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Ace Attorney 2 / The First Tree
Not going deep on either of these (Sarah from the future here and as it turns out I absolutely went deep on one of these) BUT:
I finished Ace Attorney - Justice for All today, which is great because I started it a month and a half ago, then stopped for a LONG time because it was literally what I was in the middle of playing when I got the Kendra news, and after that I stopped consuming media for BASICALLY WEEKS, and even beyond that it just felt very weird to go back to "one minute I was on this screen and the next minute..." territory.
But I did eventually go back! And it was weird! But I handled it! Anyway, Complicated Emotions aside I do really enjoy these games but I think I probably need to start breaking them up even further because the video game logic of it all REALLY starts to wear on me over the course of an installment. The plan was already to split the trilogy up (so I played Ace Attorney, then switched to Zelda with Oracle of Seasons, then back to AA with Justice for All, and now on to Oracle of Ages) but I think for Trials and Tribulations I'll take it one step further and play something different after every case. The story stuff in all these games is fucking GREAT (the killer reveal in the final JfA case was genuinely startling, and I loved Franziska becoming...if not an ally, then at least The Evil You Know, and of COURSE I loved the Edgeworth saga) but jesus christ it gets SO FUCKING OLD having to go "okay let me present twenty different things to this witness just in case one of them triggers something" or "let me press on every single statement this witness makes" (which!!!!!! by the end of the last case!!!!!!!! WAS NOT ENOUGH!!!!!!!!!!! YOU HAD TO PRESS ON EVERY SINGLE STATEMENT AND THEN PRESS ON EVERY SINGLE STATEMENT AGAIN!!!!!! FUCK OFF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), and having to do that OVER and OVER and OVER again...woof.
Also so much for my ACAB dream of "Edgeworth stops being a prosecutor and comes to work with Phoenix and Gumshoe follows him," WE ALMOST HAD IT, although I guess now that Edgeworth and Phoenix are both like "the most important thing is not winning the case but making sure that the ACTUAL murderer is found guilty" they won't be back to facing off in court all the time in AA3, and presumably the dude with the Cyclops shutter shades is the new featured prosecutor and Edgeworth will be doing Edgeworth shit. BUT WHO'S TO SAY!!!!!!!!! Not me until I have sufficiently recovered from how fucking sick I got of trying to guess what this game wanted from me, at least recovered enough that I can properly bask in all the EMOTIONAL CONTENT.
-------
SPEAKING OF BEING FUCKING SICK OF GUESSING WHAT A GAME WANTS!!!!!!!!!!! God. Listen, I criticize this game with the full understanding that it was almost entirely made by ONE DUDE, and that it is about his feelings about his DEAD DAD, so I don't want to be TOO harsh but also this dude has almost certainly made six figures off this game, he's fine, I can say his game was bad in this Dreamwidth entry that at most one person will read.
The First Tree calls itself an "exploration game" and that's its first problem. At a skeletal level, the way this game FUNCTIONS is by having you move from point A to point B, triggering voiceover narration as you go. HOWEVER, this dude wanted to design big environments, so he did. And he wanted the player to explore them, so in two levels there are platforming and/or "find the widget" tasks that feel completely out of place, and in every level there are a) occasional columns of light off the beaten path that will trigger additional voiceovers or b) frequent balls of light that you can collect towards a running tally that has literally no bearing on anything. You can't spend them and on Switch at least you aren't rewarded for collecting them.
You play as a fox running around finding [SPOILER] her dead children and also a lot of mementos from the narrator's childhood. The premise is that the narrator, a human man whose father has just died, is telling his wife about a dream he had about this fox searching for her children and how it was all tied up with his feelings about his dad.
There's no map, and the light columns are hard to lose in the trees, and a lot of levels don't have great line of sight, and this dude has really not built up those video game designed and/or Disney park architect skills of designing the level in a way that steers the player in an intended direction. And the game's "please explore all around this level" aspirations directly conflict with its "go to this spot to trigger this next voiceover" mechanics. Here's how that played out for me:
Level 1: Thought that because of the obviously deliberate open level design and lack of a clear path, I was supposed to explore and just see what the land had to offer me. Realized I was on a mountainside, tried to go to the top. Hit an invisible wall after climbing for a LONG time, so I had to turn around and go back down. The spot where I came down happened to be far enough along the intended path that I triggered a voiceover story beat that was supposed to come after at least one other beat that I'd missed because I hadn't found the path to follow it. [Basically this man's narration told me my fox child was dead before I'd ever found a dead fox child.] I ended up restarting the level so I could take a more linear approach.
