I recently read Aviary Attorney (VNDB|Steam), “the hottest bird lawyering game to come out of 1840s France”, and really enjoyed it. While some parts of it lack technical polish, it has a surprisingly fun and original story for something I had just expected to be a silly parody. And it also makes some pretty interesting changes to the formula of the Ace Attorney games it models itself after. I thought it could be fun to discuss a few of the differences in this post, which will contain spoilers for Aviary Attorney as well as some vague ones about the first two Ace Attorney games.

Despite the fact that Phoenix Wright rarely makes a decision without the input of the player, the Ace Attorney games are actually pretty linear. Sometimes there might be a few segments of investigations that can be done out of order, but there’s always only one way to solve the case and win the trial, and too many mistakes in the courtroom will result in a quick game over after Wright gets called an idiot by the judge and the prosecutor. This can get really frustrating sometimes if you’ve figured out one part of the solution, but you don’t know what statements to press or which evidence to present to express that thought process yet. Aviary Attorney instead provides a lot more freedom during the investigation section, often presenting you with several different locations to choose from and less of a direct path. And while you’ll still need some specific evidence to win trials, it’s possible to actually miss collecting that evidence and lose, and have the story still progress in a different way than it would have if you had won. The difficulty of managing a branching plotline like this can sometimes mean that the story gets less complex and some versions of it make more sense than others. But I think players can also feel much more immersed when they’re actually presented with significant choices, and then have to deal with the consequences of the choices, instead of being given an illusory choice and then scolded for choosing wrong.

One thing I really appreciated in Aviary Attorney was that aside from starring talking birds, I think it actually took a bit more of a realistic approach to depicting a lawyer’s job. Phoenix Wright’s clients are almost always innocent—the one time I know of that one was clearly guilty, he was blackmailed into defending him. The prosecutors are either portrayed as morally bankrupt villains who don’t care about sending innocent people to prison, or get a bit of character development and then start trying to subtly help Wright win. In real life, I’m pretty sure plenty of perfectly nice and moral lawyers knowingly defend the guilty and prosecute the innocent, because it’s important to make the best argument on both sides to have a fair trial. Ace Attorney shies away from depicting this complexity, but in one of the endings of Aviary Attorney, Falcon can agree to defend the king against completely fair charges and still do his best—or not, I guess, since you could take advantage of that aforementioned freedom the game gives you and totally blow the trial on purpose instead.

One final difference I noted between Ace Attorney and Aviary Attorney was in their pacing. In Ace Attorney, some of the less important trials can really seem to drag on, when you’re spending two or three in-game days trying to convince annoying witnesses you’ll never see again to admit to things you don’t really care about. Aviary Attorney instead powers through two pretty quick trials that introduce important characters and themes before getting right into one big, important one, and never seems like the developers are just trying to fill time. But on the other hand, once I got to that big trial in which I could defend Cocorico, I kind of felt like I had just met the guy—it didn’t have the emotional impact it could have if I had gotten to know him more beforehand. Defending Edgeworth at the end of the first Ace Attorney game felt a lot more meaningful because of how much time I had spent with him in those “filler” cases, even if they sometimes seemed like they were way too long. So I’m not sure if either game’s approach to pacing was better—they both have their pros and cons, and I can see how people could prefer either one depending on their preferences.

Overall, it was really interesting to see how Aviary Attorney modified the formula of Ace Attorney, and it really made me think about what the integration of gameplay can do for story when it’s handled in different ways. I’d love to read more visual novels that play with mysteries and court cases in the future.