Spoiler : The QA Review (I) Structure and Perspective :
I had originally planned to start off talking about Edgeworth, but I ran into a rut and realized I had better start off with a more foundational topic: what response is this story trying to get from the audience? For instance, it took me two playthroughs to realize that it was silly to look for the same things in Dual Destinies that I saw in the earlier games by Takumi. Takumi is trying to give his players sudden bursts of clear insight, and accentuates them by playing them against the slow building of tension and accumulation of small details so the players gradually form an idea of who these characters are. By contrast, Yamazaki is trying to give his players the adrenaline rush of turnabouts and radical context changes at a pace more rapid than Takumi ever dreamed of, but without Takumi's clarity. His characters are mainly to get surface level emotional reactions, and you can "figure out" characters fast. This game is in a similar position. It's certainly not telling a traditional Ace Attorney story about hidden incidents from the past, characters presenting false images, or trying to help a person in a very rough part of their life. So what kind of story is it trying to tell? It's a romance, but can we be more specific about what the story is going for?
Bear with me through a rather long tangent:
This game largely has a vignette structure. An entire year passes during the game, and we can often see that time is passing through Nina and Justin advancing through their training. Even when we can't, the events of one chapter usually are broken from those of the previous chapter. In Chapter 4, the characters are preparing to start taking actual trials. By Chapter 5, Nina is already perfectly comfortable accumulating evidence for court. Chapter 6 has them doing interrogations. Chapter 7 has Nina fetching files from document storage. Chapter 8 opens with Edgeworth reminiscing.
There are only two cases where a story spans past one chapter. The first story spans three chapters and is the story of the broken samurai doll and Edgeworth's apology. The second story spans chapters eight through eleven and is Nina dealing with the possibility of not being able to solve her brother's murder, the misunderstanding between her and Edgeworth, the resultant near breakdown of communications between them, and Edgeworth consoling Nina when he learns what her behavior has been about. This is in stark contrast to the Ace Attorney structure we're used to, where a case is closed within four days, and the context for all our interactions with the characters for those four days is about solving that murder.
Those aside, the individual vignettes don't have a clear "problem" to resolve by the chapter's end. If you wanted to look for a "problem," Chapter 4 gives us why Nina chose to go home, how Nina will react now that she knows about the pressure she put on Edgeworth to attend the Gavinners concert, what will come of Edgeworth being worried about Nina, Edgeworth's confusion and awkwardness over Klavier's popularity... Although general themes are continued, these "problems" are not. These are only loosely coupled vignettes. Even the chapter-spanning stories like Nina and her brother only recur once the story is done to give depth to a scene where Edgeworth holds her hand like her brother did, and Edgeworth looking into her brother's murder as a present for her graduation.
The consequence is that these stories defy organization. You can't group them by time meaningfully. You can't group them as part of a story with its own structure, where events follow in unambiguous sequence with tight cause and effect. You can't even say that each vignette is like a single "move" in one of Edgeworth's chess games, where individual stories can be abandoned like pawns in the interest of well-defined moves forward in a grander, more abstract "game." The best you can do is say the three chapters about the Samurai doll belong together, and the four chapters about Nina's backstory with her brother belong together.
This, I think, is why the game felt so daydreamlike to me. It's not a bad thing for these stories to defy organization if they're not supposed to be "organized" in the first place, instead opting for the ethereal, dreamlike quality. This also makes sense of why plotlines that could be milked for more drama are passed up. Besides the obvious point with Nina, there is the threat of Justin losing his badge in a sexual harassment case was passed up. It is not supposed to be that kind of story. The scene with Justin is supposed to build the image of Edgeworth as both a prodigy among prosecutors and someone who genuinely does care for his students. Making much drama of it would ruin the dream.
