Yesterday I talked about case 2 in game 2 of The Great Ace Attorney. Since I’ve done cases 1 through 3, I’d now like to talk about case 4, but not so much for the case itself but rather the pattern it follows that I’ve seen a lot of in murder mystery stories. As always, spoiler alert!

This case isn’t really a standalone narrative on its own, rather it is part 1 of a 2-part mystery which makes up cases 4 and 5 of Great Ace Attorney 2. Now that on it’s own is perfectly valid, but here’s the catch. The general pattern of an Ace Attorney or other investigative mystery story usually goes like this: the narrative is built as a trail of breadcrumbs in which the hero starts with a mystery that they have to solve and a bunch of suspicious people they have to talk to. Each person they talk to or clue they uncover is another breadcrumb leading to the truth.  One by one each suspicious person is interviewed and gives their side of the story, so eventually these sub-stories SHOULD build together to create a whole story that tells you everything that happened in the case, right?  Except what often seems to be the case is that everything learned in the first half of the case is basically thrown out as irrelevant, while the real revelations all happen in the second half of the case.  

To get specific with this case: the mystery we start with is the death of Detective Gregson, long-running character for these two games. In case 4, we get a lot of breadcrumbs relating to how Gregson was investigating a Red-Heads Society, and some characterization of the witnesses who found his body. But neither the Society nor the witnesses from Case 4 actually get us anywhere closer to solving the mystery of Gregson’s death. This is because Case 5 reveals that Gregson was ACTUALLY killed on a boat in the English channel, and his dead body was delivered to it’s location in London to be “found.” So everything we learned in Case 4 turns out to be pointless and irrelevant to solving the mystery.

This pattern feels common in a lot of mysteries, the story seems to have forward momentum as each character is interviewed and their part in the mystery is uncovered, but for the most part these characters usually end up having hidden backstories and suspicious circumstances that are completely unrelated to the mystery at hand, and which doesn’t always give any information to SOLVE the mystery at hand except for the fact that this character definitely didn’t do it (usually). So when the final BIG mysteries are uncovered, they at times feel unsatisfying because they’re completely divorced from pretty much everything our characters have been discussing up to this point.

Let me remind you, the Red-Headed Society and every witness from Case 4 are irrelevant to the final answer of who killed Gregson, they could be completely removed and the story would little change. I get why mystery stories do this, you want the player/viewer to constantly feel like mysteries are being uncovered and they’re getting closer to the truth, but you also want the ending to be a BIG UNEXPECTED TWIST that throws the whole case upside down.  But I feel like just completely trashing the first half of the case does this a disservice.

I think there are good mystery stories that avoid this problem, by having later revelations recontextualize what we learned earlier, rather than entirely superceding what we learned earlier, but I also feel like I’d need to spoil have a dozen other stories besides Great Ace Attorney in order to do that conversation justice.

So for now I’ll leave with a final few thoughts: this case was really underwelming but in part that isn’t even the mystery (although it doesn’t help) but rather the emotional weight of the story. Gregson is someone who has been with these characters for 2 games, and the player for more than 40 hours of playtime (by my estimate). He’s someone the players and characters should have grown attached to, yet besides his sidekick no one in the game seems exceptionally broken up about his death. The story kind of has to do this as you find his body and then immediately have to investigate the crime scene, so there isn’t much time in the narrative for sentimentality.

Still I feel it could have been improved by having all the main characters get together for a wake in Gregson’s remembrance right before the Court section, and them all not only remembering him but vowing to bring his killer to justice. A short scene like that could have made the emotional impact of his death work a lot better.