English Dub Review: Ace Attorney “Northward, Turnabout Express-Last Trial”

Talk about a train wreck.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The trial continues, though a key witness, Gale Gaelic, has been murdered. Detective Gumshoe, who found the body, explains that the corpse fell from the ceiling in front of him, and that somehow his train car has gotten separated from the one Phoenix is one. Phoenix explains that this must be because there was a switch coordinated by Avery Richman to separate the cars. Furthermore, the flame Gumshoe had seen in the snow was a fiery birthday cake accident which happened on the dining car Phoenix is on.

This means that Gale must have been murdered before the cars separated, which clues Phoenix onto the real killer. He accuses Tristan Turnbull of being the killer, and further implicates an accomplice who acted as the fake corpse of Gale Gaelic on their train. It turns out to be Rick, who had been working with the prosecutor’s office to frame Avery Richman after taking a sweet bribe. Rick confesses, and admits that Turnbull had him help frame Richman.

However, despite this damning confession, Turnbull isn’t giving up. He insists that Phoenix doesn’t have any evidence to prove his connection to Gaelic and Rick, but that’s when Miles Edgeworth steps on the satellite TV. Broadcasting from the American prosecutor’s office, Miles reveals damning paperwork firmly establishing Turnbull’s role in convicting Richman to get him out of the hair of the American Commerce Council.

Turnbull is caught red-handed, and admits to his crime. However, this caper isn’t over yet. Avery reveals that a bomb is about to go off in the train, his last resort whether he was declared guilty or innocent, since there is not legal authority to the trial on this train. However, the American Chief Prosecutor, on the satellite TV, insists that they’ll give Avery a fair retrial. After hearing this, he escapes with Phoenix and the others just in time for the train car to explode and the sun to rise, signalling a new dawn for Avery Richman.

Our Take:

Just when I think Ace Attorney might be onto something good, it manages to fall flat at its most critical moment. This conclusion to the three episode filler arc of trains and tribulations is nothing short of a weak, hackneyed together mystery climax that is lacking in any strong twists and turns, and feels like a “Story by numbers.” It doesn’t challenge, it doesn’t surprise, it just goes through the motions and finishes up its tidy little story without making too much of a fuss. Don’t expect something to really catch your eye or delight your sense of mystery. This episode is seriously lacking, even for this show.

As far as twist’s go, I could see the “They’re on two different trains” twist coming a while away. However, I didn’t think that the clue that would reveal it to be the case would be so dumb. The reason Gumshoe saw “The soul” in the blizzard was because of a previously unexplained birthday cake accident that resulted in a flame on the train car visible from the other train’s window. The bizarreness of that aside, this event wasn’t shown to the viewer until now at all. The only reason for hiding that is because if we knew about the birthday cake the twist would be even more obvious. Its a cheap attempt by the writers to make a “Twist” that isn’t a twist at all, just information we didn’t actually know yet.

Everything else goes about exactly as expected. Turnbull was pretty easily coded to be the bad guy from the get go, and I’m disappointed that the show took the most straightforward approach and just labeled him as the mastermind behind Richman’s conviction. Even worse, they just hand wave the implications of Richman’s prior conviction just so that everything can work out in the end. Gotta have that happy ending after all, we wouldn’t want the bittersweet drama that the “Ace Attorney” series has been known for after all. And having a bomb go off at the end of the episode is just another weak tactic to force tension instead of creating actual pacing to a powerful climax.

This is just sad. I was really hoping that the writers of this anime could create a nice custom mystery that was suited to the format of this show, but they really dropped the ball here. This feels like a mystery for kindergartners, something so simplistic and easy to digest that its not even worth watching to see how it ends.