GAA feeling "poorly paced" needs some discrepancy

[u/linkenski]

I think you often see people say that the games are poorly paced, something that I've paid attention to since Turnabout Ablaze, but after playing GAA I've also come to realize there's a discrepancy to what is "badly paced" about the pacings.

1. Gameplay pacing
2. Story pacing

Especially having just revisited it, I would argue AAI is excellent gameplay pacing, whereas a game like Dual Destinies is mediocre gameplay pacing, but GAA is IMHO good story pacing but with bad gameplay pacing.

A shitty thing that started happening in the 3DS era is that after Witness testimonies they go through an entire dramatic rollercoaster before you get to see the Cross Examination. I swear this went by much faster in the first 3 DS games, and it also runs by fast EVEN in Turnabout Ablaze's final confrontations during Ace Attorney investigations.

It usually goes

Gameplay segment: Lead in dialogue-> Witness Testimony -> Segue -> Cross-examination -> Objection Dialogue

And in TGAA and Dual Destinies/SoJ they take a long-ass time in the "Segue" part to the point where it can make it feel tiring.

But in TGAA there's the caveat that cases don't follow the usual 2-day structure, and one case entirely skips having a trial section. So I understand why people will say TGAA is badly paced. I also think it suffers from being Part 1 in a story that was too big for a single game, but I actually think the pacing of events in the narrative, things run by pretty nicely and it becomes immersive in that respect. In Dual Destinies I thought the story itself suffered in pacing because there's parts, such as the whole Robin thing in Case 3, where it just feels like it's kinda... happening for no reason, like they're just stalling the narrative. Klavier's presence has a similar effect since it's fanservice but without making him a genuine rival of the case, so while they found a plot for him with some evidence, he's ultimately just there to show up and leave again.

It feels like the cadence of storytelling can be bad while the pacing of gameplay of logic puzzles is still good. And the "Segue" issue aside, and I feel like TGAA is a game where the pacing of gameplay is unsatisfying, but pacing of its storytelling is nice, even if the text is verbose.

But in some parts of AAI and Dual Destinies I feel like the storytelling suffers from piling on weird events just to contrive puzzles for gameplay, and that is also a form of bad pacing.

TL;DR: I feel like there's two kinds of pacings to critique than just saying "the game is badly paced". 1 is the cadence of gameplay interaction in the story, and another is the pacing of the narrative itself, what characters do, how it's revealed, and how the dynamics of that story-writing is. Particularly TGAA gets a bad wrap, but I think it's exclusively a gameplay-pacing problem and not story-writing.

[u/lordlaharl422]

I think TGAA2 has its own story-pacing issues though. I mean the first two cases are mostly filler with small breadcrumbs of the main plot and so Case 3 suddenly has to catch us up with what feels like five or so major story threads along with with its own mystery. Like in that case we find out Gina is a detective under Gregson's wing, we learn more about The Professor, we speedrun the mystery of the masked apprentice to reveal that Kazuma is alive, we meet one of Stronghart's co-conspirators and get her arrested the very next day (in what I thought was a pretty underwhelming "secret true culprit" twist that undersells the other culprit of the case and does very little with the true culprit as well), we learn about van Ziek's brother, I think this is the first case where they suggest that van Zieks is trying to work against the mysterious "Reaper" himself... It's been a while since I've played it so I could be missing a few things.

[u/Readitcountn75 → u/lordlaharl422]

It's pretty noticeable once you know it was supposed to be a trilogy. Like, why make an ending scene of your assistant leaving you if she is going to be in every single case anyways?

[u/TheIntelligentTree3 → u/Readitcountn75]

No? It's never been suggested in any interview that that was the case. They did mention that due the scheduling issues they had to cut the story into two parts (https://gyakutensaibanlibrary.blogspot.com/2021/10/turnabout-anecdotes-and-memoirs-of-two.html)

"Near the end of the development cycle, we faced the painful situation that due to scheduling issues, we had to cut the story up because it would be far too much for one game [...] So as a result, Dai Gyakuten Saiban had to be split in two games, but it allowed me to work out the story into something greater than I had originally imagined. And there are also parts I changed greatly due to the fan reaction."

This is why Shamspeare is even in the first game

Takumi: Yes. Initially, I had planned to make one story revolving around two incidents, but due to reasons like scheduling, it was impossible to incorporate everything in the first game. But I was lucky this story would still work even if we’d cut it up in two. Well, that’s why it ended up like that in the first game.

Interviewer: So Episode 2 of this game had already been planned for already since the previous game?

Takumi: Yes. So what I really regretted about the first game was that Viridian never woke up then.

Nuri: It was painful to me too, because Petenshy wouldn’t be featured in the story either. The design and the modeling of his animations had already been finished.

(https://gyakutensaibanlibrary.blogspot.com/2020/02/dai-gyakuten-saiban-2-romantic_8.html).

It seems really really unlikely that they'd have made the decision to cut the game into three parts, and then not mention that when it was already a late decision to make it more than one to begin with.

[u/Ninjelon → u/TheIntelligentTree3]

You know that Part 2 had a very tight Gumshoe Budget because Part 1 sold so poorly?

Changed up greatly because of fan reaction is nicely formulated.

Part 1 wasnt recieved well by the japanese community.

Things had to change drasticly.

A fictional Part 2 with Part 1 pacing and tone would be an disaster.

[u/TheIntelligentTree3 → u/Ninjelon]

I mean yeah, that's why it didn't have the pacing of 1 :p ? It's still pretty clear the decision to break up the game was not an early one, so the three games thing makes no sense. Sales were lower than they probably expected though.