I had to restart this level because I accidentally strayed very far from the intended path.
Level 2: Something of a path here, but also it starts to become apparent that I'm not going to be willing to wander aimlessly enough to find all the columns of light. Getting out of this level requires collecting and holding onto three groups of butterflies so you can jump over a huge obstacle. To get to the obstacle, you have to cross a sizable field. No one in their right mind would just HAPPEN to do this with three groups of butterflies on them, so you have to cross the field, get told you need the butterflies, cross BACK, collect the butterflies, then cross again. Once you get over the obstacle you end up in a big field with columns of steam in the distance; you walk forever to get to these and at the exact moment your curiosity is about to be satisfied the level ends. It was somewhere during this level that I started checking reviews to see if I even wanted to finish this game. One review on Metacritic was like "it's a frustrating game but the ending is worth it" so I soldiered on.
I needed Google to get through this level.
Level 3: Here is where I truly said FUCK IT, I see the collectable balls of light on the little trail to my right, but I do not CARE, I am proceeding straight ahead along the main path and whatever extra voiceovers I miss, I miss. Except in this level the only way to get out is to find some BIG ROCKS which are located on opposite ends of the level, and you have to do some badly explained precision jumping on them. This was my punishment for deciding not to explore. Once I activated the rocks and a barrier disappeared, I found another dead fox child, along with the wolf (??) that killed it, and then I had to trot along for another for fucking ever before the level was over.
I needed Google to get through this level.
Level 4: Okay so in this level you just start out in this VAST empty space with nothing visible in any direction except for stars. And I look around and I don't see anything that looks like a landmark, but some of the stars are significantly bigger and brighter than the others, so I head for one of those. And I run for a LONG fucking time and eventually I just hit an invisible wall, BECAUSE THE ONE FUCKING THING THAT STOOD OUT WAS NOT THE THING I WAS SUPPOSED TO HEAD FOR? I turn around and assess again and there's a glowing blue spot. How did I miss that before? It's so fucking far away. I restart the level rather than cover that much ground, I've gone way too far out of the way to just double back.
I restart and look for the glowing blue thing and I don't see it. This is because it appears ON A DELAY. I charitably estimated this at maybe ten seconds in my head, but I just watched a YouTube video where it's fully FORTY SECONDS from the time this girl spawns in the level to when the landmark appears? I still don't think it was THAT long for me but the point stands: How fucking long was I supposed to stand still and WAIT FOR A DESTINATION TO BE SHOWN TO ME rather than assuming the ONE THING I COULD SEE was my destination?
After Harry Potter's patronus leads me through this starry void for a while I eventually end up back in a forest, and come across a clearing full of deer just as the narrator is saying something about finding family? So I'm sitting here like oh this must be coming up on the end of the game, I am going to find my one surviving fox kit here living among all these deer and the deer are my family now. That's nice. NOPE I'm supposed to keep on running forever.
I had to restart this level because I accidentally strayed very far from the intended path.
Level 5: Right off the bat I fuck up a jump and fall off a fucking cliff into a ravine so I'm like I guess I just need to follow this ravine. I ran the length of that ravine and then did what seemed to me like the most obvious path through the level (there were buildings and stuff so it certainly seemed like that was the part of the level I was supposed to be drawn to), ran up what I thought was a mountain trail, got stuck after getting super high up, and then realized I had to double back along a canyon type thing that hadn't been visible from a lot of earlier angles in order to get to a giant fucking tree I assumed was the titular First. Now, I want to point out that at this point in the game my impression is that the game will AUTOMATICALLY trigger the main narrative voiceovers but that I can go out of my way to trigger columns of light to get extra memories and whatnot. But apparently this was extremely wrong because as I'm running along that canyon or whatever it was, this man starts talking about how he'll never get to repair his relationship with his dad because his dad is dead, and I'm like listen I know I've been a little too frustrated to FULLY pay attention to your daddy issues but I do feel like I missed at least four story beats in there.
Anyway I get to the first tree, I find my final dead fox kit, I am fed up as SHIT especially because the game didn't even let me press a button to MOURN this one, and even with the tree right in front of me I end up taking wrong paths because the game will no longer allow you to jump and the tree has huge fuckoff roots and I tried to follow along the side of one but it just led to a cliff so I had to go back along it and go up the OTHER side of it to finally find a root I could climb onto without having to jump up. Then the game slows you down to the point that I was like am I just about to drop dead???? Is that how this game ends?????
