Last week I talked about cases 1 and 3 in game 2 of The Great Ace Attorney. I know this is out of order but I’d like to put my thoughts to paper on Case 2 of that game. As always, this is a murder mystery game, so total spoilers below!

The case starts out strange but OK, we’re told that after the events of the first game, our protagonist (Ryunosuke Naruhodo) has been barred from lawyering in Britain.  This is… an odd twist as it kind of makes sense and kind of doesn’t.  So spoilers for the first game but in the end of that game the protagonist uncovered a massive spy ring operating in the heart of Britain.  On the one hand yeah that’s a big thing, on the other hand he didn’t do anything wrong so why is he being punished?  Whatevs, it sets this up as a flashback case since he can’t do real cases

In a neat moment, this case is somewhat closely related to a case from the first game, with several characters lifted directly from it.  One of them is a bit of a reach though, you meet a man in a Victorian costume for about half a second and wouldn’t you know it he’s the victim in this case!  He’s not dead though since we needed him to be a kooky character for this one.

At this point I’d like to talk about the best character in Ace Attorney history: Herlock Sholmes.  You may remember when he was called Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle, but to avoid copyright lawsuits the developers of this game LeBlanc’d him up to having a new name.  Anyway he’s absolutely awesome. 

His gimmick is acting like the all-knowing Sherlock Holmes from fiction, while actually being a clutz and a goofball (but surprisingly astute when the plot demands it).  He’s awesome for bringing the best of Ace Attorney wacky humor into a character who can also be serious when need be.  His main gimmick is the “Dance of Deduction,” in which he points out a bunch of unnoticable Holmesian clues and then uses them to build an impossible and hilarious theory, which Ryunosuke then has to “correct” to find the truth.  Anyway, this case gets +10 points just for including him.

Now as to the actual murder mystery, it started off good, had some great moments, but also had just enough frustrating moments that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I should have.  It starts off well with the unexpected death of the guy in Victorian Costume (his name is “William Shamspeare” and he speaks in forsooth’s and thee’s naturally), who then unexpected isn’t dead and claims to have been poisoned. 

We totter about with a mystery about how he could afford to pay for gas heating when he was so poor (more on that later) until finding out that a victim of a stabbing from the 1st game (Olive Green) came back and tried to kill old Shamspeare in this game.  It’s all meant to be very tragic, as Shamspeare had poisoned her boyfriend, but it falls off for me at a few points with regards to its timeline.

The basic timeline of this case is supposed to be as follows: 

William Shamspeare learns of a buried treasure hidden in the second floor apartment unit of this lodge.  He is unable to rent the second floor however because it’s occupied by Olive Green’s husband, named Duncan.  So instead he kills Duncan by turning off the fire in Duncan’s gas lamps, causing Duncan to asphyxiate from gas poisoning.  The way Shamspeare does this is by blowing into Shamspeare’s OWN gas lamps, which disturbs the fire in Duncan’s lamps because they’re all on a single gas line.  Duncan’s death creates a rumor that the apartment is haunted, which allows Soseki Natsume (a real historical dude) to rent the unit for super cheap.  Shamspeare still wants the money though, so hatches a plan to kill Natsume too.

At this point Olive Green is distraught over her husband’s death, she hear’s Natsume talking about how haunted his apartment is and apparently deduces from this that her husband Duncan was murdered.  She writes a vaguely threatening letter to Shamspeare and then sneaks into his house, bringing strychnine poison with her. 

In Shamspeare’s room she finds proof that he killed Duncan, which causes her to deduce his method and put strychnine on his lamps.  Now when Shamspeare comes home, he wants to kill Natsume just as he killed Duncan, by blowing into his own lamps and causing a gas leak in Natsume’s apartment.  But since Olive Green put strychnine on them, he ends up ingesting some and very nearly dies.  The plot of this case begins with him (apparently) dead.

My problem is that Olive Green seems to deduce that Duncan was killed AND THAT SHAMSPEARE killed him on very little, almost no evidence whatsoever.  She overhears Natsume talking about how Shamspeare is weird and the apartment is haunted, and from that she concocts a scheme to kill Shamspeare.  The case when you play it implies that it was reading the note in Shamspeare’s apartment that causes her to hatch her scheme, yet she came to his apartment WITH THE STRYCHNINE so she was already planning a murder beforehand.  And she can’t have come into the apartment a second time after reading the letter because of the events of the case. 

So overall although there’s a wonderful bit of Agatha Christie-esque tragedy to the whole thing, it just feels weird to me that this lady leaped to MURDER on almost no evidence whatsoever.  The evidence she finds in the man’s apartment does prove her suspicion, but again she’d already decided on murder before even going in there.

Anyway that’s all for the plot of this case, now onto the question of gas, and I’m wondering if anyone knows the answer here: during this case, it’s revealed that Shamspeare is incredibly poor, but somehow has the money to pay for gas heating in his house every day.  In this era, you could pay for gas heating via a vending machine installed in your residence.  It’s a mystery where Shamspeare gets the coins to pay, but a further mystery is raised in that when the meterman comes to collect the money from his vending machine, it’s always empty. 

Clearly Shamspeare is stealing gas, but how? 

The only clues are a small hole drilled into the bottom of the vending machine, and a puddle of water beneath it.  The answer to this puzzle is thus: Shamspeare cuts coin-shaped depressions into bars of soap, and then leaves water in them outside to freeze in the cold London air.  What he’s left with is pieces of ice in the shape of coins that he then puts into the vending machine to pay for his gas.  The apartment he lives in warms with the gas heating, and the ice melts back into water.  Then the hole in the vending machine lets the water escape into the room, removing any evidence of his crime when the meterman comes to take the money out. 

What’s most interesting to me is that this mystery was actually lifted directly from a different book which I don’t know the name of.  I told this mystery to a family member who told me she’d read a book in which this exact situation plays out, with a poor man paying for gas using ice “coins,” but she didn’t remember the name of the book.  Does anyone remember the name?  If you do, please tell me!  In the comments below or at theusernamewhichismine@gmail.com.