Phoenix Wright: Jus­tice For All is very much like the orig­i­nal, but with a few added tricks. Released in North Amer­ica Jan­u­ary of 2007, Cur­rent fans sali­vated over the new game. Fea­tur­ing slightly improved graph­ics, - maybe I’m nuts but I don’t recall moving mouths in the first game - slightly better music, an expanded cast, and a new fea­ture to aggra­vate the player, Jus­tice For All pro­vides hours of enter­tain­ing Lawyer-y fun.

The down­side to the game right off the bat is that there are only four cases, unlike the orig­i­nal ver­sion which had five. Other than that, this game fea­tures many subtle improve­ments that should not be over­looked. For starters the cases fea­tured are much longer, and in my opin­ion have better over­all sto­ries in com­par­i­son to the first one. I didn’t find myself ago­niz­ing over use­less con­ver­sa­tions as much in this addi­tion to the series, though that still con­tin­ues to plague the series. On top of that, this one did fea­ture more deci­sion points where you are lit­er­ally grasp­ing at straws as to what the hell to present to what person to progress the story. As a result, you will end up saving and reload­ing. A lot.

The major fea­ture added to this game are called Psych-​locks. Basi­cally, a Phych-​lock (which are intro­duced fairly well, given the out­landish­ness of the game) allow you to know when some­one is lying, and pro­vides you with a sort of mini-​game where you break people down. It’s like cross-​examining, but ouside of the court­room. Fun and painful all at the same time I can assure you. The flip side to the game is that every time you screw up, your health is injured and so it forces you to be very sure of what you’re saying first.

The other fea­ture added into this game was an HP bar of sorts. This gen­er­ally makes the game harder, because there are many ways to lose your HP, but very few ways in which to gain it back (suc­cess­ful Psych-​lock breaks, and moving onto the next day). This does add a bit of an edge to the play, because there is more at stake then before and your health does not refresh between court sessions.

The sto­ries get a bit more out there, and I’m per­son­ally won­der­ing how many times they can per­son­ally include Mia in the cases. Thank­fully these Turn­abouts were far more engag­ing than the first installments’, and I look for­ward to play­ing the third to see where they go with the writ­ing. Having said that, there are gram­mat­i­cal and spelling errors to be found in this trans­la­tion but I didn’t really notice that many, and so I per­son­ally didn’t care. This really comes down to how much of a Nazi you are for it. The char­ac­ters seem a bit more ani­mated (and vio­lent) which helped with the gru­el­ing task of having to inter­ro­gate everyone.

Totally worth play­ing, and doubly so if you’re a fan of the first one. My only prob­lem is that there really isn’t much in the ways of replay value. As a result I would say rent it, but unless you plan to do noth­ing but play this game, chances are you wont have enough time to do so.

Buy it and keep it on your shelf like a good book. You can always replay it way down the road when you’ve for­got­ten everything!

8/10