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All rise! The prosecution is ready, your honour, and I won't need long. Capcom's sixth main game in the Phoenix Wright series, Spirit of Justice, was released last week. It's an open and shut case, but only if you can get over the series' longstanding irritations.Never played Phoenix Wright and don't know if you'll like it? Here's a good litmus test: if you like reading and find Pees'lubn Andistan'dhin an amusing name for a hippy, then congratulations. This latest batch of five murder mysteries starts with Phoenix travelling to the country of Khura'in, the home of his former assistant Maya Fey for a reunion almost a decade in the making. Khura'in is a deeply spiritual land about to boil over with its own problems, and while Phoenix embroils himself within a legal system that despises him, his protégés Apollo Justice and Athena Cykes risk life and limb with their own courtroom dramas at home.
The series' courtrooms are booming, raucous carnivals that veer closer to anime soap opera than Law & Order procedural. The crowd, more than ever, is a hostile, jeering presence, constantly braying for a guilty verdict (and accompanying death penalty) of characters most commonly framed for murders they didn't commit. Prosecutors are imbued with spiritual zeal, claiming to be able to see the outcome of trials before they've even happened. And then there re our heroes, the defence attorneys - shoulders hunched, visibly sweating, bluffing their way to a piece of critical evidence they need to present to the judge right now. These legal battles are noisy, hard-fought affairs, each slippery case twisting through its outlandish plotline while characters slam benches, point fingers and throw accusations in front of a bewildered judge.
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