I’ve been working through playing all of the Ace Attorney games with having completed Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth just yesterday. About a third of them required me to use an iPhone to play based on some silly standard I have for my Twitch stream. So let’s talk about this!

What games are on mobile?

As it stands, this is a list of the games that required me to use an iPhone in order to play:

• Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice
• Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth

The sequel to the last one, Ace Attorney Investigations 2 is available for iOS, but unlike its predecessor, it has never been translated into English. A patch for its DS release is available and there were efforts to bring the patch to Android, but it hasn’t had an update since late-last year.

I bought a copy of the game and have already dumped the game and patched it already! It is likely I’ll write about how easy it was to dump my cartridge and do all this work myself sometime soon.

The first three in that list are available on 3DS and Investigations was on DS (Apollo Justice is on both). However, the 3DS and DS have resolutions that make the content appear pixelated and even though I stream at 720p60, I notice this. Additionally, I don’t have a capture-able 3DS and must resort to emulation such as the case with Layton vs. Wright.

So the iPhone version is the option I chose. Namely it’s because I am a heavy user of the Apple ecosystem and I have an iPhone 8 I don’t use much any more. Additionally, the games run at an HD resolution so downscaling them doesn’t end up looking bad.

Hardware and why AirPlay is not an option

To stream an iOS device, you can use an official lightning to HDMI adapter. This provides both an HDMI output and an additional lightning port so you can keep the phone charged.

This works really well and is plug and play. My capture card had no issues with the video output and while I did need to trim the unused space, it wasn’t at all a problem.

One problem with this arrangement is since the device is attached via a dongle with ah HDMI and power cord attached to that, my hands lose a lot of mobility with one side of the device being pulled down in a rather uncomfortable manner.

So you’re then thinking: why not use AirPlay? That way I can just charge the phone after the stream or just have one cable attached to it as opposed to two. This idea is great on paper, but testing it unfortunately led to problems.

With Dual Destinies and Spirit of Justice in particular, the majority of the game content is 2D, but the moment you end up in 3D, AirPlay becomes a real nightmare. I have an Apple TV attached to my streaming set up, but the moment you encounter anything with 3D is when AirPlay just struggles. The frame rate from the game content becomes no better than a slideshow and there is not much I can do about it.

This problem is either a limitation of AirPlay or with using wireless networking (the Apple TV is attached via ethernet), but nonetheless it is not ideal.

Two games will refuse to run without a trick

Both Apollo Justice and Investigations share two things in common: the games are presented in a 4:3 aspect ratio and they both hate the HDMI connection.

When I would launch either game, it would show the game’s logo and then immediately crash. This was super confusing as the problem did not exhibit itself on my iPad or my iPhone XR. All of my devices are running the same version of iOS and the XR and iPad both have wildly different resolutions, so I was super confused to why the iPhone 8 was so special.

It wasn’t until when I was trying out things on my iPhone did I conclude the problem: it only happened when the dongle was attached. Sure enough when I launched the game with no tethering the game launch. If I killed the game, attached the dongle back in, and then launched again, it would crash.

The trick to fixing this was simple: launch the game and then attach the dongle. I have no idea why these two games in particular hated the attachment, but after launch they didn’t seem to care and I was able to move on.

I wish these games worked on my M1

There is no reason for why Capcom doesn’t permit these games on macOS. They’d run natively on my M1 MacBook Pro just fine, but alas.

That will be all 11 Ace Attorney games done in less than a year! I also plan to play Ghost Trick!

Since CRD’s post about two-port Ethernet switches came up, I was reminded about another technology: 100BaseVG.

100BaseVG is a 100 Mbit/s Ethernet standard specified to run over four pairs of category 3 cable (cable also known as voice grade, hence the “VG”). It is also called 100VG-AnyLAN because it was defined to carry both Ethernet and Token Ring frame types.

Compared to Fast Ethernet, 100BaseVG had a slight competitive edge as it was able to achieve 95% of its advertise speeds in real world tests compared to the 45% of its Ethernet counterpart. It was less susceptible to interference from outside signals and it was able to take advantage of Token Ring’s frame timing. On paper, this was pretty incredible as it was able to make use of the same cabling as 10BaseT.

