It was April Fool's Day of this year, one day before Ace Attorney started airing, that I even heard that there was going to be an Ace Attorney anime at all. Of course people make jokes about famous games or manga getting adaptations all the time, so I disregarded it, and when the first episode came out the next day I just assumed some online pranksters were doubling down. The pacing was all over the place, the character designs were square and malshapen, and they tossed serious issues such as death and being on trial for murder around in casual conversation. In a throwaway line at the end of episode 1, the show's protagonist, defense attorney Phoenix Wright, mentions that his mentor and sole business partner Mia was going to be murdered off camera before the next episode, right before the show cuts to a sweeping sky shot and goes to the end credits. The whole experience was too outlandish to be a joke, even for the notoriously bizarre Ace Attorney. Of course next week I found out that it wasn't a joke at all, and so began six months of one of the flattest game adaptations I've seen in a long time, a pretty terrible miss for such a fun prolific franchise.
The anime adapts the first two games to a T, being a rare anime adaptation that chooses to follow the source material without any real plot changes (while still garnering outrage from fans). Each two-to-four episode block covers a different court case, where Phoenix Wright is forced to win against all odds and in the face of famed prosecutors such as his elementary school friend Miles Edgeworth, the more sinister and results-driven Manfred von Karma, or von Karma's daughter Franziska. Each time the bumbling Detective Gumshoe comes out and announces Wright's surefire defeat, and then we go with them to meet all the crazy characters involved in this round. The court always seems to be biased against Wright, but in a way that feels annoying and tiresome rather than pointing to inherent flaws in our legal system, which the original games ostensibly did such a good job of doing.
As for the cases themselves, they run the gamut from terrible to fairly decent. Especially as the show goes on, the quality of the cases goes up alongside the anime staff finding surer footing in terms of production and pacing. The first cour aside, the second cour seems to hit the high and low notes in parallel with the games, although I feel that the anime also has a few more balls to keep in the air, as they had to play the bad cases straight without giving us an option to voice our discontent by raising hell in the courtroom as the game let us do. They actually made one attempt to strike that balance and give viewers the experience of a classic Ace Attorney gag scene, having Phoenix Wright say one of the impossibly stupid lines we've all tried out once for fun, but it was back in the first episode where the direction was still all over the map, and the scene ended up falling flat on its face. If anything the show was most in its element for the serious cases, with all comedy being relegated to the inevitable comic relief character and the atmosphere being otherwise well maintained. The visual design still ran counter to the show trying to play itself serious, but overall the visual design was simply bad, so despite it hurting the serious scenes slightly more than the comedic ones, the former still came out as the clear winner in my books
Being a show centered on lawyers, there's also an inevitable moral conflict to be had, mostly internal for both Wright and Edgeworth, but I'm still not sure how to feel about its contribution to the show. When there were more clear-cut issues like the case where Wright has to get a guilty man acquitted to save a kidnapping victim, the show handled the angst and cooperation between parts of the justice system well. In the more troublesome issues regarding prosecutors falsifying evidence and focusing on their personal track record above justice being meted out, there seems to be a bit too much moral polarization. Even past that point there are prosecutors redeemed over the course of a few arcs, after seeking the reason why they stand in court, and those monologues were just plain canned, saved in Edgeworth's case only because of a somewhat touching episode of their school days together. By the time the show has gotten to a tolerable level of quality, these are the scenes that are most likely to force an episode or a case to end on a flat note, which is not a luxury Ace Attorney can afford.