I gave up on an official translation of Ace Attorney Investigations 2 some time ago. The game, released in Japan for the Nintendo DS all the way back 2011, seemed like the one title in the series that would simply never get an English release, even after the miraculous Great Ace Attorney Chronicles release for modern systems in 2021. The continued adventures of Miles Edgeworth, the dapper, goofy-serious prosecutor who I'm pretty sure has a huge following on Tumblr, were denied to us. It's unlikely, I reasoned, that it would happen 13 years after the fact.

I'm very excited to have been wrong. Ace Attorney Investigations Collection finally brings the sequel to modern consoles with an official English translation, distinct and different from the (reportedly quite good) fan translations. The game has been jazzed up with new HD art, and tweaked to work on a single screen. Having received a preview code I'm finally able to play the spin-off, which, many fans contend, stands tall as one of the great games of the series.

After all these years, I can finally play Ace Attorney Investigations 2. I could stop writing this preview, step away from the computer, and finally see what all the fuss is about.  But I'm not playing it yet. Instead, I've been replaying Ace Attorney Investigations, a game I already finished in 2010.

The embargo stipulation for the preview session allows me to discuss the first three cases of the original game, as well as the first two of the sequel - and for a moment, I considered getting through those first three chapters and jumping right into the game I haven't played yet. Ace Attorney Investigations is, after all, often talked about as a lesser game in the Ace Attorney canon - a cute adventure for Edgeworth that, in my memory, was a pleasant but slightly meandering distraction. The thought of playing it again first felt like (and please forgive this extremely Australian simile) eating the lumps of raw capsicum and rubbery tomato in a pub side salad before digging into the schnitzel I'd ordered. I like the side salad just fine! But it's not what I'm at the pub for. 

But having revisited the first three cases of the game - which, as it turns out, I remember very little of - I can say that I was wrong again. Ace Attorney Investigations isn't an inessential spin-off. It's another properly wonderful Ace Attorney game.

Ace Attorney Investigations is a slightly different style of game than what fans are used to - there are no courtrooms, and you control Miles directly as he wanders through environments. The new chibi art style is a huge improvement over the DS pixel art original, even if a few of the animations have translated to it a little awkwardly. The narrative thrust of the whole thing is the same as the other Ace Attorney games - there's a series of murders to solve, and you need to investigate areas, talk to witnesses, present evidence, and eventually untangle testimonies to get to the truth.

But having revisited the first three cases of the game - which, as it turns out, I remember very little of - I can say that I was wrong again. Ace Attorney Investigations isn't an inessential spin-off. It's another properly wonderful Ace Attorney game.

A new mechanic, unique to the Investigations series, is the ability to deduce. Edgeworth collects facts as he investigates, and two facts can be snapped together in the deduction menu at any time to form a new piece of information. Miles is a prosecutor, but this is really a game about detective work, even more so than the other games in the series. Instead of surprise witnesses in the court, interviews are carried out in the field. Finding important clues  often yields immediate results, and the cases aren't protracted over several court days. This game still has that incredible user experience touch that all the games in the series have, where a successful objection during a testimony leads to the music immediately cutting out. Even without a courtroom or a judge, it still feels like Ace Attorney. It's never quite as exciting as that feeling of stepping into the courtroom, but those court battle elements - the back-and-forth of dissecting a testimony - can pop up at any time in a case.

The first three cases of Ace Attorney Investigations, which ease you into the new gameplay concepts and characters, are great fun. Each one is more isolated than the sprawling investigations of the mainline series - you travel from room to room rather than location to location. They're also jam-packed with easter eggs and fan-favorite characters, all of whom show up to play on their pre-existing relationships with Miles. It's fun to see some of these characters again, even if I know, on some level, I'm being pandered to. Ol' Edgy is a delight, too: the character has always projected a sense of seriousness and competency that might collapse at any moment, and seeing him get flustered by the other characters is always so much fun. Playing as Edgeworth humanizes him a little bit.