So how did 100BaseVG become the Betamax equal to Ethernet? For one thing, like Betamax, only one vendor truly supported it and it was its creator Hewlett-Packard. To make matters worse, it required you to replace every single network card on any system you wanted to be part of your new fast network.

With most Fast Ethernet switches, you could have it run at 10 or 100 Mbps (and 1000 Mbps) without worrying about having to gut out the card on the other end. In 1995, this was seen as rather acceptable apparently:

Upgrading [to 100BaseVG from a 10BaseT network] is, in most cases, simply a matter of replacing existing hubs and network cards…

In the PDF I link to, it quotes AU$6,613 for a 20-port hub and AU$496 to AU$757 for a network card depending on either ISA or EISA. Adjusting for inflation and converting to US dollars, you’re looking at US$8,200 for that hub and US$640 to US$980 for the cards.

I think it’s pretty clear that you were better off keeping your 10BaseT gear and slowly upgrading to Fast Ethernet where necessary. It was pushed starting in 1995 and then died a silent death in 1998. If you have never heard of this before until now, it is no surprise.

When I was a teenager, I was given a 100BaseVG network switch from a school which used it briefly and then ditched it in favour of Fast Ethernet. I eventually realised it was absolutely junk and traded it for a Macross Plus DVD, so I think I got the better deal here.

I think about four times since I have moved into my current home, I have had the building’s fire alarm pulled with three of those times being when I’d otherwise be sleeping. Last night was no exception and fortunately like the previous times, the night was temperate and dry.

When the alarm went off, I hesitated to leave my unit. It’s a concrete and steel building and would be rather difficult to simply burn down. However, this is very poor thinking as my tired brain was not considering the possibility of smoke and either suffering inhalation or simply being trapped. But as a safety and security conscious person, I eventually recognised what I should do and left after a futile attempt to get my cat to leave.

As I was standing outside while the Vancouver Fire Department determined the situation, I thought about how I was considering ignoring the evacuation alert. On the surface, the idea that another alarm late at night was yet again going to be another false positive seems innocent, but there is going to be that time where that self-assurance is incorrect.

We’ve seen this play out in society before as with the Homeland Security Advisory System (now National Terrorism Advisory System) with its colour-coded system indicating the possibility of a terrorist attack on American soil and foreign services. News outlets really loved to latch on to whenever it was changed, but it provided inadequate information and was too broad for the typical person to understand.

Homeland Security eventually admitted during the Obama administration that it was ineffective and subsequently adopted a new version which outlines current threats. I have a lot of opinions on HSAS/NTAS and its role as security theatre, but that is a different discussion.

Here at home, Alert Ready–a system associated with alerting via mobile devices–has faced criticism for not being used enough or used too much. As evident in the severe heat and then severe rain my province of British Columbia faced in 2021, criticism over the government’s lack of response did eventually lead to changes to their use of it.

Outside of British Columbia, similar remarks were made during Nova Scotia’s public inquiry over the mass shootings which led to the death of 22 people in 2020. It was revealed that hesitation as well as jurisdictional clashing over roles and responsibilities led to a lack of sending an alert at all.

RCMP in Nova Scotia considered issuing an alert on April 19 after multiple calls from the provincial Emergency Management Office (EMO), but ultimately that didn’t happen.

At the time of the mass shooting, all agencies had to go through EMO to request an alert, which the provincial agency would then issue. The inquiry heard this week that the RCMP and regional police forces in Halifax and Cape Breton had been offered direct access to the alert system in 2016 and 2017, but declined.

Who ultimately should send these alerts and when? British Columbia’s severe weather and Nova Scotia’s mass shooting are two examples of lacking organizational preparedness. But it is this part from the CBC article I linked to earlier that stands out about my original problem with alert fatigue:

He said this was a devastating lesson to learn after the 2011 Norway shooting, where dozens of teens who were killed by a gunman on a remote island were given away by the alert sounds on their phones.

Australia and other countries have systems that don’t override user settings, Hallowes said, but Canada does not. Currently he said someone hiding from a shooter in Canada would have to turn off their phone completely and give up the ability to call for help to ensure their location wasn’t revealed.