Given this daydream quality, I think it's safe to assume that "digging into details" is not the way for me to evaluate this story. It's far better to evaluate how individual chapters deepen the daydream character of the story and contribute to our image of the various characters, chiefly Edgeworth and Nina. For romantic chemistry, it seems early to ask for something very specific there. The game gives us the sense that they are slowly, subconsciously (completely unconsciously in Edgeworth's case) falling for each other. For the first part of the story, I think that's enough for now! I'll need to look carefully at the two vignettes where Nina gets on Edgeworth's bad side to see how those contribute to the overall story, but I suspect the key things there are going to be the sides of Edgeworth and Nina those stories let us see that we can't see otherwise, a bit of tension to prevent the daydream structure from getting monotonous, and to show the resilience of the relationship that is slowly forming.
As of right now, that is my outlook for the rest of this review. The next thing I should be writing about is Edgeworth's character.
Bear with me through a rather long tangent:
This game largely has a vignette structure. An entire year passes during the game, and we can often see that time is passing through Nina and Justin advancing through their training. Even when we can't, the events of one chapter usually are broken from those of the previous chapter. In Chapter 4, the characters are preparing to start taking actual trials. By Chapter 5, Nina is already perfectly comfortable accumulating evidence for court. Chapter 6 has them doing interrogations. Chapter 7 has Nina fetching files from document storage. Chapter 8 opens with Edgeworth reminiscing.
There are only two cases where a story spans past one chapter. The first story spans three chapters and is the story of the broken samurai doll and Edgeworth's apology. The second story spans chapters eight through eleven and is Nina dealing with the possibility of not being able to solve her brother's murder, the misunderstanding between her and Edgeworth, the resultant near breakdown of communications between them, and Edgeworth consoling Nina when he learns what her behavior has been about. This is in stark contrast to the Ace Attorney structure we're used to, where a case is closed within four days, and the context for all our interactions with the characters for those four days is about solving that murder.
Those aside, the individual vignettes don't have a clear "problem" to resolve by the chapter's end. If you wanted to look for a "problem," Chapter 4 gives us why Nina chose to go home, how Nina will react now that she knows about the pressure she put on Edgeworth to attend the Gavinners concert, what will come of Edgeworth being worried about Nina, Edgeworth's confusion and awkwardness over Klavier's popularity... Although general themes are continued, these "problems" are not. These are only loosely coupled vignettes. Even the chapter-spanning stories like Nina and her brother only recur once the story is done to give depth to a scene where Edgeworth holds her hand like her brother did, and Edgeworth looking into her brother's murder as a present for her graduation.
The consequence is that these stories defy organization. You can't group them by time meaningfully. You can't group them as part of a story with its own structure, where events follow in unambiguous sequence with tight cause and effect. You can't even say that each vignette is like a single "move" in one of Edgeworth's chess games, where individual stories can be abandoned like pawns in the interest of well-defined moves forward in a grander, more abstract "game." The best you can do is say the three chapters about the Samurai doll belong together, and the four chapters about Nina's backstory with her brother belong together.
This, I think, is why the game felt so daydreamlike to me. It's not a bad thing for these stories to defy organization if they're not supposed to be "organized" in the first place, instead opting for the ethereal, dreamlike quality. This also makes sense of why plotlines that could be milked for more drama are passed up. Besides the obvious point with Nina, there is the threat of Justin losing his badge in a sexual harassment case was passed up. It is not supposed to be that kind of story. The scene with Justin is supposed to build the image of Edgeworth as both a prodigy among prosecutors and someone who genuinely does care for his students. Making much drama of it would ruin the dream.
Given this daydream quality, I think it's safe to assume that "digging into details" is not the way for me to evaluate this story. It's far better to evaluate how individual chapters deepen the daydream character of the story and contribute to our image of the various characters, chiefly Edgeworth and Nina. For romantic chemistry, it seems early to ask for something very specific there. The game gives us the sense that they are slowly, subconsciously (completely unconsciously in Edgeworth's case) falling for each other. For the first part of the story, I think that's enough for now! I'll need to look carefully at the two vignettes where Nina gets on Edgeworth's bad side to see how those contribute to the overall story, but I suspect the key things there are going to be the sides of Edgeworth and Nina those stories let us see that we can't see otherwise, a bit of tension to prevent the daydream structure from getting monotonous, and to show the resilience of the relationship that is slowly forming.
As of right now, that is my outlook for the rest of this review. The next thing I should be writing about is Edgeworth's character.