Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies is celebrating its 10-year anniversary today, October 24, 2023. Below, we reexamine the possibilities and shortcomings of its attempt to soft-reboot the Ace Attorney story.
Ruins signify a collapse. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies begins with the most heavy-handed representation of it, portraying an explosion inside a courtroom. This imagery is meant to echo the narrative breaking point that the law is going through. Yet, for a brief moment, it stands as a promising clean slate--it leads the player to believe Dual Destinies is rising from the ashes of a disruptive predecessor, determined to continue strengthening a new vision for the series. It's unfortunate, then, that the promise of reforming a decaying law system and passing the mantle to a different generation is never fulfilled.
October 24 marks the 10th anniversary of the Western release of Dual Destinies. Its release marked the series' jump to 3D, as well as being the first mainline entry without the involvement of original director Shu Takumi. Looking back, the introduction of characters like Athena Cykes and Simon Blackquill remains one of its strongest appeals. Yet, as interesting as some of the story threads are to untangle a decade later, the true potential at play is deliberately ignored. Mimicking the likes of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, it disregards the attempts to break past foundations to present familiarity once more instead.
I'm a fairly newcomer to Ace Attorney. I played Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney back in 2018, but it took me three years to continue unravelling the story of the rookie detective and its cast of wonderfully peculiar characters. Since late 2021, thanks to the start of a retrospective podcast called Turnabout Breakdown, which I co-host alongside longtime fan Jay Castello, I've been spending a good chunk of my time immersed in the series. As much as I liked the original trilogy, I was looking forward to meeting Apollo Justice, and seeing new characters take the mantle after a satisfactory end of a cycle in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Trials and Tribulations.
Similarly to the likes of the Yakuza series, when your protagonist becomes the face of a franchise, it's hard to start anew. Yakuza 6, like Trials and Tribulations, was a fulfilling conclusion for Kazuma Kiryu's story. Yet, he's been kicking around for the past few games regardless, despite the promises of a new beginning led by Ichiban Kasuga. This was intentional--in a 2023 interview with IGN, producer Hiroyuki Sakamoto said that when the team said goodbye to the character, they were "still planning to have him appear as a double protagonist" for Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth.
The first game in the new trilogy, named Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, paves the way for the upcoming generation. But Phoenix, inevitably, withholds a substantial involvement. In a 2017 interview with Capcom, Takumi mentioned that one of the orders the team received "from above" was to "bring Phoenix back," and it shows. Surprisingly, this depiction of Phoenix was purposefully disjointed from what the fans expected. His iconic attire, as well as emblematic personality, were replaced by casual clothes and a reserved, more mysterious aura. After all, as the player learns through the eyes of Apollo Justice, Phoenix has been disbarred for the past seven years after the events of the trilogy.
Wearing the badge of the lawyer with chords of steel, we witness an epilogue of sorts for Phoenix, as well as the beginnings of what Dual Destinies would denote as "the dark age of the law," where forged evidence and corruption are ingrained in both the lawyer and prosecutor stands. But the story also marks the start of Justice's growth as a lawyer himself, joined by all the necessary characters to make that happen: Phoenix as the renowned mentor, Klavier Gavin as the rival prosecutor, and Trucy Wright as the funny little girl who, as you eventually learn, also happens to be his half-sibling.
Old conventions had been challenged, and the story was on the dawn of a different beginning. But somehow, Phoenix returned as his former self (albeit with weaker writing overall), with Athena Cykes sort of taking Justice's spotlight as the up-and-coming lawyer. Meanwhile, Apollo departs on a solo crusade that unravels in the background until the final case, with the character appearing momentarily as a punchbag disguised as plot device in the interim, and Trucy is completely overshadowed.
This year, the announcement of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy brought Justice's treatment back into the conversation, with tons of folks expressing how ironic it is for Capcom to give it such a name when both Dual Destinies and its sequel, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice, largely ignore Apollo, and disregard the backstory set in his first entry. Instead of capitalizing on his relationship with Trucy--both of them are oblivious that they're family, and that their mother is alive--DD forcefully introduces a long-time friend of Apollo to serve as personal motivation without the emotional involvement that the series is known for, whereas SoJ delivers a wildly different background that bears little thematic relevance to his character, if any.
It doesn't help that not even the thematic disruptions of the previous games are taken into consideration. The so-called dark age of the law, while promising at times, isn't that different from the events that took part in the original trilogy. Moreover, in the eyes of Dual Destinies, the lay judge system introduced at the end of AA4 never existed. This is even further capitalized in Spirit of Justice, the one that plays it the safest when it comes to showing any substantial progress or novelty in the courtroom. Instead, it takes place in a fictional country in which the law system is blatantly retrograde, ignoring most of what the previous games introduced.
In a 2013 interview with Official Nintendo Magazine, Shu Takumi admits to having "mixed feelings" about the direction the mainline entries took without him. In particular, how after his team focused on the new character of Apollo in the fourth game, the Dual Destinies team decided to bring Phoenix back. Perhaps it was yet another directive from above. Still, it's hard not to fantasize about the fully fledged second trilogy we never got to see.
Phoenix's last appearance as the face of the franchise was meant to have a lasting impact. It was a depiction that echoed a willingness to start anew. Instead, Dual Destinies goes against this sentiment not with equal challenge, but by playing it safe while stumbling upon the way. There isn't a place for the new justice envisioned. Ten years later, I hope the next Ace Attorney game understands that disruption can lead to more than just replicating what stood before.