Should users be allowed to override settings? The 2011 Norway attacks were an extreme example, but of course it cannot be ignored that the alarms emanating from the victims’ mobile devices made them targets. Is this a failure of the alert system itself or its use? Were the alerts too broad in geographic scope? Or would it be better for the alerts to have sounds controlled by the issuing authority?

And that is really just it: can you entrust users to ignore the sounds? I had the option to just sit in my apartment and endure the loud clanging coming from my apartment’s alarm, but its persistence and my ability to hear it led to me evacuating anyway. If someone sets their phone to silence such alarms, is it defeating its purpose?

In my world of cyber security, it is this sort of problem I fear. When Target was breached in 2013, there were many indications that a problem existed, but nobody was answering the call.

At first, the malware went undetected, and it began compiling millions of records during peak business hours. This data was being readied to be transferred to the hackers’ location in Eastern Europe. But very soon, FireEye flagged the malware and issued an alert. Target’s security team in Bangalore noted the alert and notified the security center in Minneapolis. But the red light was ignored.

FireEye flagged as many as five different versions of the malware. The alerts even provided the addresses for the “staging ground” servers, and a gaffe by the hackers meant that the malware code contained usernames and passwords for these servers, meaning Target security could have logged on and seen the stolen data for themselves. Unfortunately, the alerts all went unheeded. Furthermore, given that several alerts were issued before any data were actually removed from the Target systems, FireEye’s automated malware deletion feature could have ended the assault without the need for any human action. However, the Target security team had turned that feature off, preferring a final manual overview of security decisions.

Trained cyber security personnel as well as an experienced security vendor did not respond to these alerts in a timely fashion. The alerts were seen, forwarded to the appropriate party, and then nothing happened until it was too late. This was alert fatigue at its finest and is now used as a case study by other cyber security teams.

My long-time boss very much likes to make the statement “let no incident go to waste”, but it’s still not a badge of honour to be made an example of.

I guess a more current matter would be the response to COVID-19. It’s still a pandemic and it’s still raging through many workplaces, homes, and events, but I feel as if the exhaustion around lockdowns and news about variants has similarities to the fears public officials have using public alerting systems. Are we just doomed to have failure in light of the information we are presented with?

At least I left my apartment, but I wish I didn’t hesitate and I also wish my cat would have cooperated.

I’ve been a resident of Metro Vancouver for most of my life and a resident of the city for two years. There are little things that are super apparent about you that tell me that you’re not from around here or spend little time in the city itself.

This is all tongue and cheek and should not be taken at all as serious.

Transit

You run for the train presently idling at the platform despite the fact that the trains run every two to five minutes.

This means one or more of the following:

• You rarely take transit despite living in the region
• You’re on the Millennium Line and it’s off-peak, a weekend, or a holiday
• You’re from out of town

Even though you do not need to run, I still root for you making it for the train.

Be sure to not run into someone as they get off the train. That isn’t necessary I can assure you.

Also the train going away from downtown may not be going to Surrey if that is where you need to go.

On top of that, don’t hold the doors. It’s a bad idea.

Clothing

This one is super tricky.

One story I have is my then-girlfriend was visiting me from Texas and was woefully unaware of the our January climate. From October to March, you’re better off wearing waterproof shoes and best have a jacket and umbrella. In her case, she wore some chucks and had a jacket that was perfect for a rainy spring day but not one in winter where it is barely above freezing.

It only snows maybe two or three days out of the year and most of the time the snow disappears by the end of the day and if not, the day after.

However, her situation is just a funny story.

It’s harder to spot this situation instead of seeing a random couple wandering down Burrard on a Wednesday summer afternoon wearing clothing you’d find best-suited in some gated community in Palm Springs. That ball cap for an American hotel chain that is well-weathered or even just something on your person donning has an American flag just makes quite apparent you’re a tourist.

Wear what is comfortable! Just let it be known that we probably will figure out that you’re not from around here sometimes.

Gastown

Everyone loves to rag on this one, but here’s my take.

If you’re taking photos of the steam clock at Water and Cambie, you are absolutely a tourist or at a minimum an Instagram influencer (or trying to be).

