[T] Eagle Rong: Ace Prosecutor ☆○

Find and discuss trials made by other members and showcase your own trials.

Moderators: EN - Forum Moderators, EN - Trial Reviewers

Post Reply
MrWrightIsWrong
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Jan 22, 2018 8:34 pm
Gender: Male
Spoken languages: English (USA)
Location: The Universe

[T] Eagle Rong: Ace Prosecutor ☆○

Post by MrWrightIsWrong »

Hello everyone! I am MrWrightIsWrong (I go by Trial McMaker in my games) and I am making a new series about Eagle Rong. Everything in his world is basically a reverse of Phoenix's. Eagle has help from his assistant, Roger Makkins, and his detective partner, Sally Spase, to find the truth and put the culprits away. This series will add new characters, new plot, new game mechanics, and more.

Eagle Rong: Ace Prosecutor introduces the main characters and focuses on one trial. It is about Eagle's first time meeting James Jones, a defense attorney who has never lost. He only focuses on trust in his clients and wants to free everyone. Will truth triumph trust, or will the truth be hidden away forever?
[T]Eagle Rong: Ace Prosecutor ● http://www.aaonline.fr/player.php?trial_id=101527

Eagle Rong: Truth and Justice is the second installment in the series. It is going to focus on Eagle's struggle to find the truth. He will have to face a defense attorney who only focuses on fame and fortune. There will be a few more main characters added to this series.
[T]Eagle Rong: Truth and Justice ○ [WIP]

[More installments will be added in the future.]

Image
Last edited by MrWrightIsWrong on Tue May 01, 2018 1:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.
~MrWrightIsWrong
(In-game Name: Trial McMaker)
--Objector--

Image
User avatar
Enthalpy
Community Manager
Posts: 5169
Joined: Wed Jan 04, 2012 4:40 am
Gender: Male
Spoken languages: English, limited Spanish

Re: Eagle Rong: Ace Prosecutor

Post by Enthalpy »

This is a lot earlier than I was expecting, but I got a request, so...

☆ This case is pending a QA inspection to be featured.
[D]isordered speech is not so much injury to the lips that give it forth, as to the disproportion and incoherence of things in themselves, so negligently expressed. ~ Ben Jonson
User avatar
Enthalpy
Community Manager
Posts: 5169
Joined: Wed Jan 04, 2012 4:40 am
Gender: Male
Spoken languages: English, limited Spanish

Re: [T] Eagle Rong: Ace Prosecutor ☆○

Post by Enthalpy »

QA Review: Eagle Rong: Ace Prosecutor

Image
Isn't there an Awkward Zombie comic about this?
Getting a request to QA a case that isn't even showcased yet is certainly a first! Is the case worth the rush? Read the review, and let's find out.
_____________________________________________________
The format on Check #1 is similar to in my Normal review.
Enthalpy wrote:They check that it has an overall story and gameplay of astounding quality; it should be really engaging, have interesting contradictions and be really fun.
– The Sparkling Feature Star is given for an aspect that makes your trial stand out even among the featured trials. Getting a Sparkling Feature Star means your trial is pretty much guaranteed to be featured after implementing the changes from check 2, unless it gets a Hollow Star.
+ – The Great Plus means that this aspect makes your good trial great. You don't need a Great Plus in every category, but you should have at least one Great Plus or Sparkling Feature Star for the trial to be featured.
✓✓ – The Double Check Mark means that this aspect is good enough for a featured trial. Almost everything in this area works solidly, but it lacks a "wow" factor. An otherwise great aspect that requires some non-trivial tweaking falls in here.
– The Single Check Mark means that this aspect can be good enough for a featured trial, but requires not major, but non-trivial modifications to make it truly solid. You must not have any Single Check Marks in order to pass Check 2.
– The Hollow Star marks a problem that can't be fixed without a major rewrite. A trial must not have any Hollow Stars in order to pass Check 1. If you get one, don't be discouraged! Remember that a Hollow Star is only a star that hasn't been filled yet. It's something you can work on when improving this trial or writing your next one, and once you've worked on it, go for another QA review!

Unlike the other marks, the Hollow Star and Single Check Mark only talk about how large of a rewrite is needed to be featured-trial good, not how good that part of the trial is.
Spoiler : Check #1: Here Be Spoilers! :
Contradictions and Cross-Examinations:

There are only two cross-examinations. In the first, the defense spends four statements to say that the defendant has no connection to the crime. To move forward, we must present the ring found at the crime scene, with her fingerprints on it, when the defense challenges us to connect her to the crime, but why can' wet present the statement of the eyewitness that she did it, or the murder weapon with her fingerprints on the gun? And why present it at statement 4, "Unless you can prove otherwise," rather than statements 1 or 2, "You see, she had nothing to do with this" or "She wasn't there at the time of the murder; she left early"? There are nine plausible contradictions, but the author only lets us present one. Compare Rule 6 from here. The presentation of the final pieces of evidence suffer from the exact same problem.

Cross-examination two wasn't bad! My one suggestion here is to not have "The Body" as evidence, but condense that into the autopsy report. I was expecting information about the body to be in the autopsy and spent a while trying to figure out what the contradiction was if not the lack of other damage on the body, before I realized that I needed a second, very similar piece of evidence.

There are several other "choose an option" prompts, and for the most part, they simply test if the player has been playing attention. Two miscellaneous points: when we have to explain the reporter's testimony about the shirt, it isn't clear if we need to explain the stomach blood, the lack of chest blood, or both. Also, how does "bringing an extra shirt" prove premeditation? Would a killer really bring an extra shirt, knowing she planned to shoot somebody?

