Review: Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy Is a Great Port

Seven years since the release of Spirit of Justice and sixteen since Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, we finally have a comprehensive compilation of the final three games in the Ace Attorney series. While the ports do justice to the original releases—even enhancing them—the fact that they easily allow you to play the games back to back highlights the existing issues with these games.

For reference, this review’s score will focus on the experience of playing the games as ports. However, it is almost impossible to play it and not notice the dips in quality. I also had the brilliant idea of purchasing the original trilogy and The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles for the Switch, since they were on sale. Replaying a bit of those ones before continuing Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy was not fantastic. Like I said earlier, playing all of these games without years in between make it hard to ignore all the little issues that pile up.

To start with, let’s talk about how Capcom ported these games. Each individual game looks and feels really good! As we saw with Ghost Trick, Capcom has a stellar track record when it comes to porting games originally on the DS onto a single-screen device. If you didn’t play these games when they were on the Nintendo DS or 3DS, it might be hard to believe that you originally had two screens to work with.

The sprites look really good with the exception of Dual Destinies; characters who were in the original 2D games appeared as 3D models for the first time and not everyone transitioned smoothly. Klavier, for example, lacks a lot of the charm from his 2D art. It wasn’t so noticeable on the 3DS, but it’s very obvious on the Switch. Trucy also looks weirder the more times I see her. She lacks the playful teenage girl vibe she had as a 2D sprites. Instead, she seems a lot older, which is at odds with her animations and dialogue. The sprites greatly improve in Spirit of Justice though, which is hardly a surprise. Capcom perfected the looks of 3D sprites in The Great Ace Attorney, which originally came out between Dual Destinies and Spirit of Justice.

There are no issues at all in terms of performance. I didn’t see any significant lag that wasn’t in the game proper; the 3D animations in Apollo Justice seem really slow but they were slow in the original game too. When I played for the preview, I played it while watching an eSports tournament so I turned my Switch on and off in five-minute intervals. This lead to the audio bugging out, which I easily fixed by simply restarting the game. Well, I was watching an eSports tournament again this time and there weren’t any issues with the audio. So I guess the first time I ran into problems was a fluke. Since I heard that the PC version of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles had some issues, I can’t say for sure how it runs on other platforms. But in terms of the Switch, it plays very smoothly.

Another thing I noticed is that the game’s localization is a lot easier to read. I vividly remember the fifth game in particular having multiple typos and grammatical errors on the 3DS, but they’re not present anymore in this trilogy. It is a little bit jarring to go from Apollo Justice to Dual Destinies though. This is because the margin for the text is different. It doesn’t sound like a big deal on paper but after playing like four games with the text boxes looking the same, it takes a bit of time to adjust to the new ones. This was likely a change that occurred on the 3DS so I highly doubt that the Capcom could change it for the port even if it wanted to.

The main issue with Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy is that it allows you to play the games back to back straight away. You no longer need to wait literal years between each entry. This means that you’ll likely remember character and plot details a lot clearer, which makes it easier to notice when the writing doesn’t go back to them later. A joke I saw online is that this is the Apollo Justice trilogy because Apollo has three different backstories in these games. It’s not wrong… The fourth game sets up enough mysteries about Apollo’s background and past, but the latter games don’t really pick up these threads.

Changes to the legal world that occur in the fourth game also do not come back in a meaningful way. We get little follow-up on Klavier after the fourth game, whereas Blackquill returns for quite some time in the sixth. The Mood Matrix and the Divination Seance feel less like evolutions of Apollo’s Perceive. Instead, they seem more like elements that would occur in a spinoff a la Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. Maybe the 3DS games were supposed to be a fresh start for players who might not have had access to the fourth game or the original trilogy. In any case, it certainly is a lot easier to think of Dual Destinies and Spirit of Justice as their own little duology rather than part of an Apollo trilogy.

Fans of the fourth to sixth Ace Attorney games will be delighted to experience these games again, I’m sure. I was certainly excited to see characters like Klavier and Rayfa once more, and in HD too! It’s also a good introduction for those who never played them before on the 3DS. Now that I’m done playing through this trilogy though, I think I’ll go back and revisit the Phoenix Wright games and The Great Ace Attorney.

Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy will come out on January 25, 2024 for the PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and Windows PC. Nintendo Switch version reviewed.