Phoenix Wright is a remarkable game where a few nagging annoyances keep it out of rare-air classic status.
As I said the game is very much a classic adventure games. The gameplay consists of a few basic things. Courtroom drama where you have to cross examine witnesses looking for contradictions in the testimony versus what's in evidence. Another major element consists of searching for evidence which utilizes the touch screen and stylus in a traditional hot-spot hunt. And reading what other people have to say and engaging in conversation with them. Each of these modes work together in concert to move the various shorts along but each could have been done better. In both the dialogue trees there is very little penalty for failure--you do get a set number of objectionsbut it's more than forgiving enough. THe conversation otherwise proceeds on rails unlike something like Indigo Prophecy where if you head the wrong way in the conversations the game's narrative will alter themselves a bit. Further the hotspot hunting and knowing where to go to talk to people can get a tad bit on the tedious side. The two biggest problems arise in court--on a few instances I really had to just guess and hope I was right on where to raise objections. Sometimes stuff that seeemed obvious to me wasn't where the game intended for me to object. The real primary annyance in this game is that it really does a poor job of simulating the legal rules that any viewer of tv shows like Law and Order or The Practice would be familiar with. There are no rules of evidence, the defense has to create an alternate theory of the crime and convict someone else on the witness stand. This wouldn't even be noticable if the writing wasn't otherwise so good that it makes it stand out even more. Presentationally this game looks and sounds good enough for an adventure game on the DS. It doesn't use the stylus all that much and that's a bit dissappointing but otherwise this is a technically fine game for a port from the GBA especially. It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination but it's a really fun game.