Playing this case gave me a very similar feel to when I played I Wanna Be The Turnabout, an entry from the trolling competition six years ago. It's inspired by I Wanna Be The Guy, and is sadism far past what even Turnabout of Courage can deliver. I was surprised when I made the connection, because this case is not intended to be sadistic in the slightest. After a while, the connection hit me: the similarity wasn't in what they were trying to be, but in the effect it had on me.
The jokes in this trial were hit or miss for me. Maggie's costume switching, calling Pearl "Trucy" and Garbulfunkancle didn't work, but the idea of a dog as a witness for the prosecution did get a laugh out of me, as did Edgeworth's oddly specific denial of recognizign the blade in his testimony. As the trial wore on, the jokes started to wear on me. Is this just not my style of humor? Well, possibly. Humor is notoriously difficult to analyze. Either way, when the jokes became a bore to get through, I was left to plow/lawnmower through the trial in order to get to the true 19th ending. Which reminds me a lot of how I played IWBTT, just trying to make it to the end.
The other connection is in how I played the cross-examination section. Both cases have case logic that is so bizarre that turns into a game of reading the authors' minds. Do we tell the judge we're ready or not? It's a mind-reading exercise. How do we know to prove Larry is the witness by saying the only male (human or otherwise) whose appearance he would compliment is his own? Mind-reading. How do we know that although we couldn't prove the knife was Edgeworth's before, we can now due to a hyper-literal and absurd reading of the description in the Court Record? Mind-reading. This was common throughout the trial and also led me to lawnmower through the case, since I could tell that trying to think through it wouldn't work. I probably could have tolerated this if the jokes worked for me, but they didn't. When you combine those together, it's no wonder that the case reminds me of IWBTT.
One other thing that puzzled me. The early parts of the case seemed to be satirizing AA cliches, like the "I believe in you" speech, but this was dropped by the end of the first testimony. Was there a reason for this, or was the satire never intended at all?