Phonex Wright is not a game series it’s easy to find fans for. I’ve got two brothers, one of whom hates slow paced games with lots of dialogue and the other is so lazy he won’t even take a game suggestion from me because that would involve borrowing a DS and putting some time aside to play it. It truly is a mystery. Anyone would think I was asking him to dig me a military war bunker lined with currency that’s been out of circulation for thirty years.
In any case, Phonex Wright [I’m counting the whole franchise as one game] is one of two games I’ve played that was heavy in dialogue. The other was Zone of the Enders on the GBA. Ah, what a nostalgia trip that is. The repetitive witticisms. The character clichés. The endless text-scroll boxes. The incomprehensible storyline. The insultingly easy game play. Phonex Wright is much newer and better and is more like an interactive story than a traditional video game. There’s no shooting the thing or poking the squirrel or whatever it is you do in popular entertainment nowadays.
The most accurate way I can describe it is as a Courtroom Drama. You know those really unrealistic shows where the attorneys get away with murder to make sure that the defendant doesn’t? Yeah, one of those. Except, Phonex Wright knows it’s a bit silly. It’s injected with plenty of humour, from dimwit characters to great Easter eggs. If you’re happy to make your own character look like an idiot, you can see a whole load of brilliant dialogue that you’ll miss if you play the game straight – it’s these extras that make the game so full and add replay value. What’s mystifying is how the game almost seems to try and discourage this by penalising mistakes. The point of this is anyone’s guess, seeing as it’s one of those delightfully rare breeds of save-whenever-you-want games, where you can reset if you make a mistake with no comeback. And that’s just as well, because in a text-based game, the last thing you’ll want to do is reread the whole thing.
Another peculiarity of the penalising system is that it rather suggests that the answers should be obvious with a bit of logical thought. I am a big fan of logical thought and I can tell you, quite categorically, that Phonex Wright does not specialise in it. This is where the game becomes infuriatingly inconsistent. Because we’re people and we’re very very clever, we often find that we can often figure out what’s going on well before the characters do. I don’t have any problem with being a few steps ahead of a game – generally speaking, it’s a good thing. My issue is with the assumption that you, the player, hasn’t caught up yet. It insists on taking you through all the plodding steps towards the answer that you already know. It’s like making a game twice as long by merely preventing the player from being able to take diagonal shortcuts [Game Freak, I’m looking at you].
The way they justify this is with a convenient little plot-boiler called ‘evidence’. Without ‘evidence’, you can’t ‘prove’ anything. I use these terms loosely, because both the ‘evidence’ and the ‘proof’ they provide are woollier than a misshapen Christmas jumper knitted by your granny. Forcing me to use evidence I think is a load of crap and refusing to accept evidence that I can justify perfectly is not something I tolerate well. If I think I’ve understood something, I want it acknowledged. I don’t want to wait and be told. I find it condescending when I’ve been sitting here waving the evidence in front of the noses of everyone in the courtroom for 15 minutes and they’ve all stared at me coldly and told me to stay quiet and wait my turn like a good little boy.
That, I suppose, is a problem of options. Including lots of options in games is a complicated process, especially as it relies on a team of people to cover all the bases and the more bases you cover, the more complications arise. Accounting for all the possibilities is nigh on impossible, so instead the developers give you just one logical thread and make it as interesting as they can. They twist and turn the plot and make it so that key bits of information have to be slowly and strategically uncovered or you won’t know the full story. This, the game does very well. Mostly.
Although Phonex Wright does suffer from is the opposite extreme; what I like to call the ‘Disc World’ stream of logic. Or perhaps more accurately, the Disc World stream of consciousness, as it is about as easy to follow. I remember trailing around Disc World, showing every random bit of junk I happened to pick up to every random bystander I walked passed in every location. I remember rubbing a pack of fertiliser vaguely against a lamppost, not really expecting much, but no longer having any inspired ideas as to where to go and what to do.
Phonex Wright is a smaller, tidier game in many ways. When you’re investigating in the field, changes in your environment are signified by the appearance of new, semi-interactive cut-scene dialogue. It has also made sure that the vast majority of items you carry in your inventory will ignite at least some response from your bewildered CPU onlookers. This does not carry over so well into the courtroom itself, where you have no time (apparently) to wave bits of evidence around willy-nilly. There you will find some of the most obscure bits of testimony and wildest trains of thought you will ever encounter. I don’t know who’s doing the thinking for these characters, but let’s hope they’re on prescription medication for it. Having to guess the inner workings of their mind is like a whole new science. We also differ slightly on our definition of the word “objection”. To me, an “objection” has to be… Well, an objection. Not an opportunity to present a piece of evidence that vaguely relates to what the witness is saying.
Because I love Phonex Wright despite its faults, I can be as critical as I like and feel no guilt. My last “Objection!” is with the constant and frankly baffling way the game translators insist that the game is American.
It’s one thing to change all the words, spellings, names, pun-based jokes and endless pop-culture references so that they are comprehensible to English speakers. It’s another thing entirely to move the whole setting over to the States. Nobody with a quarter of a brain is going to buy that for a moment. The pretence is so emphatic it’s bordering on bizarre; like if they keep yelling it in our faces, we’ll eventually just accept it. Call me a raging weeaboo, but I don’t see what the issue is with just keeping the setting in Japan. It seems to be a growing disease in anime and other media to shift to the setting to match the language, as if we’re all allergic to being exposed to other cultures or something.
The problem with that is, there are some things you can’t change without actually changing the game completely. Like, for example, the entire graphics template. Phonex Wright is probably the worst candidate for a cultural re-shift, because the scenarios are constantly set in places that don’t exist in the Western world and are accompanied by beautiful background drawings that illustrate the real location perfectly. Is that a Shinto shrine you’re trying to block from view, Mr Phonex Wright? And where in the United States is it standard to live in villages containing wooden huts decked with Chinese-esque calligraphy? Admittedly, I haven’t been there for many years, but last time I did, I didn’t notice any communities of people clad in kimonos and indoor sandals, drinking endless cups of green tea and sitting on tatami mats at heated tables that only come a foot up off the floor. That sort of thing is a distinctive (albeit stereotypical) part of Japan - it just doesn’t translate over convincingly into a Western setting. If we must pretend that we are not in a *gasp* foreign country, let’s pretend we’re on another planet entirely. That also explains the peculiarities of the in-game legal system, which couldn’t possibly exist in any democratic society.
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