CapcomAce Attorney is one of those absurd ideas that could only be created as a video game — a cartoonish courtroom drama where you pick out discrepancies in testimony and present crucial evidence to turn the tide. Despite its text-heavy presentation, Ace Attorney has found ingenious ways to make its events feel like thrilling battles — and few games in the series manage to hit the same highs as The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures. Transporting the courtroom drama from modern day to Victorian England revitalized the Ace Attorney franchise, creating one of the best historical dramas ever seen in video games — entirely because of The Great Ace Attorney’s whimsical characters and phenomenal writing. It’s one of the best visual novels ever made. If you’re unfamiliar with Ace Attorney, the games largely focus on a defense attorney named Phoenix Wright, and the bizarre cases he undertakes to defend innocent clients who have been accused of everything from murder to corporate espionage. The visual novels do have crime scene investigation bits and some complex gameplay features unique to each game, but it’s largely a visual novel-style game.The Great Ace Attorney makes fantastic use of its historical setting, both for a charming visual aesthetic and quirky characters. | CapcomBut what really defines Ace Attorney is its eclectic mix of serious storytelling and borderline slapstick humor. There’s an almost feverish edge to the writing of the franchise, filling the games with genuine laugh-out-loud humor, whimsy, crippling trauma, tear-jerking emotion, and everything in between. And that’s where The Great Ace Attorney shines. You’d think moving on from beloved characters after over six entries might be hard, but The Great Ace Attorney’s cast is so inherently charming and likable, it feels like you’ve known them for years. The Great Ace Attorney follows Ryunosuke Naruhodo, a student at Imperial Yumei University and an ancestor of Phoenix Wright who lived near the end of the 19th century. At the beginning of the game, Ryunosuke is put on trial for the murder of his professor, who is visiting from Britain. His friend and fellow law student, Kazuma Asogi, defends him in court and, somehow, the pair comes out successful. From there, Asogi is supposed to travel to Britain to study law, and hides Ryunosuke in his suitcase — but to Ryunosuke’s dismay, his friend ends up murdered on the boat, and he now has to use his limited lawyer skills to defend himself, as he’s the prime suspect.As you might expect, The Great Ace Attorney’s story is filled with twists and turns, but it does one crucial thing better than nearly every other game in the series — every case is connected to an overarching narrative that builds up into a truly spectacular finale. A vital part of this, of course, is the attachment you build to the characters themselves, and how their personality seep into even gameplay mechanics. The Great Ace Attorney brings some unique mechancis to the series that nicely shakes things up. | CapcomRyunosuke himself is a fantastic hero, incredibly earnest in his desire to do good, but also hopelessly naive — much like Phoenix Wright. But he really shines in his relationship with others. The star of the show is easily Herlock Sholmes, yes, a deliberately named reference to the most famous detective of all time. But Sholmes is a colossal screw-up who thinks he’s the greatest detective the world has ever seen, and his dynamic with Ryunosuke is fantastic. It even ties into The Great Ace Attorney’s new “Dance of Deduction” mechanic, where Sholmes will give you a ludicrous scenario of the crime committed, and it’s your task to find discrepancies and poke holes in it. The dynamic between the two is then made even more complex by the main “villain” of the game, the genius prosecutor Klint van Zieks. This cold-as-ice character is the perfect foil to the headstrong Ryunosuke, and his complex relationship with Sholmes, and Sholmes’s adopted daughter Iris Wilson plays a huge part in the narrative at large. Seeing the clash of ideologies between Zieks and Ryunosuke is a blast, fueling so much of the game’s drama and intrigue. Herlock Sholmes absolutely steals the show in every scene he’s included. | CapcomBut interspersed among these major characters are a handful of equally unforgettable bit parts, real weirdos that make up the cases you play through — from the hilariously gloomy Olive Green, to the pompously noble Jexaille Brett, who literally wears an entire goose on her ridiculous hat. In Ace Attorney tradition, so many of these characters feel like spoofs or caricatures, but hold fantstic hidden depth. But the pièce de résistance that ties everything together in The Great Ace Attorney is its brilliant historical setting. Victorian England is such a remarkable period of time that was filled with mystery and wonder — which is why things like Sherlock Holmes and Penny Dreadful became so popular. There’s so much of the time period’s personality injected into every aspect of The Great Ace Attorney. The environments you explore are wonderfully evocative; a sort of light steampunk-inspired take on the era. Even the costuming of characters is used to great effect to evoke humor and tongue-in-cheek designs. The setting even seeps into the gameplay ideas, with Summation Examinations based on English trials of the time, where the jury will unanimously reach a guilty verdict, and you have a limited amount of time to sway a majority to change their votes. Although the series is rife with great prosecutors, Van Zeiks stands out as one of the most memorable, and elegantly dramatic. | CapcomAce Attorney is a series filled with phenomenal entries, including more than one game that many might call a masterpiece. Capcom’s masterful fusion of historical drama and courtroom antics is simply one of the most engaging visual novel experiences you can have. The Great Ace Attorney utterly and completely breathed new life into the franchise, proving that there’s so much depth and potential for the kind of stories it can tell, and where it can go. And from there, the sequel, The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve, only reached even greater heights. Even though the series is on a break right now, hopefully, we’ll be looking back on The Great Ace Attorney years from now as an indicator of even greater things to come.The Great Ace Attorney: Chronicles is available on PS4, Nintendo Switch, and PC.