I get up to the tree and the tree is like WHAT WOULD YOU SAY TO YOUR DEAD FOX CHILDREN IF YOU COULD TELL THEM SOMETHING and I wanted to type FUCK THIS GAME but I was actually very sad every time this game made me come across a baby fox corpse so I typed I LOVE YOU.
I did not need Google or a restart for this level but I did accidentally wander a significant distance off the intended path and apparently missed several key story beats.
Level 6: No more fox. You're the dude now. He and his wife are at his dead dad's house to clear it out. You wake up in the middle of the night. You can press A to open doors but you can't seem to do anything else, not that there's any visual indication on screen about what you can and can't interact with so for all I know maybe you can cook breakfast. I wander outside. There's a driveway and a road. I follow that. There's a gate with a lock. I keep trying to interact with the lock but I can't, so I figure this must not be where I'm supposed to go. I wander around the back of the house and find an old tent and some chairs around what used to be a campfire. I look inside the tent and there's nothing of particular interest. I can't sit in the chairs. I continue to wander the property in search of something glowing or lit up or that looks like I can do something interesting with it. Nothing. I go back into the house and re-check every room. Nothing. I wander the property again. No idea. I hit up Google. I have to stand in front of the tent and press A to crawl in. Fuck this game.
Ultimately this triggers a fantasy sequence where you walk through fields and eventually come across a tree with a carving in it, where the fox's last words to her children are repeated as your dead dad's last words to you. I said I LOVE YOU so it's a nice message. I really wish I had said FUCK THIS GAME it would have made for a hell of a screenshot.
For the third time in six levels, I needed Google to get through this.
I have said on Twitter before that there's a funny little trend in small puzzle games to add some weird fraught backstory - Unravel 2 can't be about two little yarn people who've been shipwrecked, it has to also be about abused orphans, My Brother Rabbit can't be about wandering around as a rabbit clicking on shit, it has to also be about a little girl who's sick and in the hospital and the rabbit stuff is her brother's fairy tale imagining of how he'd rescue her.
This game is somehow the opposite? Like this game started with "my dad died shortly before I had my first child and I want to explore that" and somehow the choice of delivery mechanic was...a dude talking about his dead dad as the soundtrack to a fox running around doing nothing.
AN ABSOLUTELY MISERABLE TIME. SOME PEOPLE HAVE REALLY EMOTIONALLY CONNECTED WITH IT BUT I SIMPLY COULD NOT. INFURIATING STUFF.
I finished Ace Attorney - Justice for All today, which is great because I started it a month and a half ago, then stopped for a LONG time because it was literally what I was in the middle of playing when I got the Kendra news, and after that I stopped consuming media for BASICALLY WEEKS, and even beyond that it just felt very weird to go back to "one minute I was on this screen and the next minute..." territory.
But I did eventually go back! And it was weird! But I handled it! Anyway, Complicated Emotions aside I do really enjoy these games but I think I probably need to start breaking them up even further because the video game logic of it all REALLY starts to wear on me over the course of an installment. The plan was already to split the trilogy up (so I played Ace Attorney, then switched to Zelda with Oracle of Seasons, then back to AA with Justice for All, and now on to Oracle of Ages) but I think for Trials and Tribulations I'll take it one step further and play something different after every case. The story stuff in all these games is fucking GREAT (the killer reveal in the final JfA case was genuinely startling, and I loved Franziska becoming...if not an ally, then at least The Evil You Know, and of COURSE I loved the Edgeworth saga) but jesus christ it gets SO FUCKING OLD having to go "okay let me present twenty different things to this witness just in case one of them triggers something" or "let me press on every single statement this witness makes" (which!!!!!! by the end of the last case!!!!!!!! WAS NOT ENOUGH!!!!!!!!!!! YOU HAD TO PRESS ON EVERY SINGLE STATEMENT AND THEN PRESS ON EVERY SINGLE STATEMENT AGAIN!!!!!! FUCK OFF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), and having to do that OVER and OVER and OVER again...woof.
Also so much for my ACAB dream of "Edgeworth stops being a prosecutor and comes to work with Phoenix and Gumshoe follows him," WE ALMOST HAD IT, although I guess now that Edgeworth and Phoenix are both like "the most important thing is not winning the case but making sure that the ACTUAL murderer is found guilty" they won't be back to facing off in court all the time in AA3, and presumably the dude with the Cyclops shutter shades is the new featured prosecutor and Edgeworth will be doing Edgeworth shit. BUT WHO'S TO SAY!!!!!!!!! Not me until I have sufficiently recovered from how fucking sick I got of trying to guess what this game wanted from me, at least recovered enough that I can properly bask in all the EMOTIONAL CONTENT.
