English Dub Review: Ace Attorney “Turnabout Beginnings -1st Trial”

Mia’s back! Again!

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Time rewinds again as we see one of Mia Fey’s earlier cases unfold. One year before she met Phoenix, she defends Terry Fawles, a man sentenced to death for the murder of a police officer. This is Mia’s first real case, and she’s mentored through it by Diego Armando, a senior attorney at her firm. Her opponent is none other than a young Miles Edgeworth, still carrying the stately and intimidating presence he’s known for even at a young age.

The case is a strange one, where Terry is accused of having murdered a police officer, Sergeant Hawthorne, on a bridge, after escaping from prison. However, this bridge was none other than the place he committed the first crime that landed him in the big house in the first place: the murder of a young woman by throwing her off a bridge.

The case unfolds with a young Detective Gumshoe delivering the case report, explaining how they found Hawthorne’s body in a car trunk with a knife in it’s back, the car the victim was arrested with. Furthermore, there is some damning evidence that puts Terry at the crime: a photograph of him and Hawthorne on the bridge taken by a girl named Melissa Foster. Melissa is called to the stand as a witness but appears to be none other than Dahlia Hawthorne, who tries to kill Phoenix one year later.

Mia is relentless, however, and presses the small details and contradictions in Melissa’s photos that lead her to the conclusion that Melissa actually staged these photos to make Terry look like the killer. In particular, she notes that the “white scarf” Terry requested that Hawthorne wear when meeting him on the bridge could have been worn by anyone. With this advantage, Mia continues to say that Melissa Foster is the one who actually committed the murder.

To further their argument, it becomes clear to Mia and Diego that they’ll need to find a way to pin the cunning Melissa Foster down and reveal her true identity. Diego points out that Melissa would be the age of the girl Terry originally threw off the bridge, Dahlia Hawthorne, at this time. He goes on to use this point to question Melissa’s very identity.

Our Take:

It was a curious thing to shuffle around the case order in this season of Ace Attorney from the way it was in the original game, “Trials and Tribulations.” Originally, the Mia trials would be interspersed between the different Phoenix Wright trials, with the first Mia case acting as the first case/tutorial for the game and Turnabout Beginnings being the penultimate case, setting the stage for the final case which brings everything together. Yet, for one reason or another, this show has decided to be as linear as possible and put all three cases pertaining to Mia Fey one after the other. This makes a certain amount of sense, but it loses the sense of mystery and drama that accompanied seeing these cases delivered piecemeal. I don’t think having them occur right beside each other adds anything to the story, it just makes things a bit more obvious and clumsy.

Once again, the artwork is completely off-model and the courtroom sequences fail spectacularly to capture the feel and gravitas of the original. Proportions are off, angles are skewed and awkward, and sometimes characters move more like animatic keyframes than actual finished work. The visual problems are nothing new, but the series is moving towards a darker tone with more drama and pathos than ever before in the Ace Attorney series. These obvious and embarrassing art problems only serve to highlight how obnoxious the show’s failing tone has become. I can’t take a show that looks like a newspaper comic seriously, especially when its music and direction is so flat.

All that’s left then is the story, which is as technically good as its the only thing carried over from the original games. However, even here there are problems, because the dialogue, especially Diego Armando’s pants-on-head ridiculous coffee speak, is as weak and ever. Once again, the story can’t gain any momentum because there’s an unfortunate amount of gags and jokes polluting the moments in-between.

The problems of the Ace Attorney anime are most glaring when it tries to recreate the narratives of the original. As the cases become more interesting and complicated, the show proves itself more and more unable to properly do them justice. There’s literally nothing to enjoy here for any audience; this episode doesn’t work as a standalone anime, it doesn’t work as a recreation of the games, and it doesn’t work as something one might sit down and enjoy with their precious time.