However, none of these touch on this game's biggest problem: Although you want to write a game where you play as a prosecutor, the prosecutor gameplay presented in this case is not going to work. A large part of the reason why Ace Attorney cross-examinations work so well is because the cross-examinations build off of each other. You can have three increasingly tense cross-examinations about trying to discredit a troublesome witness, or where you try to find a way for another killer to have snuck into the crime scene, or where you piece together how the flight attendant moved the body. Single cross-examinations where we just contradict a defense theory and then move to a completely unrelated topic are not satisfying.

I highly recommend that you rethink this part of your game. There aren't many prosecutor games on AAO, but if you really want to make a prosecutor game, I recommend you look for them.

Dialogue and Characterization:

The characters have their own idiosyncrasies, which is a good start. I can not, for example take random lines of Roger's and have Sally say them. The lines would sound wrong. Roger is dependent on Eagle - or E as he calls him affectionately - for what to do next. He's eager to please, but also easily startled. Despite this, he's more competent than he first appears, finding a witness that not even the detective knew about. (I also can't imagine Roger responding to criticism in the same way as Sally; she acts as if it's nothing, but I imagine Roger would care.) So, good there!

That said, most of this dialogue is unnecessary, and it emphasizes social pleasantries rather than interesting dialogue. I picked a random scene of yours, and I drew scene #3. Here's your dialogue.
Sally: Well, here we are!
Eagle: This is the campsite, correct?
???: What are you two doing here?
Eagle: Woah!
???: Sorry for scaring you, but why are you here?
Eagle: My name is Eagle Rong and I am the leading prosecutor on this case. May I ask what you are doing here?
Lil: My name is Lily Soule. You can call me "Lil." I was reporting the great pond when I found the body.
Eagle: So you were the first to discover the body?
Lil: That is correct.

Eagle: So what were you doing when you found the campsite?
Lil: I was getting a picture of the great pond for my article.
Eagle: Where was the body?
Lil: It washed up onto the shore over there.
Eagle: (I will check the lakeside later.)

Eagle: What is this article you mentioned?
Lil: I am writing an article about the lake.
Eagle: What is it about?
Lil: It's about the nature around here. I'm posting it on our website.
Eagle: I'll be sure to look at it later when it comes out.
I can get the same amount of information out in fewer lines.
Eagle: Sally, have the police spoken with this witness?
Lil: Yes. She was a reporter out here to write an article about the creatures of the lake. She said she stumbled across the body on the shore.
Eagle: Great, let's talk to the next witness.
To justify spending time to talk to this witness, the dialogue has to be more interesting there; it needs to fulfill some other purpose. One good purpose is to give us a better feel for the kinds of people these characters are. As an example of this, I've rewritten your dialogue about the article.
Eagle: What is this article you mentioned?
Lil: It's about the lake. You see, I'm a reporter for the Living section of the newspaper, maybe you've seen my work?
Eagle: The only reporters I know are court reporters.
Lil: People like you are exactly why my column exists! You can't go around working all the time! Camping season just started, so I figured I'd write a paper on that, on what there was to do out here.
Eagle: But... wait, didn't you say you stumbled onto the campsite?
Lil: Good ears! I was looking for good campsites off-the-beaten-path. That's another part of the article. This campsite tends to get crowded in a month.
Eagle: (Huh. She knows this place well.)
Lil: Now that I'm caught up in a murder, though, my article is on the back burner.
Sally: That's alright, at least you have this story to report on.
Lil: No, really, I enjoy writing for the Living section...
Do you see how this new dialogue is more communicative about the characters, less generic, and more interesting? This is the kind of thing your dialogue should be aiming to do. (I can go into a lot more detail about how dialogue should work in Ace Attorney games, and I'm tempted to write a tutorial about this now.)

Narrative:
I think MrWrightIsWrong's time is better served by focusing on the other two problems, so I'll be brief here:
He tries to have four dramatic scenes in the trial, one where James faints, one where Rent reveals that he's the victim's stepbrother, one where James confronts his father, and one where it is revealed that the defendant killed her fiancee by accident. None of these dramatic moments worked for me because there was nothing leading up to them. We haven't seen James be a particularly hard fighter for his client, we haven't seen Rent's feelings towards his brother in any detail, we haven't seen conflict between James and Jonathan, and we know very little about the killer.

I feel like this would be a lot stronger if the problems I mentioned previously were fixed. Also, ~1600 frames may seem like a lot, but it is very difficult to give four emotional moments the intensity they need with only that many frames.
Spoiler : Check #2: Here Be Spoilers! :
Not performed.
_____________________________________________________
Spoiler : VERDICT :
☆ The QA inspection is complete. This case is not good enough to be featured. Sorry!

MrWrightIsWrong has an ambitious idea, but as is all too common with new authors, has work to do on the fundamentals before such an ambitious problem can go smoothly. Having such disconnected cross-examinations kills a lot of the fun of Ace Attorney cross-examinations, and the dialogue isn't strong enough to support anywhere near as many shocking moments as the author wants here.

Don't give up! Making a trial is a lot harder than it seems, and it's something you have to practice at to get good at it. I strongly recommend that you pick either your dialogue problem or your gameplay problem and focus on improving that.
[D]isordered speech is not so much injury to the lips that give it forth, as to the disproportion and incoherence of things in themselves, so negligently expressed. ~ Ben Jonson
Post Reply