Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

A brief impression of the series from the first volume

I'm actually quite a big fan of Capcom's Ace Attorney games on the Nintendo DS. While they lack a little in their gameplay and their controls, I think they more than make up for this with their plotlines and interesting characters. And I'm not alone, the series seems to be somewhat of a hit, having a lot of fans to its name.

Considering all of that, a move to Manga format would seem to be a good idea. A book could still deliver the characters and an interesting plot, but probably wouldn't be criticised for having bad gameplay or controls. (Well, maybe those “choose your own adventure” ones would, but I digress.)

Anyway, imagine my joy as I discovered that there was going to be an Ace Attorney Manga. But unfortunately both me and all the other Phoenix Wright fans have a big disappointment coming up.

Why? Well, it's a Manga, and it starts the cast from the Ace Attorney games. It looks like a duck, it swims like a duck... but it's not a duck. No-one from Capcom has written this. Instead, it's a collection of tributes from nine different artists – a collection of guest strips without an actual strip, if you will.

Why is that a bad thing? Well, for one, readers of the book will see the art style of the manga changing dramatically with each artist. I've seen comics where the main artist leaves and is replaced by someone with a different style, and let me tell you that it's very painful on the eyes, no matter how good the new artist is. Now imagine this happening eight times in one book. For me, it broke the feeling of immersion enough to make the book pretty much unreadable.

Secondly, none of the artists have been working together, so rather than one coherent story you have nine very short stories. Now, you wouldn't think that this would be too much of a problem, as quite a lot of comics are episodic like this. However even episodic comics usually have some form of overall arc. Here, literally everything is wiped back to square one, resulting in the disjointed feeling that you get watching, for example, episodes of The Simpsons.

This book is just a blatant cash-grabbing attempt by someone at Capcom. They hope that by outsourcing their intellectual property they can cash in on it and make a quick buck without actually committing any resources to the project. However the fact that no-one has really thought this through properly is why this book fails.

Now, if there was a real Ace Attorney Manga and the author was sick, or on holiday, or too busy rolling around in the huge pile of money that he or she would no doubt make from writing with such a popular IP, I'm sure no-one could complain if we saw one of these guest strips. In their own right, they're each quite funny. However when put together they are much less than the sum of their own parts, and just can't pretend to be a complete and solid Comic.