-------
SPEAKING OF BEING FUCKING SICK OF GUESSING WHAT A GAME WANTS!!!!!!!!!!! God. Listen, I criticize this game with the full understanding that it was almost entirely made by ONE DUDE, and that it is about his feelings about his DEAD DAD, so I don't want to be TOO harsh but also this dude has almost certainly made six figures off this game, he's fine, I can say his game was bad in this Dreamwidth entry that at most one person will read.
The First Tree calls itself an "exploration game" and that's its first problem. At a skeletal level, the way this game FUNCTIONS is by having you move from point A to point B, triggering voiceover narration as you go. HOWEVER, this dude wanted to design big environments, so he did. And he wanted the player to explore them, so in two levels there are platforming and/or "find the widget" tasks that feel completely out of place, and in every level there are a) occasional columns of light off the beaten path that will trigger additional voiceovers or b) frequent balls of light that you can collect towards a running tally that has literally no bearing on anything. You can't spend them and on Switch at least you aren't rewarded for collecting them.
You play as a fox running around finding [SPOILER] her dead children and also a lot of mementos from the narrator's childhood. The premise is that the narrator, a human man whose father has just died, is telling his wife about a dream he had about this fox searching for her children and how it was all tied up with his feelings about his dad.
There's no map, and the light columns are hard to lose in the trees, and a lot of levels don't have great line of sight, and this dude has really not built up those video game designed and/or Disney park architect skills of designing the level in a way that steers the player in an intended direction. And the game's "please explore all around this level" aspirations directly conflict with its "go to this spot to trigger this next voiceover" mechanics. Here's how that played out for me:
Level 1: Thought that because of the obviously deliberate open level design and lack of a clear path, I was supposed to explore and just see what the land had to offer me. Realized I was on a mountainside, tried to go to the top. Hit an invisible wall after climbing for a LONG time, so I had to turn around and go back down. The spot where I came down happened to be far enough along the intended path that I triggered a voiceover story beat that was supposed to come after at least one other beat that I'd missed because I hadn't found the path to follow it. [Basically this man's narration told me my fox child was dead before I'd ever found a dead fox child.] I ended up restarting the level so I could take a more linear approach.
I had to restart this level because I accidentally strayed very far from the intended path.
Level 2: Something of a path here, but also it starts to become apparent that I'm not going to be willing to wander aimlessly enough to find all the columns of light. Getting out of this level requires collecting and holding onto three groups of butterflies so you can jump over a huge obstacle. To get to the obstacle, you have to cross a sizable field. No one in their right mind would just HAPPEN to do this with three groups of butterflies on them, so you have to cross the field, get told you need the butterflies, cross BACK, collect the butterflies, then cross again. Once you get over the obstacle you end up in a big field with columns of steam in the distance; you walk forever to get to these and at the exact moment your curiosity is about to be satisfied the level ends. It was somewhere during this level that I started checking reviews to see if I even wanted to finish this game. One review on Metacritic was like "it's a frustrating game but the ending is worth it" so I soldiered on.
I needed Google to get through this level.
Level 3: Here is where I truly said FUCK IT, I see the collectable balls of light on the little trail to my right, but I do not CARE, I am proceeding straight ahead along the main path and whatever extra voiceovers I miss, I miss. Except in this level the only way to get out is to find some BIG ROCKS which are located on opposite ends of the level, and you have to do some badly explained precision jumping on them. This was my punishment for deciding not to explore. Once I activated the rocks and a barrier disappeared, I found another dead fox child, along with the wolf (??) that killed it, and then I had to trot along for another for fucking ever before the level was over.
I needed Google to get through this level.
Level 4: Okay so in this level you just start out in this VAST empty space with nothing visible in any direction except for stars. And I look around and I don't see anything that looks like a landmark, but some of the stars are significantly bigger and brighter than the others, so I head for one of those. And I run for a LONG fucking time and eventually I just hit an invisible wall, BECAUSE THE ONE FUCKING THING THAT STOOD OUT WAS NOT THE THING I WAS SUPPOSED TO HEAD FOR? I turn around and assess again and there's a glowing blue spot. How did I miss that before? It's so fucking far away. I restart the level rather than cover that much ground, I've gone way too far out of the way to just double back.
I restart and look for the glowing blue thing and I don't see it. This is because it appears ON A DELAY. I charitably estimated this at maybe ten seconds in my head, but I just watched a YouTube video where it's fully FORTY SECONDS from the time this girl spawns in the level to when the landmark appears? I still don't think it was THAT long for me but the point stands: How fucking long was I supposed to stand still and WAIT FOR A DESTINATION TO BE SHOWN TO ME rather than assuming the ONE THING I COULD SEE was my destination?
