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| Creator | knabepicer |
| Engine | FE8 |
| Download | Here |
| Score | 64/80 |
| Rank | 3rd |
| FEU Link | Here |
Reviews
Judge 1: Darrman
Gameplay: 8/10
As the title implies, it’s Ace Attorney! Ace Attorney and Fire Emblem are very well crossed over here. In place of strategy RPG gameplay, you play through an Ace Attorney case within FE8’s engine. Everything felt like it fit in, with various unique puzzles requiring the player to know knowledge of Fire Emblem. I won’t spoil anything, but there was one area with multiple solutions, albeit not as consistent as the real solution. There were times where I had thought ahead of the solution, but that is inevitable in Ace Attorney. Excellent work in adapting the two series together.
Presentation: 4/5
Almost all of the music is replaced with Ace Attorney music, perfectly fitting in with the crossover that this is. HOLD IT! and OBJECTION! CGs appear when necessary too. The only nitpick I have is that the portraits are canon FE characters, but the obligatory puns are very much in the spirit of the crossover.
Story: 5/5
Being basically a visual novel, the story is everything. All text is well-written, with only the very occasional text skip. There is a lot of text, too, in true Ace Attorney fashion. Humourous asides for presenting the wrong things are there too: I have nothing to complain about here.
Total Score: 17/20
Judge 2: BandanaSplitzzz
Gameplay: 7/10
It’s hard to grade “gameplay” separately from the story in this hack, so I’ll quantify gameplay as the individual puzzle aspect. Being an Ace Attorney tribute, the gameplay revolves around finding holes in witness testimony to piece together the truth of the mystery. All the puzzles/cross-examinations are clever enough to require full brainpower, enough to make me look at the guide once or twice, embarrassingly enough… I also greatly appreciate the usage of battle stats and gameplay-exclusive FE mechanics in the mystery. Including them made Ava Turr appropriate for this engine in particular, rather than aping visual novel tropes in a medium that didn’t accommodate them.
In terms of critique, this hack suffers from the flaws of most other detective games, where you can intellectually identify the contradiction in statements, but don’t know the exact item and testimony that will push you forward. I struggled with this during a few cross-examinations and partially in the text input section. Additionally, the overall mystery felt very “by the books”. With all the unique baggage a Fire Emblem setting brings, the mystery didn’t use much other than battle mechanics (and the literary equivalent of a garbage disposal.)
Presentation: 4/5
The portraits, tilesets, and sprites in this hack were mostly vanilla. I appreciated the additional touches, including the soundbites, the “Objection!” screens, and the quality of life hacks. It’s hard not to compare the presentation in this hack to the more bombastic visual novel style of the original Ace Attorney games, which had mid-dialogue sound effects, more dynamic portraits per character, and more space for displaying text. I think this hack would have been improved with those features. I also encountered a game-breaking bug during the second cross-examination, where examining evidence spawned an extra testimony, and gave Ava a penalty. The court didn’t like her duplication magic very much, I imagine.
Story: 5/5
Having such a focus on the story made this hack stand out in this regard. All of the dialogue was fun to read, which is absolutely necessary in such a dialogue-driven game. The story is simple, but all the characters are written captivatingly. I have to give special credit to Ava’s inner monologue, diegetically giving the player hints, while also characterizing herself very well. The story wrapped up all of its character arcs perfectly well, Ava, Ditt, Payne, and even Jeanrick. My only complaint is that the story itself is very derivative of actual Ace Attorney cases. I kind of guessed who the killer was after a handful of lines they spoke on intuition alone.
Total Score: 16/20
Judge 3: Fringus
Gameplay: 8/10
Ranking the gameplay in this is a little weird, ’cause it’s Ace Attorney. So part of the strength of the gameplay also comes from the mystery itself, which is fairly clear-cut. With a few great puzzlers in there. Many of the things you’d do in a usual case are implemented well here and feel very natural to do.
Every part of FE’s battle mechanics are implemented well into the mystery, and only one answer felt odd in execution. By all regards, it is a well done case with solid flow throughout each part, and quite a bit of extra dialogue to see.
Presentation: 4/5
It’s largely vanilla assets, with soundbytes, music, and the iconic “Objection!” CGs are there as they should be. Though said vanilla stuff is largely used well, and make good use of everything as best as can be. Really, the biggest gripe is that due to being very much an AA styled thing, you feel the flourishes that aren’t there.
Story: 4/5
It very much feels like a first case in full-length Ace Attorney fangame. In this context, it works since throwing people unfamiliar into the deep end would be a bit much. Plus, Ava herself still gets a compelling enough arc in the story, and the whole thing ends on a very sweet moment.
Dialogue as a whole is fun, with everyone having really solid and notable voices from one another. While the mystery is relatively simple, the use of every part of FE’s systems as part of solving the case helps keep it interesting, and it did have one or two moments I had to mull over the right answer for.
Total Score: 16/20
Judge 4: Electric Serge
Gameplay: 7/10
Ace Attorney’s pretty cool, in my opinion, and this hack manages to translate its gameplay into a Fire Emblem engine almost seamlessly, what with each statement being represented by a copy of the witness that can be checked in their respective descriptions, as well as the menu commands being replaced by things you can do in Ace Attorney, such as pressing statements, presenting evidence or checking the Court Record.
Of course, a big part of Ace Attorney’s gameplay is the mystery itself, and the mystery presented here is simple but solid, with the extra advice you can find from the Analyze button helping me to get a general gist of what I need to do to progress through testimonies without having to check the walkthrough. The only thing I got hung up on is a bug I encountered where an instance I presented incorrect evidence repeated itself every time I got to a new section of gameplay, which caused the “statements” to respawn and softlock me by surrounding the correct answer for the current testimony. It made me afraid to make mistakes when I would have otherwise been content to play with my 5 lives.
Presentation: 4/5
The courtroom mostly uses vanilla assets for its visuals, but the inclusion of Ace Attorney music, soundbytes, and CGs for the iconic speech bubbles really help bring the game closer to its source material. The game really brings out the most in what it has to work with; I especially like how the culprit had their portrait change dynamically to match their emotional state, similar to how the actual AA games do so, though I do wish that other characters also received this level of detail, even if they don’t have such portraits in vanilla and as such creating them would have taken some amount of work.
Story: 4/5
The story feels very similar to a first case in your average Ace Attorney game, and includes just about everything you’d expect from the series: witty dialogue, distinct characters with delightfully punny names, and character arcs that are easy to follow but still very compelling in the time they’re given. It’s not a particularly complex tale, given its nature as an analogue to an introductory case so as to ease players in, but the characters and the mystery still kept my attention throughout the entirety of the case, even if I was way too confident about the fact that an Elwind tome was the actual murder weapon.
Total Score: 15/20
Results
| Category | Darrman | Bandana | Fringus | Serge | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gameplay | 8 | 7 | 8 | 7 | 30 |
| Presentation | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 16 |
| Story | 5 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 18 |
| Total | 17 | 16 | 16 | 15 | 64 |