First off let me make it clear that Im a huge Ace Attorney fan. The games are all very dear to me and the first three are in my opinion especially spectacular. This anime covers the events of the first two games. So first lets talk presentation. I quite like the background music its pretty fitting and the main theme is super catchy. Some of the court themes are a little underwhelming but overall Id say the music does its job pretty well. Both the OPs and one of the EDs are very idoly if you like idol music youll probably like them. If you dont then you probably wont. The other ED is a in my opinion very nice pop ballad. Cool. So the character design. I actually think the characters generally look pretty visually appealing. They all look pretty similar if not identical to how they look in the games. Well when theyre not moving. Unfortunately the animation is not so good. The characters are nearly always horribly off model. Not in a good KonoSuba way in a this anime was far too rushed and lacking a decent budget kind of way. The animations arent nice looking or interesting theyre just dull and bad. Also side note the background characters faces in this show look hideous. I get that theyre going to look as good as the foreground characters that would be pointless but they just look appalling in this sometimes even to the point of being distracting. When the faces in your show look distractingly bad thats when theres a problem. There are also some strange changes to the story. I should note first though that there were always going to have to be some changes when adapting this series to anime. I understand this. Some changes were actually really good. Having screens in court to replace the games UI works really well. That was a good change. On the other hand sometimes certain characters were replaced with other ones for no reason whatsoever. It doesnt improve the show in any way and just serves to confuse fans of the games. Its not like it ruined the show or anything it just seemed super weird and unnecessary. Oh well. But now I want to talk about what I believe to be the real problem with this anime is. The reason fans of the games and newcomers alike found it to be pretty meh. These games just dont work very well in a noninteractive medium. The whole joy of the Ace Attorney series comes from that aha moment when you finally find a lie in a witnesss testimony when you discover a damning piece of evidence and when you nail a killer. The whole satisfaction of these moments is YOU working it out and that just doesnt really work as an anime. Sure it can still be interesting to find out who did it and how in the anime but the real satisfaction the thing that made the series as successful as it is comes from the interactivity of the game medium. So I think this anime wasnt awful. It had many enjoyable moments and there are aspects that I really do like about it. But in somes ways it never could have lived up the the heights of the games for me and I think for many others too. It can be an interesting companion to the games and I enjoyed seeing the stories I loved animated on screen but as a stand alone series Im afraid that this anime was in my opinion a failure. Nevertheless I look forward to the next season. Maybe the animation will be better. I hope so.
60 /100
60 out of 62 users liked this review