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jaggedwolf) wrote2022-08-24 11:42 pm
AAI2 | Uncharted 2
Progress through the video game franchises continue.
Ace Attorney Investigations 2: The Prosecutor’s Path
A really good game! The cases are intriguing and intricate, the antagonists-that-are-not-villains are probably my favorites since Miles himself, and somehow there is still more backstory behind DL-6 to be spilled.
Overall case rankings: 3 > 5 > 4 > 2 > 1
The Dadworth of it all
Did not expect to get Gregory Edgeworth content, let alone play as him. We get to see his approach to a case, learn what Miles was like as a kid, and man, even that tiny similarity of him having a bowing animation like Miles does got to me. Dude fucking argued a hopeless case for a year, what a guy.
Ray is...barely tolerable as an entryway to Dadworth content. I unsurprisingly have a very low tolerance for his “creepily wants to hug women, especially young women” shtick, and him showing up to be mad at Edgeworth for being a prosecutor at this point in Edgeworth’s life makes more sense from a Doylist perspective than a Watsonian one. Young Ray was good though, could’ve done with more of that and less of the older one.
Prosecutor’s Path
The other reason Ray’s anger at Miles doesn’t quite work is the angle of it, and that extends to what it is Edgeworth grapples with when he contemplates what it means to be a prosecutor and if he even still wants to be one at all. To be clear, I understand that these games are always going to be about the intensely personal for our protagonists, and I even more easily understand why. It makes for a far more gripping narrative to see Von Karma’s miscarriages of justice tear apart the Edgeworth and Fey families, to have Apollo’s final boss battle be his former boss/Nick’s betrayer/Klavier’s brother, to have Maya in danger in a final case. And it was certainly the lack of the personal that made Turnabout Ablaze, the last case of the first Investigations game, rather lackluster to me.
And so - of course Edgeworth grappling with his job means grappling with his father and what his father would have wanted and how the limitations of that job affects the people he cares about, namely Kay.
But it feels like a damn shame for a former demon prosecutor to never reckon with any of the innocent people he must have sent to prison, especially when we had a case set at prison. Or even in the framework he lands on at the end of this game, that he doesn’t consider the criminals he let escape. Phoenix and Apollo have no careers to speak of when we meet them, and so rightfully their past only matters in the personal. Edgeworth is different, sufficiently so that his heel face turn comes with a loss of faith that makes him flee the country (and a possibly genuinely meant suicide note), and it would’ve been cool to utilize that.
Nonetheless, the game’s goal is different, and it does a good enough job at that. Speaking of, I love our antagonists-not-villains of Justine and Sebastian. I was turned around on them exactly the way the game wanted me to, and I haven’t had that happen since the first game (sorry Franziska, Godot, Lang, not counting Klavier because he is not even an antagonist LOL). When John Marsh was revealed I was pre-emptively annoyed because why not just let Justine be 40-something instead of 20-something, but the game even resolved that in a way that made sense to me.
And Sebastian! I really didn’t think I’d like him that much when I just thought of him as an annoying toddler in Case 2, but I couldn’t resist all the drama of Blaise being a fucking dick and power-hungry in a way that holds back even his own son’s development. (And in more father-son animation similarities....Blaise’s alternating between sobbing and burning vs Sebastian’s tears and injuring his own face...good...) And man that logic chess sequence of building up Sebastian’s confidence after he’s been accidentally kidnapped by his own dad. Crackily Ace Attorney and fantastic.
Case solving
This game ties all of its cases into the main plot way better than the previous game did, even if it makes one consider that DL-6 would never have happened if some guy didn’t decide to throw a baking competition. Furthermore, I enjoyed slowly realising what was happening in the last three cases, especially the realization of the master mind in I2-5 - it felt very rewarding.
There were some meh moments. (1) Are you seriously telling me no one can tell the different between a sniper rifle laser point and a pimple in a photograph??? (2) I don’t like Shelly de Killer showing up in person and getting to escape, it makes everyone look so incompetent and I don’t care that he’s a L33T assassin. He also didn’t add much to the plot - Edgeworth didn’t need a motivating phonecall after Case 4, he was already pretty shaken up by what happened to Kay!
Anyway, 100% would recommend, solid Ace Attorney installment.
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
Definitely less clunky gameplay than the first one - no godforsaken boat sections to make one queasy and smoother gunplay - but IDK if I bought into the plot as much? It was still fun to hang out with Nate and [REDACTED] and [REDACTED], I’m fonder of them than I thought I’d be.
Instead of Francis Drake, this time we are following the path of Marco Polo. Why? Well...
Why Nathan Why
Nathan Drake is not a thrill-seeker - he is just sufficiently treasure-and-history-obsessed that he will accept the price of thrills and having to shoot his way out in order to get to the treasure and history he is after. I guess this is why he ends up having to spend all of his earnings from the first game to get out of a Turkish prison in this game, because he literally cannot resist the urge to go after another historical McGuffin.
On that note, Nate’s journal is also a great look into his mind, where I only wish we got access to it earlier - sketches and theories of the hunt they’re on, jokes about Sully, phone numbers (bc of course), a drawing of Tenzin’s daughter. Definitely made me think of Ellie’s journal in TLOU2 and how perhaps Nate and Ellie are ruminators compared to say, Joel and Abby.
