English Dub Review: Ace Attorney “The Lost Turnabout”

Objection!

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Phoenix is getting ready for another day of court, when a devious man with yellow hair strikes him from behind with a fire extinguisher, knocking him out cold. When he awakes, poor Phoenix finds that he’s lost his memory of how to be an attorney and his upcoming case. Somehow, he has to find a way to defend Maggey Byrde, a police officer wrongly accused of killing her superior.

When court begins, Phoenix goes up against Winston Payne, an attorney known for both his baldness and his bullying behavior towards new lawyers. Phoenix has met him before, but he has no memory of their prior encounter.

The first on the witness stand is Detective Gumshoe, who, despite his hapless behavior, reveals some key evidence in the case. After his pathetic performance on the stand, next Payne calls Richard Wellington to the stand. Wellington is a total fop but has a damning witness account of Maggey committing the crime. But, with the help of Phoenix’s assistant Maia, and the sudden return of his memory, Phoenix is able to turn the tables around on Richard Wellington and his lies. As it turns out, Wellington is both the murderer and the one who hit Phoenix on the head to protect himself from prosecution.

Our Take:

Phoenix Wright, the legendary ace attorney, is back for another season of his animated adventures in the criminal justice system. This season opener follows the first case in the second game of the series, wherein Phoenix has to try a case after suffering from short-term memory loss after a sudden blow to the head. But does the first episode of this anime’s second season manage to live up to the Ace Attorney hype? Well, sort of.

This is a pretty straightforward telling of this case from the video game, of which I’m pretty familiar. (I’ve been addicted to these games since middle school) The anime doesn’t go through a lot to try and jazz things up visually from what you would see in the original game. There is a feeling of “Matter-of-factness” to the way the episode is structured. The twists and turns all feel very choreographed, which gives a stiff, scripted feeling to the whole episode. And in a series like Ace Attorney, which thrives off of high emotion and character drama, that problem is a bitter pill to swallow.

The episode’s setup is also strange to be adapted into an anime series. The original’s story of having Phoenix lose his memory was used as a makeshift tutorial level to bring players up to speed on how to play the game. This works fine in a game, but in an anime, Phoenix’s extremely temporary memory loss has no real purpose and feels unnecessary to the larger plot. Yes, its true to the original to play it straight like this, but perhaps this could have handled a bit better.

As for the plot, this case is rather self-contained and silly at its core, so it doesn’t get to the core of the legal drama that makes Ace Attorney, well, Ace Attorney. Furthermore, because we already know who the killer is at the beginning of the episode, there’s no real mystery to solve here.

The issues that I’m seeing with this anime so far are largely in presentation over substance. If the mysteries here are just going to be retellings of those in the original games, then their plots will be just fine, but if they’re presented in this silly, awkward fashion, they won’t hit nearly as hard for the audience. Not to mention, the audience for a show like this is probably people who are already Ace Attorney fans. Without something new or exciting to draw them, why would they stick around with this show? Only time will tell.

6/10