If you’re the local that complains about it and you don’t live near there, just avoid walking along Water street near Cambie on a the weekend or any nice day in the summer.

The clock is fine and if someone likes it despite being built in the late 1970s, that is totally okay too. If you cannot accept that, once again avoid Water and Cambie if you are able to.

Closing

I am sure I can come up with other things but these came to mind earlier today and I felt like dumping this post here.

Late last year, I tried playing the original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney trilogy for the first time ever. Within a week, I was hooked and was determined to play every single Ace Attorney game by the end of 2022.

As of today, I have completed the original trilogy, Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies, and the subject of this post, Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright. While, Dual Destinies is often lamented as the worst of the mainline games, it never left me as angry as the Layton/Wright did–hereby referred to as “PLvPW” moving forward.

This post is going to contain spoilers so be warned. Also preemptive content warning around some matters relevant to the story. Also enjoy the typos and linear inconsistencies.

This game should have been good

PLvPW is an interesting game as we’re taking the mechanics of the Layton series with using puzzles to investigate mysteries and merging them with the defence and logic approach with defending the accused from the Ace Attorney games. The thing that makes this even more interesting is that the logic approach has a slight twist: we’re dealing with witch trials.

Historically, witch trials were baseless in logic and instead rooted in everything from fear to economics. With the Salem witch trials in particular, 80% of the accused were women and many found themselves in the crosshairs of these trials due to petty disputes with neighbours or were behaving outside of the expectations of gender. Of those who were accused, 15% of them were imprisoned and around two-thirds of convicts found themselves executed with another 15% dying due to neglect.

The stakes are high enough that introducing the Ace Attorney world to the concept of a witch trial should be a slam dunk. Out goes the frustrations of expecting to be punished for perjury and inadequate evidence handling and in comes the reasonable frustrations of being made to counter the beliefs around witches. It isn’t really outlandish to have this plot considering your legal assistant, Maya Fey is herself a spirit medium and can channel the dead–this is also a point of frustration of which I’ll address later on.

With Layton, I’ll admit my ignorance: up until this point, I was familiar with the Tumblr memes about him and Luke, but overall I was out to lunch. However, he’s known for dealing with unusual mysteries and having learnt a little bit about the games since completing PLvPW, I feel that it works–sort of.

So we have witch trials, puzzle solving, confusion how we ended up in this situation, and a need to completely rethink our use of logic in solving the case. This should be a slam dunk right? I’m afraid not.

There is always something “wrong”

As I streamed my progress through PLvPW, there was something always unusual with the scenery I was observing. The city (named “Labyrinthia”) is walled off, there are slight anachronisms about the clothes and mechanics of the world we’re in, and the references to the city’s past are extremely cloudy.

We’re at least given the impression that time has passed because when Layton and Luke first meet Phoenix and Maya, they claim to have been bakers for the past five years and have no recollection of their past. And this is where I start to get really confused: if our AA dual are unaware of their pasts, why is it that our Layton counterparts are not too? Perhaps I missed this, but I felt like the reason why we were all here were due to one person.

And that one person is: Espella. She claims that she left her father who is known as “the Storyteller” due to vague circumstances with his behaviour and in turn the entire town have many suspicions about her. Her only confidant aside from her cat, Eve is also her aunt who is claimed to be her sole ally in all of Labyrinthia.

It has been supposedly years since Espella has found herself the subject of much ire by the city folk. This itself is weird because the Storyteller himself is apparently in control of the fate of every person residing within the city walls. And then it happens: Espella is accused of being the “Great Witch Bezella” because her father decreed in his most recent parade that this must occur.

How did we end up here?

I need to explain how we end up in this world because when I discuss the ending, you’ll understand where my discontent comes from.

The game opens up with an epic car chase scene where these “witches” are flying through the sky, chasing a vehicle resembling a Morris Oxford–no wonder it didn’t end well. Statues are coming alive and the witches are flying around effortlessly as the man driving attempts to protect Espella.

We’re then introduced to supportive characters from the Layton series who then segue to a scene introducing Professor Layton and his assistant, Luke. Coincidentally, they end up speaking about witch trials and the existence of witches, with Layton stating that they’re no more than mere fantasy as a thunderstorm rolls on.

