right now. After burning out on new releases after a hectic 2023, I found a renewed love for gaming on my Nintendo DS. Games like Metroid Prime Hunters and Kirby Mass Attack brought me back to a unique era of two-screen game design brimming with innovative ideas. I’m not the only one missing that time, apparently; 2024 is already filled with DS throwbacks like Another Code: Recollection.

That emerging trend continues this week with Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy. The latest collection brings another batch of classic Ace Attorney games to modern platforms, following 2021’sThe Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. More importantly, it preserves three games that were facing a preservation crisis due to their two-screen experimentation. While the refreshed package has to do away with the original games’ more creative tech gimmicks, I’m always happy to see more games saved from the brink of obscurity — especially when they’re still this enjoyable.

Revisiting a classic trilogy

Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy pulls together three beloved games that spanned the Nintendo DS and 3DS era: Apollo Justice, Dual Destinies, and Spirit of Justice. Like the Ace Attorney games that proceeded them, all three are beefy visual novels that balance point-and-click adventure gameplay and sharp courtroom deduction. Those core tenants still hold up in 2024. Trials are an engaging linguistics puzzle that have me hunting for contradictions and busting my brain to present the one piece of evidence that will illuminate the truth.

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That system works as well as it does thanks to sharp mystery writing that does a great job at obscuring the truth. While a few suspects are easy to deduce, each case tends to take a few left-field turns that are hard to fully predict. An early case in Apollo Justice, for instance, ties