Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth Demo Impressions

Today, Nintendo released a demo of upcoming DS game Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth on the Wii's Nintendo Channel. The game is due in stores in a few weeks, and is firmly in the vein of the previous Ace Attorney games, which had you playing in the shoes of defense attorneys Phoenix Wright and Apollo Justice. This time around, however, you get to see things from the other side of the courtroom, as you're taking control of Miles Edgeworth, the prosecutor who was Phoenix Wright's main adversary in previous games.

Capcom definitely has the development of these games down to a science. The interface and narrative style will be immediately familiar to anyone who has previously played an Ace Attorney game. The presentation is identical, down to the fonts and the music. The demo starts with a short cutscene consisting of some anime-style stills of a murder taking place in an attorney's office. After that, you enter as Miles onto the crime scene, where a couple of cops are taking evidence. The action occurs on the top screen, while you use your stylus on the lower screen to move Miles. You can also use the D-pad to move Miles around, which feels a lot more precise. This is actually a new feature for the series, as the previous games never actually showed Phoenix walking around the environments; you were simply shown a scene on the lower screen, and you poked around it with your stylus.

Turns out the attorney's office in which the murder took place belongs to Miles Edgeworth, who has just returned from a month-long vacation. Shortly after arriving, you are joined by Detective Gumshoe, a reliable standby from the older Ace Attorney games. He's there primarily to give Miles someone to bounce information off of, giving the character an excuse to lay out the importance of each piece of evidence in the room. As you move close to an important item in the scene, an Examine button appears on the lower screen, and tapping it lets you check it out more closely, often switching to a zoomed in view of part of the crime scene that lets you examine even smaller details more closely.

When you find something important, it either gets added to your Evidence menu, or, if you simply discover an important piece of information, it gets added to your Logic menu - another new addition. In the demo, you find out that the victim was a cop, and that the murder weapon was a standard-issue police revolver. Once those pieces of information are in your Logic menu, you can physically "connect" them by tapping them with your stylus and pressing Connect. Once you do so, some new information is created, propelling the investigation forward. This is a welcome addition, as the older games usually required you to hunt down a certain character and show them a piece of evidence in order for an important logical connection to be made. Now Miles can come to conclusions all on his own.

The demo is short, allowing you to search a single crime scene and come up with a couple of Logic connections. The courtroom portion of the Ace Attorney games isn't available in the demo, which is a shame, as that's the most iconic part of the series. Nevertheless, the addictive brainy investigative gameplay seems to remain totally intact here, while the few new interface additions have the potential to spice up the experience a bit.

Ace Attorney Investigation: Miles Edgeworth will be available for the Nintendo DS on February 16th, 2010.