Parallel to all of this, we’re then taken to a scene showing Maya and Phoenix on a flight approaching into London. Phoenix is here as part of an exchange trip for the Legal League of Attorneys–which is a weird name consider “attorney” is an American word–to observe and participate in the British court system.

We’re then taken back to Luke and Layton introduce the mechanics of puzzle solving, with its completion leading to Espella visiting their home. Through her accounts, we’re introduced to her protector (a detective) who she gives to Layton as instructed by him. At this point, he’s no longer important, but after a bit prelude, a witch breaks into Layton’s residence and Espella is kidnapped. Witches are real?

And now we spend the next bit meeting some Layton characters we’ll never see again, solve a few puzzles, and finally with one remaining puzzle, we come to find Espella and meet the witches. We’re given the trope of “this is bigger than you think” from the lead witch and with a diversion, Espella escapes on to a freighter moving by on the Thames.

Layton and Luke find this book that Espella had been running around with and upon reading the text, they find it starts to move and see themselves in it. They’re then thrusted in a forested scene and fade out. At which point, Espella finds herself party to a crime.

So naturally this is somehow becomes Phoenix’s problem and we have defend Espella from the accusations laid upon her. Her guardian, Darklaw informs him and Maya that she doesn’t see the need to defend her and that we should let the whims of the court decide her fate. This is an affront to our trusty lawyer of course and we proceed to do what he does best anyway. All the while, Espella is very different from before. Aside from her attire resembling that of a school uniform, her eyes and voice appear lifeless as if she was under the control of something greater than her.

The usual AA mechanics for how the court proceeds and flows exist here and upon victory, Espella is cleared and the real culprit is arrested. After being congratulated by Darklaw for a job well done, they depart but curiously the same book that Layton and Luke saw earlier was left behind.

Maya insists on reading the book and just like before, the same moving text appears but this time the image we saw before is replaced with them instead. At this point, they’re teleported into the book and the book lands to the ground.

Layton and Luke plus Maya and Phoenix have been sucked into another world.

This was a good approach to an isekai

The term “isekai” (異世界) means “other world” in Japanese and in my opinion, this is a good execution of the trope. A mysterious book and this blurring overlap between what seems to be our world and the realm of magic really do make for a good story. While I cannot comment on the Layton games, it’s at least to me plausible for Ace Attorney to have this situation because we’re constantly coming across Maya channeling her dead sister in the original trilogy.

Things are extremely curious once we find ourselves in Labyrinthia. We’re made to solve puzzles as somehow the entire city is into them and then eventually introduced to the the Storyteller through a parade. He’s writing and copies of his writings are being thrown out to the towns people. However, a curious individual steps out to the front: it’s Darklaw, the woman Maya and Phoenix had met earlier in London.

Why is she here? Is she the reason why we’re here? What is going on? What did that book actually do? Espella eventually rescues us because Layton opines against the writings of the divine texts of the Storyteller, raising the ire of the city folk and nearby guards. It is at this point she leads us to meeting her aunt and now we have Layton and Luke finally meeting Maya and Phoenix for the first time–except they’re both bakers.

We’re then introduced to more of the lore through Labyrinthia’s archives, leading to additional backstory. After we leave, it’s time to defend Espella in a witch trial.

The game goes to eleven out of ten as for the first time ever, we walk into a court room at the tail end of a prior trial, watching as someone convicted thrusted into a fire pit at full force–in all previous AA games, executions are implied but never shown.

It’s time to go to court, except with a twist.

The courtroom mechanics are awkwardly augmented

Typically in an AA game, we have evidence, profiles, and choices in order to provide our defence. However, we learn quickly that this is all useless as evidence and logic has to battle against conjecture and irrationality. Phoenix suddenly learns through his suggestion we examine fingerprints that the concept of modern forensics is as alien to the people we’re battling as computers would be to pre-common era mathematicians. This is exciting and should be again a slam dunk, right?

And it is at this point Layton introduces Phoenix to the book that brought us here in the first place: The Grand Grimoire. It’s a book which outlines the incantations witches can use alongside accompanying stones in order to cast magic. At no time can a witch other than Bezella make use of these words without the accompanying stone and to add to that, they are only able to have two of those stones on their staff at any given time.

