The Gamer's Quarter

[Nana Komatsu]

[dessgeega]

chapter 4 is getting good.
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[Persona-sama]

Wait, Dess:
Please tell me you knew about how you can abuse saving as a way to never lose life ever?
Because... you can.
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[dessgeega]

tell me more!
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[Tablesaw]

I'm in episode 4, and I haven't had much problems with logic. But I have had big issues with the penalties attached to the life bar.

Adventure games are mostly about getting nowhere. You have to be certain you've checked every last nook and cranny before you know whether you even have the necessary pieces to the next puzzle. And when your logic fails, you have to try everything against everything else.

One of the reasons the Lucasarts games are so highly prized is because they made this process fun with clever writing and immortal characters. Exploration and experimentation were never punished but were almost always rewarded. As a result, you play the game looking everywhere for the jokes, and then discover that you've progressed enough to solve the puzzles.

The first PW game encouraged bluffing and proceeding without a clear plan. The penalties were low, and there was a good chance that the game would help you if you were slightly off. It was like a trapeze act, if you weren't sure what to do, they game wanted you to jump into the air anyway and something would come along for you to grab hold of. The thrill of moving quickly and unpredictably from utter failure to last-minute recovery was what made the game so fun.

JfA, on the other hand, gives out penalties at unexpected moments, and they tend to be much harsher than the original game. AA always took off 20%, regardless of the problem, JfA seems to penalize you for at least 25% at any critical point. The heightened penalties are supposedly meant to tie into the stakes of the moment. When you're deep into a tenuous argument, the wrong path is more dangerous. But for some reason, the game seems to want to discourage the bluffing that was a hallmark of the first game.

The big problem with JfA is that the likelihood of me not understanding the problem is not related to the "dramatic moment" of the case. I'm just as likely to have a cognitive disconnect early on in case one (where the penalty is small) as I am in case four where the entire case rests on a single piece of evidence for reasons I'm not entirely clear about. The case may be dramatic, and everything may be stacked against me, but that's not a reason to ratchet up the punishment in an adventure game. It just discourages me from trying to solve the puzzle.

In the first game, I would have been given the chance to run out the judge's patience here, hoping that, later in the case, I'd be able to continue without making another big mistake. In this game, I have to cycle through the case again and again if I need to use trial-and-error, even when I've narrowed my evidence to three likely options.

If you're going to expect players to "get it in one," you have to be pretty damn certain that your puzzles are clear enough, which isn't PW's strong point. So I don't know why they added this ludricous system of punishment that only seems to be sending its players to Game FAQs.
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It's the saw of the table!

[dessgeega]

yeah, the life bar seems to be the real culprit in justice for all.

the problem can be circumnavigated, though! the quicksave that you can create by pressing start isn't deleted upon loading, as i'd assumed. if you save and suspend your game in the middle of the trial, you can continue it and later, if things go awry, reset the ds and continue it again from the point where you saved. (i'm pretty sure a game over will cause your save to be deleted, but there's plenty of time to reset the ds once you've noticed your life bar run dry.)

i played through the last day of chapter 4 like this - the game's final and most arduous sequence - and only ended up consulting a faq once (i thought i had presented the correct evidence at the right time, but i'd been confused). whereas in earlier, less difficult chapters, i'd gone to faqs sooner because of the frustration of game overing and having to start a case from the beginning again.

and the final chapter, really, is great, and challenges the player to do something that she'd never been forced to consider before in the series. and if persona hadn't told me the trick about save abuse, i wouldn't have solved it on my own.

i was also glad to see that the translation staff was back on form in the last chapter. the writing was much tighter than in chapter 3, which it had to be considering the content of those final scenes. and there are lines that genuinely come off as hilarious, a relief after the clumsy composition and intraweb name-dropping of the circus chapter.

phoenix and edgeworth need to get a hotel room already.
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[Ethoscapade]

ugh, dammit all, i'll start that last case already.

dess - those interrupt saves are never deleted unless you want them to be. it's really stupid when you finally realize it, as the game, uh, seems to have something to gain by not telling you that, and so doesn't, but it really makes the whole thing feel a bit sloppier than it needs to, methinks.

[Dracko]

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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Persona-sama]

I laughed pretty hard the first time I saw that.

Also, abusing quicksaves really kind of kills whatever pressure the game tries to build since you have an uneraseable point to keep coming back to. It sort of relies on the player to not totally abuse it to at least get in the mood of the game, I feel.
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[Ethoscapade]

problem being, having to repeat a sequence from the beginning in the event that you are noble and don't abuse the save system and subsequently lose is about the most discouraging thing ever in a text-driven game.

[dessgeega]

interview with janet hsu of the phoenix wright translation staff.
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[Nana Komatsu]

I meant to post in this thread earlier today but I got distracted by work.

The fourth case is pretty neat. It has some really great lines, mostly.

"Can't a foolishly foolish fool get some love too?"

"All right! It's Investigatin' Time!"

"Edgey-poooooooooooooooooo"

"Yeah Mr. Nick, let's go let Ms. von Karma whip us some!" (I think I butchered that one)

Also, someone random posted doujin game shots from a phoenix wright ren'ai game (potentially nsfw if you work somewhere uptight) to my friend's image board
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resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[Nana Komatsu]

"The miracle never happen"
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resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[Tablesaw]

[Nana Komatsu]

This thread having been bumped reminded me that I finished this game earlier this week.

I got sick of the last case by the end of it, it was too long. it was still pretty good, but I really stopped caring after a point because it felt like the writers were just beating the entire thing to death to ensure a set number of hours of gameplay or something.

That said, I think I liked the second case the most out of the four in Justice For All. I did like Von Karma having a self-identity crisis at the end there, and I am very curious as for what happens in the third case. Maybe I just didn't like the last case for lack of Maya ;_;
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resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[Nana Komatsu]

Why didn't someone tell me sooner? Ema is back!!!
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resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[dessgeega]

because you don't like her?
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[Nana Komatsu]

No, I do like her, I just like Maya more and I didn't like the case she was in. But I like her as a character. Moreover I think it's neat that she's coming back in the fourth game as a canon character.
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resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[dessgeega]

objection to come yet again!
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