If this was the second game in the series instead of the fourth, I would have given it an 11/10
Apollo Justice comes to us with a whole lot of oomph, but it just gets dragged down by the earlier games flaws that were unaddressed.
The games main plot is only present in the 1st and 4th cases. The 3rd cases plot focuses on the games prosecutor and his musical career, while the 2nd case is meant to introduce you to your sidekick and to the hell that is investigating. The main plot focuses on now 33 year old Phoenix Wright and his fall from grace, despite the game being called Apollo Justice. The game's main protagonist has almost no backstory or character development, which in my mind is not acceptable unless the protagonist is of the silent type.
While Apollo Justices two main characters, Apollo and Trucy, are very likeable, moreso even than the original two. Apollo gives off that
siastic, almost innocent Mr. Smith Goes to Washington aura, and lacks much of Phoenix''s cynicism, which is very refreshing. Trucy plays the part of the quirky female sidekick, but thankfully she is much cuter and much smarter than Maya (let's face it, Maya's face just was not drawn very well). Unlike Maya's dumb-as-a-doornail routine, Trucy's quirkiness stem's from her personality and her youthful enthusiasm. That being said, the rest of the game's characters are seriously lacking. The game's *only* prosecutor after Wincedin Pain is just too much of a team player, helping Apollo out with clues during the case instead of openly mocking him as a prosecutor should do to a defense attorney. The judge seems to be less brainless and biased towards the prosecution as he was in previous games, though he still provides humorous commentary for the trial.
The biggest flaw in the Ace Attorney games that should have been taken out has again been left in. That is of course, the investigating portion of the game, where you teleport between locations, examining cluttered crime scene backdrops, talking to witnesses and presenting evidence. Evidence must now be manipulated to gain the most information from them, and this could be plus on the one hand that it makes the investigation more interesting and interactive, but on the other hand it also just makes it longer and slows down the plot delivery. The biggest problem with this part of the game is that you get almost no prompting as to what your supposed to do, so you are often left clueless as to what scene you should be back tracking to, or what evidence you should be presenting to some person, which makes for a tedious game of trial and error. The fact that the first case of every Ace Attorney game gets on perfectly fine without going through this hell is proof that investigation sections are totally unnecessary, and are just used to pad out the games play time.
Mini-games have been added to the investigation sections to make them more interesting, but you only get 1 or two of these mini-games for each case, so it really doesn't make them any more enjoyable. In fact, I actually miss the magatama feature of the previous sequels, which made investigating more like the trial.
The meat of the game, the trials, are as good as ever, but with one debilitatingly bad new feature. In the trials, you cross-examine witness testimonies and *present* evidence to prove that they are lying. If you can't see the contradiction in the testimony, you can *press* a witness to reveal more information. Profiles are no longer used to prove contradictions, which makes it easier to decide which evidence to present. The penalty bar remains to punish anyone that does not save often, but you can save your game at almost any time, so this isn't much of a problem. The only time you can't save is if you are prompted by the judge to present evidence, though he will usually warn you. The fourth case in the game promised a jury of six, which sounded really promising for new gameplay during a trial, but the jury watch the trial off site via cameras, so they might as well not exist.
Amazingly, a new feature introduced to the trial portion has tainted what would have been a thing of perfection. Apollo Justice must use his magical vibrating bracelet to detect nervous tics that witnesses display while lying. While "perceiving" in this way, Apollo goes into a tunnel vision mode where he can only see a tiny portion of the witnesses body at a time, and scan them for the give away twitch. Unfortunately, these twitches are rarely on the persons face where you would think they would be (one twitch could only be found by looking at the witnesses armpit, wtf). This feature turned what was otherwise a logic game of comparing evidence to testimonies to find contradictions into a guessing game, of trying to figure out which testimony the lie is in(the evidence offers you no hints) and where the twitch is, and will almost gurantee a trip to GameFAQs unless you get lucky.
If you have never played an Ace Attorney game, or have only played the first game, I highly recommend this game, as it does stick to the Ace Attorney formula that makes the games so enjoyable and every DS owner should play at least one Ace Attorney game. However, if you have already played through the first three games, you might as well skip this one and save your money, since you won't really be missing out on anything. Apollo Justice offered a slew of new innovations, but they ignored the serie's primary weaknesses which overshadow the new features. Had this been the second game instead of the fourth, those weaknesses could have been easily overlooked, and the innovations would have made this game perfect, but the fact that we've already done this three times now and they still haven't fixed the problems, along side introducing new ones by turning trials into guessing games, really marred this title for me. A classic case of too little, too late.