The third case also introduces Kay Faraday, the fan-favourite new addition to the cast, and her ability to recreate holographic simulations of crime scenes with her super-fancy phone - the exact kind of silly science this series excels at. The third case uses Kay, and a handful of other new characters, to facilitate a great series of twists and turns. It's one of those cases where the broad shape of what happened becomes clear early, but piecing together all the specifics is quite thrilling.

This game still has that incredible user experience touch that all the games in the series have, where a successful objection during a testimony leads to the music immediately cutting out.

After digging into these cases, I can't help but wonder why I didn't remember it more fondly. Ace Attorney Investigations is the first game in the series directed by Takeshi Yamazaki, who would go on to direct its sequel and the 3DS games in the mainline series, Dual Destinies and Spirit of Justice (Shy Takumi, the director behind the first four games, helmed the incredible Great Ace Attorney titles, as well as Ghost Trick). It's possible that my memories of Ace Attorney Investigations have maybe been tainted by my opinions on Dual Destinies, the only Ace Attorney game that I flat-out do not like.

Beyond that, I think time has been good to the Ace Attorney series, and the slowed release schedule lets a game like this one breathe. When Ace Attorney Investigations originally released in 2009, it was, for those of us in the West, essentially an annual series. There had been a new Ace Attorney game on the DS every year since 2005 - and Investigations, as good as it is, wasn't as exciting as the bold (and slightly divisive) Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, not to mention the series highpoint Trials and Tribulations.

Now, releases have slowed - there have been five new games in English since 2009, one of them a crossover with Professor Layton. Revisiting a game like this means revisiting old friends, characters that the series has moved away from in more recent entries. If we ever see an Ace Attorney 7, Edgeworth could, theoretically, put in an appearance - but Dick Gumshoe has not shown up in one of these games for a long time, and neither have many of the side characters from the original trilogy who pop up in here. If there was a time where I felt like there were too many Ace Attorney games featuring these characters, it has long since passed.

Revisiting a game like this means revisiting old friends, characters that the series has moved away from in more recent entries.

Even with my renewed vigor, this isn't as good as peak Ace Attorney. The logic in the solutions isn't always as strong as they are in the best main series games - a few times in the third case I felt like my reasoning for presenting items on certain lines of testimony was just as solid as the actual answer. And for my money, the localization of this game - which is carried over exactly from the DS version - is not as strong as the other games in the series. There are more grammatical issues, more comma splices and run-on sentences, than you'd expect from an Ace Attorney game.

But these are minor quibbles, and I love this game. These characters, these cases, the feeling as the pieces start to fall into place: it's all vintage Ace Attorney. This just makes me all the more excited to move onto the sequel - the one I've been hearing good things about for over a decade now -  for my upcoming review. Ace Attorney Investigations 2 is the headliner of this release, but - judging by the first three cases, at least - the first game is well worth your time, too.

Ace Attorney Investigations Collection releases for Switch, PS4/PS5, Xbox, and PC on September 6, 2024. SUPERJUMP will be publishing a full review, focused on the sequel, at that time. 

A popular way to open an article about an interesting piece of media goes something like this: "There's a moment in X where Y happens. Here's what it made me realize/how it made me feel." It's a good entry point, not only because it illustrates something about the experience, but because it lets the author connect their emotional tether to the work right away. You tell the reader about this moment, and in the process, you're drawn back into it yourself. In some cases, the moment you share is the one when you realized that the game was special.

For me, Wide Ocean Big Jacket - a short, sweet game about two adults and two children who go camping over a weekend - is twenty-or-so such opening anecdotes stitched together. There's a moment in Wide Ocean Big Jacket where young protagonists Mord and Ben encounter a group of what the game assures us are "Mean Teens". There's a moment in Wide Ocean Big Jacket where one character tells the others a surprising horror story. There's a moment where the two adult characters, Cloanne and Brad, must decide whether or not to let their discussion simmer over into an argument. Stitch all of these moments together and you have a full game where nothing really happens but everything feels impactful.

I don't remember what prompted me to pick up Wide Ocean Big Jacket back when it launched on Switch, but I remember the dawning sense that it was something I liked. I am not sure at what point I realized that I, in fact, fully loved it. I know it happened within an hour because that's about how long it takes to hit the ending. And since then the four central characters have occupied a small space in my heart, setting their tent up and roasting wieners on the fire so that the smell sometimes wafts up to my brain.