Apparently I was more attached to Elena than I’d realised, because seven chapters into this game I ended up googling “Does Elena appear in Uncharted 2?” I dunno, I enjoy the way Nate and Elena’s different types of lacking self-preservation mesh, and find it very believable that they would’ve broken up and yet somehow ended up in the same Nepalese town during a civil war.
My only complaint is that Elena being conveniently out of commission/in life-threatening danger while the final boss battle happens is already getting old, and I’m gonna be very annoyed if that holds true for the next two games. Let Elena help murder the final boss!! She doesn’t have to always get threatened by the baddies at the end so Nate can get a solo gameplay moment.
(Even if I did enjoy all the Chloe-Elena dialogue there is from the former helping the latter post-grenade. I am remarkably easy in this regard. Give me a nickname like “sunshine” and a grumbling reluctance to help save the world between a cynic and an idealist and I will be here for almost any f&f or f/f dynamic)
Chloe was cool too and I got her side of things until the turn in the plot I’ll discuss in the next section. She says “not with those two on your back” when Nate says he’ll always have her back, and I understand the reason why the two of them can never quite trust each other’s judgement in this game.
Plot Why
Following Marco Polo’s trail >>> following Francis Drake’s trail. The burning resin revealing secrets was cool, as was jumping from Istanbul to Borneo to Nepal to Tibet to a mythical hidden city.
The game loses me a little after the last part of the train level. A random mook has the dagger instead of Lazarević himself? Schäfer convincing Nate that he needs to Save The World TM? I didn’t really need Nate to be deliberately heroic. The Uncharted 1 formula of “wants treasure oh crap baddie wants to do terrible bad things guess I’m in the way now” works fine for me. Worst of all, the last third of Uncharted 2 essentially implies that the only reason Lazarević even got to the Tree Of Life was because Nate kept unlocking the path forward!! And having Nate be reluctant to kill Lazarević at the end there was such a painful cliche.
Everything else is a ton of fun though, from the classic trying to double-cross but getting double crossed instead, the quiet breather at the Tibetan village, that terrifying foreground shot of the guardian, etc.
Gameplay
Train levels! So cool and I appreciated the variety of tactics I could use to navigate them, even if I died so many times from simply...walking off the train. Parkour made me less queasy than in UC 1 too, which was nice.
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Thanks for sharing!
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But it feels like a damn shame for a former demon prosecutor to never reckon with any of the innocent people he must have sent to prison
I wonder if the writers thought about exploring this, but ran into the same issues I did last time I tried to wrangle this for fic-writing purposes... It's clear at times the games have sort of teased exploring this properly (iirc, the main game of AA1 implies pretty heavily that Edgeworth has used forged/false evidence for convictions... but then Rise from the Ashes kind of backs off by implying it was all Gant, or something? been a while, I forget the details). But they never do, and when I tried to fic it, it just felt impossibly hard to head-on confront "people fucking lost their lives (either to death penalty, or years of prison) because of what you did" without either (1) making Edgeworth unsympathetic to an uncomfortable degree, or (2) throwing off the whole "tone" of canon. And like, (2) you can definitely do in a fanfic—I'd be surprised if there isn't some fic out there where Edgeworth is properly overwhelmed with the weight of what he did, and desperately tries to "make things right" in some small way (and maybe is thwarted? idk, it's hard to contrive scenarios where he nobly overturns these past sentences without losing his status as prosecutor, but also hard to write him as not a prosecutor), but... I tend to like to writing things that match the "vibe" of canon, and AA is really into People Doin Good To Save The Day in a sort of shonen-y way at the end of the day. It can dip into darker territory, sure, but not with someone that compromised, it feels like?
idk though. I agree that I'd really love to see more in that territory; it's always felt like a missed opportunity even if it'd be hard to execute.
it makes one consider that DL-6 would never have happened if some guy didn’t decide to throw a baking competition
god i have REALLY got to play the aai games huh
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Yeah I can't really get too mad at the games for not exploring the consequences of demon prosecutor Edgeworth because as you say, it is just not the vibe of the games, but it was something I couldn't stop thinking about while playing from Edgeworth's PoV, especially in AAI2.
But they never do, and when I tried to fic it, it just felt impossibly hard to head-on confront "people fucking lost their lives (either to death penalty, or years of prison) because of what you did" without either (1) making Edgeworth unsympathetic to an uncomfortable degree, or (2) throwing off the whole "tone" of canon.
It does feel like an impossible needle to thread, between obviously not wanting Edgeworth Hate hour and the irrevocable loss? failure? of stolen lives and years tucked inside his early prosecutorial career. But yeah, I'd always be down for more in that territory. The fanwank take, of course, is that Edgeworth himself cannot bear to look at his own past and it is only by focusing on the present/future he manages to hold on to not running off again, which I also would not put past this guy.
AAI1 def passes up on the opportunity to have a truly terrible bratworth in its flashback case though, smh.
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hahaha i love this interpretation. love me some dudes with wildly avoidant tendencies~
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