The book is cool but is also a problem. It’s pivotal to the story of this game but the way the overall story is paced and how we’re to argue our cases, the logic and reason Phoenix still ends up using collides with the book’s purpose. We have to use the evidence we have and this magic book, but as the game progresses, the importance of this magic book becomes less so.

The importance of magic

And that is where things just get weird. What is this magic? Why is it that the Great Witch Bezella is seemingly capable of using magic but the rest of the witches are limited to one of two stones and their staff? This becomes clear as the story inches a long when the anachronisms we noticed earlier appear more and more.

As mentioned earlier, there are a lot of spoilers, but we eventually find ourselves having to defend Espella once again as she opts to lay claim to being the Great Witch despite the woman herself being a century old and she is merely 18. When she is found guilty, we’re treated a scene where Maya and Phoenix object and through some mishaps, Maya finds herself in the contraption, landing in the fire pit below.

Espella has escaped and Maya is dead? Well, no. Eventually we go to investigate what is below and we discover that the fire pit itself is merely an illusion. The contraption that the witches are put inside is essentially an elevator which passes safely through the flames to a tunnel below. It is unlikely that anyone who goes through here is dead at all and we eventually are led to a chase scene where Layton rescues Maya.

It was at this point I asked: is this something akin to Westworld, the Running Man, or better yet, The Truman Show? The latter of the three happens to be a favourite movie of mine as it centres around a single man unknowingly held captive to entertain the masses. He is kept with a confined space with artificial lighting and cameras in every single nook and cranny. The outcome of the movie is that he comes to discover the truth of the world he lives in is al a sham.

My thoughts were not baseless considering that in every single past Ace Attorney game I played, there was always a reason behind the unusual circumstances of whatever story faced. Ockham’s Razor is the antithesis of the AA universe and I found myself convinced that there was something sort of rational about everything going on.

There was no magic and I was also about to find out how on the nose my thoughts were.

The unravelling of the world

After meeting someone claiming to be the Great Witch with her unusual mansion built atop of ancient ruins, we find ourselves at the Great Witch Trial with Espella herself charged after she claimed to be the witch who killed her father earlier in the day. Phoenix once again has to defend her in court, but now faces Darklaw as the inquisitor (instead of prosecutor) for the trial as our previous foe, Barnham was accused of treason after the Storyteller’s death.

Parallel to this trial, Layton once and for all decides to visit the residence of the Storyteller himself. It is here that we come to discover a curious photograph.

And yeah. A photograph. This is a society that seems to straddle the line between medieval and renaissance and yet in his hand he’s holding a full colour print showing a young Espella holding hands with someone who resembles Darklaw, the woman presently tasked with convicting her of being a witch.

This world is not at all an isekai; it’s still made up however. After a battle with the Storyteller himself (oh what a surprise that he is not dead either), he relents after Layton points out what is happening and opts to accompany him and Luke to the trial.

Layton finally shows up just when Darklaw herself has been formally accused by Wright as the Great Witch. There’s no inquisitor to convict her so the Professor volunteers him and finally we get where the “versus” in the game’s title comes from. We get something akin to Edgeworth and Wright from game two’s final case where it’s now Layton in Miles’ role.

The truth is finally revealed: there was no Great Witch Bezella. It turns out that every year the Labyrithians would have a giant pyre in the square. During that time, it was revealed that a much younger Espella and Darklaw (who is revealed to be named “Eve”) were hanging out atop of the local bell tower. They decided to ring the bell against the wishes of their respective fathers (their fathers were friends and business partners), leading to a great catastrophe.

And why was the bell forbidden to be wrung? Because the whole concept of Labyrinthia was a research facility on some island, largely funded by the British government. Everyone had been contractually living on the island in a mind-altering drug programme which had been going on for over a decade. The sheer legal nonsense around this had me recalling my readings about the troubles with the Pitcairn Islands (content warning: sexual assault).

