After his journey abroad at the end of the Phoenix Wright trilogy, where he went off to try to discover other less mad legal systems, Miles Edgeworth's been given his own game, this time under the title Ace Attorney Investigations. This time, it's up to him to work his way to the truth by strutting around in a pink suit and jabbing an accusatory finger at anyone sporting less silly neckwear.

The slight change of title is justified, because it's not so much a straight Ace Attorney game as something of a very slightly different genre that tries to lie in the Ace Attorney mould. The whole thing feels like it's been simplified again after the Phoenix Wright trilogy added more ideas per game - most obviously, you can no longer present profiles, and the locked conversations are also gone, leaving you with just the investigation/questioning cycle. And that cycle has been sped up considerably - instead of rotating between various locations connected to the crime scene and the courtroom, you wander around between investigations and confrontations, and both of these phases are short enough to fit about two of each into every sub-chapter. The confrontations are the equivalent of the courtroom scenes, where you're given an Argument and have to press or present evidence from your inventory Court Record Organizer in your Rebuttal, and even though there's no bumbling buffoon of a judge to impress this time, you still have all the shouting of "Objection!" you could want, as it's become an unavoidable compulsion to them all by now. The evidence examination screen from the DS-exclusive case of the first game makes a reappearance, though it's not really used to as great an extent as it was then - to go along with it, there's another mode that's been added to the investigations, which is the Logic button at the top left. During some investigations, snippets you've discovered will be added to a bank, like a separate inventory, and once you've discovered enough of them, you then have to James Burke your way forward by making connections between the different facts that you've picked up.

And it all trundles along quite admirably - there is still a great satisfaction in picking the right piece of evidence, having the music stop and watching Edgeworth's self-satisfied finger-waggle as he prepares to reveal the crucial flaw in your opponent's logic. As the game doesn't take place in a court, you're up against various incidental characters and not one single prosecutor the whole time, but there is a recurring opponent in the form of a suspiciously lupine Interpol agent who by the looks of him is in the country on a transfer from Wankerstan. However, compared to some of the later cases in the Phoenix Wright games, it sometimes feels easier than it should be - for example, it's rare for the Logic bank to have more than about four pieces of information in it, making matching things up quite trivial. It doesn't really get harder even at the end (with the last case instead being expanded from the normal three chapters to about a squillion) and I found the points where I had to just use trial and error happened mostly in the third case. In other areas, the game is also softer in a good way - there are no situations in which you reach the end of a line and have to go around showing everything to everyone across the city to make somebody unrelated magically appear like before, and they take great care to drop sometimes slightly sledgehammer-shaped hints as to what would be useful to present to somebody to move the investigation forward.

Now, the Ace Attorney translations have always been haphazard - and I don't necessarily mean 'bad' by that, because great attention had always been paid to preserving the series' mood and references to pop culture throughout - but it's always had some truly baffling decisions, such as attempting to pretend that the game is set in America when it obviously isn't, and this game extends that by saying most other people are from countries that they blatantly aren't from. Take, for example, the case of Zinc LaBlanc, a rather large man in the second chapter who has sitar-based theme music, a blue and yellow headdress, and is apparently from a place called "North Europe". It's as if someone decided on people's new nationalities by just throwing darts over their shoulder into a world map at random. To take another example, wine is consistently referred to as "grape juice" - they're all small details, but they leap out at you, and it's really distracting having this kind of half-hearted wallpapering over things that anyone with a quarter of the deductive power needed to want to play the series can see through instantly.

Leaving those translation oddities aside and concentrating on the writing of the rest of it, it seems that the game is rather more serious than the previous ones. That's not to say it's lost its sense of humour - it's still more Inspector Gadget than Inspector Morse - but it's become more grounded in reality, at least. It's still manic and Japanese, but in a different way - you won't find any of the paranormal elements of the first trilogy, bringing people back from the dead or cases that hinge on the properties of the Kurain channeling technique, and this of course gives the game the tremendous advantage that it doesn't have Maya in it. In place of getting the humour out of how over-the-top the game is, it's become more understated (though it must be said that being an Ace Attorney game, this really isn't saying much) and the humour now lies in watching Edgeworth trying to keep himself together as he's surrounded by the rest of the characters and the madness of them and their haircuts, delivering more deadpan lines like "I said I'd always stay by your side, sir!" "Yes, and though I have tried, words have always failed to describe the amount of suffering I have gone through since that day."

In fact, while I'm on this subject, I must say I shared Edgeworth's reaction during the section where one particular character can't stop laughing at him for how he speaks and calls him "a regular Shakespeare"... because worryingly, from my point of view he doesn't seem to talk incomparably from the way that I do. Take that.

A trailer for the sequel is now out, which means we may be seeing it here at some point in the next ten years.