It’s odd, isn’t it? Most of us here never particularly wanted to be lawyers, prosecutors or whatever, and if someone had come along ten years ago and said ‘yeah, we’ve got this series of games based around goings-on in court’ then you would have probably smiled weakly and tried to move the conversation off in some other direction. Heck, there might even be some of you out there now who can’t quite see the attraction of the Phoenix Wright games and their associated spin-off titles.

Thing is, and as much as I hate to use the phrase, they are just charming. Silly characters, silly situations, brilliant story twists packed with hilarious pop-culture references – it’s a whirlwind trip around what would happen if the justice system had strolled in one day having smoked something a bit funny and proceeded to dance to a J-Pop mix tape for a while. People who took a look at this latest title, featuring the series’ main anti-hero Miles Edgeworth in the starring role, could perhaps have been forgiven for worrying that this might spin things off in a direction that didn’t capture that kind of fun; thankfully, as it turns out, things are just as barmy as ever.

First off the bat, let’s clear this up: Phoenix Wright himself is not the main attraction of this game, and is in fact reduced to a couple of tiny mentions throughout the course of the five cases on offer. With Edgeworth as your main focus of attention you quickly forget about that however, with the ol’ ruffled red suit being somewhat less uptight and more prone to exasperated gasps and hilarious conversation diversions throughout. It certainly goes a long way to making him a more likeable chap, although Capcom have managed to avoid taking him too far away from his more austere roots.

The biggest difference is obvious right from the beginning of the game; rather than moving around a selection of flat locations in first-person and clicking about on them (much as if you were playing with a series of interactive paintings), this time it’s flipped outside your character and you can wander around each location. It gives a much better impression of crime scenes, and although it doesn’t completely change the way the game plays it is very much a welcome addition.

The other big change from the previous titles in the series is that you rarely see a courtroom, with the first appearance of one being in the fourth episode and not actually seeing you battling away in court as you would presume you would be. Most of the time you are out and about with your ragtag collection of oddball buddies looking for clues and solving crimes on-location, and again it lmanages to liven things up rather nicely and leaves it feeling slightly different from the games that preceded it.

What is familiar, however, is the usual process by which the game moves itself forward. Having come across some kind of crime (a few of which poor Edgy-poo is even accused of), you must hunt down suspicious items and pieces of evidence to present to people in order to sway them to your way of thinking. Occasionally, and in a new addition to the game, you store a particularly important bit of logic in a little menu which, when paired up with a corresponding piece of logic registered at another time, will help you deduce what’s going on. Again, as with the other changes, it’s not a massive difference, but it’s a neat little idea and it works very well.

What doesn’t work quite so well, mind, and something that’s been a bit of a thorn in the arse of every one of these games, is that the path to finding out what has happened and putting the right person behind bars is a strictly linear affair, with no room for a little lateral thinking. Quite often you will think up a perfectly justifiable link between someone’s testimonial and a piece of evidence, only for the game to reject it because it wasn’t exactly how the designers linked things together. A big part of the problem is that at times the game is terribly vague in what it asks you to decipher, leaving a whole stack of potential evidence applicable and the player grasping around for the right piece. You can save mid-game should you not want to use up your entire energy bar and have to start the chapter afresh, but it does frustrate the living heck out of you.

Thing is, though, that you never find yourself getting too angry for too long. For every obscure bottleneck in the story – particularly the case in the third and fifth cases – there are utterly bizarre moments, such as Edgeworth’s reaction to running into a rather unwelcome admirer two days in a row in two different cases, an evil villain cursing your crew using a Scooby Doo reference, and a strange murder that involves people dressed up in badger suits. It’s ludicrously absurd at the best of times, and series fans will no doubt enjoy the amount of fan service Capcom have offered in terms of cameos and the like.

The story is well-written too, as you’d have probably come to expect. The five cases you tackle are all linked by an over-arching story that ties up pretty satisfyingly in the end, and each are as intriguing as anything the series has had to offer to date. The random characters you bump into along the way are all memorable enough too, each with their own whacky traits and mannerisms.

It all adds together to make yet another great little game which, despite suffering from the same problems that have occasionally blighted the titles that followed before, still manages to get you smiling and laughing away at just how ridiculous it all is. Highly recommended, and perhaps as his next case Mr. Edgeworth can go and investigate whatever the living heck has happened to Apollo Justice 2, as this has fuelled the fire enough to have me champing at the bit to get my hands on it. Hurry it up Capcom, please!