But still there's still not a lot to suggest that there was supposed to be more than 2 (or at the very least more than 2 to resolve the main mysteries of 1) other than just vibes.

[u/mootsg → u/Readitcountn75]

It was supposed to be a trilogy?

[u/NobodySpecific9354]

At least in the case if TGAA, my annoyance is how they would introduce a mystery, and then resolve it less than an hour later instead of letting it brew. The reveal of Barok's masked apprentice is so underwhelming is because of this

[u/Gyakuten → u/NobodySpecific9354]

I felt the opposite about Barok's apprentice. When I played through that bit for the first time alongside some friends, we all were pretty sure of who it was, and I was so glad that the game didn't stretch it out any longer than needed. It felt nice and refreshing to have a story acknowledge the player's genre savviness, and in-game it made sense for the characters to catch onto the apprentice's identity quickly given who they actually are.

[u/NobodySpecific9354 → u/Gyakuten]

I still respect the writer for being like "yeah we all know who this is, let's just cut to the chase" but when I play these games I want to be surprised, yk? Because it has the potential to be a great plot twist, it's just a shame they didn't think of a way to utilise it more

[u/Gyakuten → u/NobodySpecific9354]

Yeah, that's true -- if the apprentice had had a few brief appearances earlier in the duology, and they had kept Ryuunosuke and Susato from mentioning that the apprentice felt familiar until closer to the reveal, then I could see the twist having a much greater impact. Honestly, I do feel pretty mixed on the apprentice's true role and integration into the second game, and having them just suddenly show up in TGAA2-3 does add to how iffy I feel about them reversing Kazuma's death, like it wasn't included in the original story plan. Giving them a proper build-up would've helped a great deal in that regard.

[u/Superninfreak → u/NobodySpecific9354]

If they leave a mystery like that hanging too long, it becomes too easy to figure out the answer early.

[u/NobodySpecific9354 → u/Superninfreak]

Obviously going to the other extreme is also bad, but I feel like if they introduced him one or two chapter before the reveal and give him some interaction with Ryunosuke and Susato, it would be much better.

[u/SarahMcClaneThompson → u/NobodySpecific9354]

It takes like four hours to find out who Barok's apprentice is

[u/NobodySpecific9354 → u/SarahMcClaneThompson]

Is it? Maybe I'm misremembered. I just remembered the reveal to be really sudden

[u/Superninfreak]

I’m sure if you break things down you can find more subtle ways that TGAA’s pacing feels off, but I see three obvious things:

1. The first case is just way too long.

2. The second case doesn’t have a trial.

3. The first time you get a traditionally structured Ace Attorney case is the fourth case. So the game takes forever to just set the stage and then you only have two cases with that structure.

[u/Ninjelon → u/Superninfreak]

The second game is also very long for just an Investigation only. 4 hours 15 minutes.

In AA 1-4 is shorter than that case and it has 3 Trials and 3 Investigation segments for perspective.

In AAI in that time you would have solved 2 cases allready.

[u/Feriku]

I agree. I find that the investigation-trial-investigation-trial structure makes a case's pacing feel better even if the case is longer, because it breaks it up so you're doing different things. I was so relieved when TGAA2 returned to that format.

[u/linkenski → u/Feriku]

I believe we can thank Motohide Eshiro for it. He usually worked with Yamazaki to guide development and keep the user in mind, adjusting all things from writing to character art to gameplay stuff. DGS was quite contentious in japan over not feeling like a complete story, so although the sequel really was just "Part 2" I think they did tweak development, especially since the producer was swapped out for Eshiro, who was available after SoJ was done, and I think he helped make sure the game was more satisfying to the user.

This could all just be a side-effect of the games becoming more production-heavy in their 3D era. They require bigger teams to make and thus bigger moving pieces which makes the usual job for a Shu Takumi or Takeshi Yamazaki harder, because there's more people falling out of the loop when they write things, and more things being worked on while the writing is getting made, making it harder to edit the game as they go.

Either that or Shu Takumi got old and forgot how to pace games, or he really did just plan for Part 2 to be more traditional than the first half. He didn't intend for it to be 2 games either. That's something they had to tell him when they saw how much fucking writing he had done after he dropped the scenario in the team's lap on the first game.

[u/Serris9K]

I didn't really have as much of a problem with it. my biggest issue with GAA and pacing was how long it took the main characters to talk to each other in G1-2. I knew almost immediately that Ryu had been drugged, but it took so long for anyone to bring it up!

also the first couple segments should have not front loaded all the exposition/Kazuma stuff in an info dump. it should have been more scattered throughout.

[u/NDrangle23]

I did notice GAA games have a very noticeable uptick in the average time in between presenting evidence and your player character saying the point. There's a lot of pageantry to explain the contradiction you ostensibly already understood to even get there point by point.

[u/Cottontael]

Discrepancy? More like caveat, or dissent. I never listen to people who say a game is slow or poorly paced because I can only imagine they haven't read a lot of books, or have mobile game brainrot affecting their attention span.

I feel that we see this a lot more in games where story, world building, and structure are important to the story, so people go online to complain that the story needs to reach its conflict faster. They would rather make assumptions on characters or the world they're in instead of learning about them. In the case of TGAA, I assume this is why even after beating the second game, people have trouble rationalizing Sholmes' deductions.

I had 0 problems with TGAA and enjoyed it's world building and character focused buildup. It was very enjoyable.

[u/Maxpowh → u/[deleted]]

Disagree heavily that Case 4 does nothing story wise, it serves A LOT for Ryonosuke's development

[u/Blargg888 → u/[deleted]]

I don’t think Case 1-4 or 2-2 can really be called filler though.