The ringing of the bell caused a side-effect due to the frequency emitted, causing everyone who was drugged to collapse and fall unconscious. This coinciding with the pyre led to the entire town being engulfed in flames and because of Espella’s father using a made up story to prevent her from messing with the bell in the first place, when she looked at the fire through the grates of the fence, she was led to believe that she herself was seeing the Great Witch and thought that it was all her fault.

Espella was so traumatized that her involvement in difficult situations (such as being in court) would lead to her mentally shutting down. Her trauma combined with herself being subject to the drugs led to believing that she was the great witch. Because of Eve’s involvement in all of this, she had to take on a special role in effectively playing a central role in building a whole world where nobody suffered in a great fire because she only dreamt it. It was all because her father couldn’t tell her the truth and instead of therapy, he’d just drug her and make a fucked up reality world for her to live in.

So how did this whole charade persist? Easy. Nobody had any recollection of their lives prior to being placed in this facility. The drugs were part of the water they drank so they constantly had a dose of whatever medication suppressed their past memories and additionally the writings on the paper were written with an ink which as it gassed out would convince someone of what was to happen. It was all brainwashing and it was claimed that everybody living on this island signed contracts that only Scientology could dream of legally enforcing.

As a consequence of this, it led to Eve’s father (who’s also the Storyteller’s business partner) to commit suicide midway through the game’s story. We were never given details about Eve being his daughter as we’re given the impression that his adoptive daughter was his only kin, but it speaks volumes to the impact and horror this island has made.

To make people “see” the magic, they were told that they could not see black. If you review all of the things you see in the game, there isn’t much of that. The writers decided to really lean into the idea of Vantablack paint, which at the time was rather controversial. Everything required to make things appear other worldly were merely painted in this paint and because people were convinced through this brainwashing medication that they couldn’t see anything painted with this colour, they would substitute it out of their sights.

So with one magic word said to everyone involved, Layton says “taelende” and those subject to the drug’s effects would see that they were not living in a world of magic but something akin to movie magic instead.

I was right.

This was not my problem The reveal at the end was admittedly in line with a lot of things I have seen so far in Ace Attorney. The intensity of the story had me thinking back to some emotions I had when finishing off the final story of the original trilogy.

But unlike that story which had me sobbing at the end, this one decided to make a hard left turn straight into a concrete wall, ruining everything it built up.

Legal ramifications are a weird area for Ace Attorney games, but you are able to roll along with the outcomes because it usually makes sense. However, I brought up the story of Pitcairn because the legal nonsense around that island was an actual think the UK government faced and I cannot think of any way an island in the middle of the ocean could past muster with anybody marginally capable of performing a legal review.

I cannot see how an island funded by the UK government with dubious contracts and outright brainwashing could go without any scrutiny in the House of Commons. MKUltra was highly controversial in the United States and it would equally be so in the UK–the parallels between this story and the real-life CIA one are rather staggering.

You’d think that with Espella aware of her father’s unethical behaviour that she’d not be pining for a return to normalcy in the relationship, but she does and why wouldn’t she? Having been sheltered on a remote island for so long, I guess you probably wouldn’t have developed that level of critical thinking that her father is actually a huge problem.

And of course, he reveals that he is dying! Of course he is! But then three sentences later, his research team has developed a new “wonder drug” and that he is going to take it after having surgery. Yep. No consequences. Happy family. Too bad about Eve’s dad, though.

Closing I’ve wanted to complete this rant for a month now. Having learnt about the development of this game and how it led to the problems around Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies (they were developed in parallel with PW’s creator, Shu Takumi on this game instead), I am still annoyed.

One of the things about Layton games I’ve learnt is that the happy ending is always the one the writers go for. However, that is not really the case in Ace Attorney.

After we finished game three of the original PW trilogy, we come to realise the impact the abuse one character faced at the hands of her mother will have lasting impacts as she becomes an adult. Espella herself was about the same age as Pearl when she started to be manipulated, but consequences be damned, we must be happy. I guess it’s obvious that Shu didn’t get his way on this outcome.

This game had fantastic story, probably one of the best soundtracks of any Ace Attorney game I’ve played thus far, and mechanics and concepts that were rather refreshing, but because of this desire to make everything seem “okay” as we depart the island, I’m not left feeling anything like that at all.

At least we got an Edgeworth cameo at the end.