After Harry Potter's patronus leads me through this starry void for a while I eventually end up back in a forest, and come across a clearing full of deer just as the narrator is saying something about finding family? So I'm sitting here like oh this must be coming up on the end of the game, I am going to find my one surviving fox kit here living among all these deer and the deer are my family now. That's nice. NOPE I'm supposed to keep on running forever.
I had to restart this level because I accidentally strayed very far from the intended path.
Level 5: Right off the bat I fuck up a jump and fall off a fucking cliff into a ravine so I'm like I guess I just need to follow this ravine. I ran the length of that ravine and then did what seemed to me like the most obvious path through the level (there were buildings and stuff so it certainly seemed like that was the part of the level I was supposed to be drawn to), ran up what I thought was a mountain trail, got stuck after getting super high up, and then realized I had to double back along a canyon type thing that hadn't been visible from a lot of earlier angles in order to get to a giant fucking tree I assumed was the titular First. Now, I want to point out that at this point in the game my impression is that the game will AUTOMATICALLY trigger the main narrative voiceovers but that I can go out of my way to trigger columns of light to get extra memories and whatnot. But apparently this was extremely wrong because as I'm running along that canyon or whatever it was, this man starts talking about how he'll never get to repair his relationship with his dad because his dad is dead, and I'm like listen I know I've been a little too frustrated to FULLY pay attention to your daddy issues but I do feel like I missed at least four story beats in there.
Anyway I get to the first tree, I find my final dead fox kit, I am fed up as SHIT especially because the game didn't even let me press a button to MOURN this one, and even with the tree right in front of me I end up taking wrong paths because the game will no longer allow you to jump and the tree has huge fuckoff roots and I tried to follow along the side of one but it just led to a cliff so I had to go back along it and go up the OTHER side of it to finally find a root I could climb onto without having to jump up. Then the game slows you down to the point that I was like am I just about to drop dead???? Is that how this game ends?????
I get up to the tree and the tree is like WHAT WOULD YOU SAY TO YOUR DEAD FOX CHILDREN IF YOU COULD TELL THEM SOMETHING and I wanted to type FUCK THIS GAME but I was actually very sad every time this game made me come across a baby fox corpse so I typed I LOVE YOU.
I did not need Google or a restart for this level but I did accidentally wander a significant distance off the intended path and apparently missed several key story beats.
Level 6: No more fox. You're the dude now. He and his wife are at his dead dad's house to clear it out. You wake up in the middle of the night. You can press A to open doors but you can't seem to do anything else, not that there's any visual indication on screen about what you can and can't interact with so for all I know maybe you can cook breakfast. I wander outside. There's a driveway and a road. I follow that. There's a gate with a lock. I keep trying to interact with the lock but I can't, so I figure this must not be where I'm supposed to go. I wander around the back of the house and find an old tent and some chairs around what used to be a campfire. I look inside the tent and there's nothing of particular interest. I can't sit in the chairs. I continue to wander the property in search of something glowing or lit up or that looks like I can do something interesting with it. Nothing. I go back into the house and re-check every room. Nothing. I wander the property again. No idea. I hit up Google. I have to stand in front of the tent and press A to crawl in. Fuck this game.
Ultimately this triggers a fantasy sequence where you walk through fields and eventually come across a tree with a carving in it, where the fox's last words to her children are repeated as your dead dad's last words to you. I said I LOVE YOU so it's a nice message. I really wish I had said FUCK THIS GAME it would have made for a hell of a screenshot.
For the third time in six levels, I needed Google to get through this.
I have said on Twitter before that there's a funny little trend in small puzzle games to add some weird fraught backstory - Unravel 2 can't be about two little yarn people who've been shipwrecked, it has to also be about abused orphans, My Brother Rabbit can't be about wandering around as a rabbit clicking on shit, it has to also be about a little girl who's sick and in the hospital and the rabbit stuff is her brother's fairy tale imagining of how he'd rescue her.
This game is somehow the opposite? Like this game started with "my dad died shortly before I had my first child and I want to explore that" and somehow the choice of delivery mechanic was...a dude talking about his dead dad as the soundtrack to a fox running around doing nothing.
AN ABSOLUTELY MISERABLE TIME. SOME PEOPLE HAVE REALLY EMOTIONALLY CONNECTED WITH IT BUT I SIMPLY COULD NOT. INFURIATING STUFF.