All good things must come to an end, whether it's the weekend (sigh), the last few sips of a frothy lunchtime pint or the dying few notes at the end of the final song on a decent album. Annoyingly, rule of thumb has it that such ‘good’ things also have a habit of coming to an end rather quicker than your average day at work or monotonous train journey home spent crushed up against a bloke reading the Times, and so it’s occurred to me that I should probably spend more time appreciating life’s little happy moments a little bit more.

The Phoenix Wright series fits into this rather nicely, as we’ve arrived at the third instalment with the prospect of this being the final time we get to investigate our way around numerous crime scenes in the company of Phoenix, Maya, Pearl and their varying selection of amusing friends and opponents. Apollo Justice may very well be on the horizon with a sprinkling of new characters over a familiar-looking base, but for the moment we can take the cast that we’ve all become rather familiar with over the past couple of years out for one last adventure.

The game, subtitled Trials and Tribulations, kicks off with a rather familiar looking fellow standing over a body and looking rather terrified with what he’s come across. Yup, the first chapter in the game leaps back a good five years to when a certain Mr P. Wright stood trial for murder and had to pin his hopes of being acquitted on almost-rookie lawyer Mia Faye. The jump back in time does initially throw you off somewhat, but as an opening chapter it ably introduces series newcomers to the various ins-and-outs of the drama of the courtroom whilst at the same time bolstering the Phoenix Wright timeline with an added bit of history.

The other thing it does is demonstrate to you that Trials and Tribulations is, story and characters apart, exactly the same as the previous two Phoenix Wright titles. You’ll be sifting through evidence and testimony in the courtroom, looking for inaccuracies or contradictions with what evidence material you have been provided. Whilst you are confined to the courtroom in this first trial, subsequent episodes also provide the evidence-gathering parts of each chapter that once again see you visiting a number of locations, scouring their contents and layout, gathering vital clues and interviewing people of varying degrees of suspicion. It’s like slipping into a pair of comfy shoes all over again.

Except, you would be forgiven for perhaps having wanted a little more when it comes to the basic way in which Phoenix gets the job done. Those who played the first game in the DS series will no doubt remember that there was a bonus fifth episode that had been especially added to what was otherwise a port from the Game Boy Advance, with all sorts of uses for the DS touch controls and some pretty nifty investigation techniques added for good measure. It’s quite bizarre that the subsequent two titles haven’t been given some sort of DS-specific overhaul that sets them apart from their original GBA form. Those wanting to spray Luminol, dust objects for clues and lift finger prints will once more be left wanting, and it’s a tad disappointing.

It’s probably best that I go right ahead and get all the bad stuff out the way first seeing as I’m on a bit of a roll with it, so it’s to the series’ other main annoyance that we find ourselves at next. As anyone who has played one of the previous games will attest, there are occasions when the game runs away from you a little in a logistical sense, leaving you scratching your head and having to make a bit of a blind guess at what clues a suspect has unwittingly left you. As with the previous game, Trials and Tribulations presents you with a health bar that diminishes if you make incorrect guesses or present the wrong piece of evidence, and on more than one occasion throughout the game you will run up against the metaphorical brick wall and be left with either no clear solution or a number of options that make equal sense, with the chances being that you’ll end up making too many errors, get the dreaded ‘guilty’ verdict and have to restart from the beginning of the chapter.

To soften the blow a little the developers have included a rather handy option to pause and save the game at any point in proceedings, which in theory sounds like it removes a lot of the tension from the game but in reality stops you swearing like a sailor at your DS. Should you come to a grinding halt it’s rather a godsend to be able to turn the thing off, go and make a snack and have a bit of a brainstorm about where a particular missing link might be nestling in your clutch of evidence.

Talking of links, another feature to have made the leap across from And Justice for All is the Psyche-Lock system. This primarily acts as an interrogation method on particularly reluctant witnesses or suspects in which Phoenix can present evidence to break down his subject and get them to reveal crucial clues that’ll help him solve the case. These sections of the game work like miniature courtroom sections with the player needing to present evidence to counter the target character’s claims, and as such they can also cause you to lose health off your bar. Luckily, smashing a target’s locks will see a healthy dollop of the green stuff restored to you, so it works both ways.

As with previous Phoenix Wright games, all this takes secondary importance to the main pleasure of meeting whacky characters and having a chuckle at some of the best dialogue in a video game to date. You’ll find yourself up against a mysterious new prosecutor in the form of Godot, a man who seems to have some sort of vendetta against Phoenix that our hero can’t quite fathom. As a character he’s every bit as deep and interesting as Miles Edgeworth and the rather sassy Franziska von Karma were in the first two titles, with some great one-liners, a menacing mask and a coffee addiction. You could hardly make that kind of stuff up.

The supporting cast throws up a mixture of familiar faces and engaging newcomers, each with their own quirks. All the while the dialogue between Phoenix, Maya and Pearl keeps throwing up hilarious little asides from the main crime-busting action, with some incredibly silly happenings threading their way into things. The chapters themselves also feature some of the most complex and puzzling crimes the series has seen to date, with the writers toying with the player and throwing twist after twist into the stories to keep you on your toes. Even when you do get stuck you’ll feel a compulsive urge to keep plugging away and solve everything, as when the cases do unravel they are all more cunning than a particularly cunning fox, living at 100 Cunning Street, Cunningsworth, Cunning..[Stop it. Now. - Jay]

It’ll take over your life, it really will. The inspirational ‘light bulb moment’ that helped me solve the second case came whilst I was having my morning shower. The moment I figured out which piece of evidence I needed to use on a certain character in the third chapter popped into my head whilst I was boiling some pasta. It’s still as engaging as it ever was, with its Japanimation graphics and catchy 16-bit tunes buzzing away in the background. It also leaves you with a slight twinge of sadness at the culmination of the final case, given this being what seems to be the last in the series. My head’s urging me to score Trial and Tribulations a seven, whilst the fanboy in me would quite happily apportion a nine. Tell you what; let’s split the difference.