"Stitch all of these moments together and you have a full game where nothing really happens but everything feels impactful."

Wide Ocean Big Jacket is a tiny narrative game about a couple, Brad and Cloanne, who have taken Brad's 13-year-old niece Mord and her boyfriend Ben away on a camping trip for the weekend. There are no huge revelations, no twists or subversions of genre or anything like that. You control all four characters at various points, and when they speak the screen displays their face and text over a black background. The animation is done with few frames, and the world is rendered in limited, blocky polygon shapes. It's absolutely gorgeous.

Many of the games I really love have a distinct voice, and Wide Ocean Big Jacket's sense of irreverent nostalgia feels unique from the nostalgia in other games - in part, perhaps, because it feels very modern. It's a celebration not so much of camping, but of the idea of camping - of what happens when you step away from the "real world" for a little while and live what feels like a short, separate little life. It's not an escape, it's a vacation, and that's how Wide Ocean Big Jacket feels, too. It's a little stopgap from the wider world of games, a calm little island that doesn't ask too much from you. There are no puzzles to solve or challenges to traverse. You're here to enjoy the characters, the art, the little slice of a world that the game has carved out. It's a holiday you can go on whenever you have a spare hour.

A huge part of Wide Ocean Big Jacket's power is in how short it is, how little time you have with these characters. It gives every choice the game makes an extra layer of significance, and you feel like you can capture the whole thing in your head. The dialogue and writing - the game contains 10,000 words of text, but feels much smaller than that - is evocative throughout. A text prompt might welcome you to "POP A SQUAT" or "PEE IN THE BUSH". At one point, as you roast hot dogs, the text prompt to progress the story just reads "OH YEAH BAY-BE".

"It's a celebration not so much of camping, but of the idea of camping - of what happens when you step away from the "real world" for a little while and live what feels like a short, separate little life."

The script is extremely economical in explaining who these characters are, and what their relationships with each other look like. Cloanne and Ben are more serious-minded, more introspective, but informed by different experiences and desires; Cloanne is a capital-A Adult, whereas Ben seems young for 13, projecting real "this child must be protected" energy. Mord, with her bright-pink elbows and spindly limbs, simply wants to absorb everything, to talk to everyone, and has no sense of how annoying she might be. Brad is in his element, quietly thrilled to be camping with his niece. The real meat of the game comes from observing them, thinking about how they fit together, enjoying their antics. There's not a lot to do in Wide Ocean Big Jacket, but that never feels like a problem. You can imagine the lives these characters came from, and the ones they're returning to, largely unchanged by the low-stakes weekend they've just enjoyed.

The dialogue does not follow any specific grammatical rules - Cloanne is the most grammatically formal of them all, whereas Mord and Ben are carried by the sort of vibes that will be familiar to anyone who has spent too much time online. "(ha ha i can not believe you yelled back)", Ben whispers to Mord after encountering the Mean Teens. Later, as he starts to panic about being away from camp as night sets in, he exclaims his fears in perfect Twitter-speak: "I Guess I Just Feel Weird How Dark It's Getting". It feels like these characters are in a group chat, which gives you, as a player, the feeling of having been invited into something personal and exclusive. When Mord uses the wrong "it's", I like to think it's not a typo, that's just her style.

This is the sort of thing that's very difficult to get right, a balance that few games manage - go too hard and it feels like a focus-grouped bit, not hard enough and it feels insincere. But Wide Ocean Big Jacket's dialogue is so sweet, so considered, so evocative. It means that the game can take you anywhere - into any of the moments that might have made for a good article opener.

Wide Ocean Big Jacket is a one-off story, with no branching paths, no meaningful player choices, no big hidden surprises beyond a few interactions you might miss. There's an extra little story that was added in a post-launch update - and also released as a standalone demo on PC - but the core game is just a small and beautiful thing. At one point in the game, Ben sums it all up: "(It's) like I'm living a 'Full Life' but just smaller." That's Wide Ocean Big Jacket - it's camping. A full life, but small.