Nina Aquila: Legal Eagle, Chapter IV: “Sacred Feathers”

This is a review for the entire series so far (Chapters 1-4)

Nina Aquila does a great job at capturing the spirit of Ace-Attorney-like games, ranging from its extremly silly humor over the colorful characters all the way to the core of its case-solving. An especially charming touch is the fact that each chapter (barring the first one, which is a brief tutorial) is inpired by and pokes fun at a specific genre of anime/manga and blends that with the detective and attorney work.

One thing I prefer over the AA titles is that you generally have way more evidence than you need to solve the cases/respond to the testimonies. While in AA there often is a sense of "ah, guess it's finally time to use THAT piece of evidence" by process of elimination, in Nina Aquila you gotta think a bit about what is useful and what is superfluous evidence (Although the amount of evidence reversly makes it sometimes a bit annoying to scroll through all of it). I am also intrigued by the games' overarching plot that is being revealed piece by piece and will hopefully be brought to its conclusion soon.

I want to mention some things I didn't like so we go into mild spoiler territory from now on:
- Every chapter has a gameplay gimmick tied to the genre the respective chapter is dealing with, i.e. there's a turn-based card battling minigame, a rock-paper-scissors car-racing mini-game and a final-fight-esque beat-em-up minigame. While they are competently implemented and a neat little distraction on paper, they were sadly neither fun nor challenging to me, but I appreciate the effort. There's a "Challenge" and a "Story" option for these, and since there are no achievements linked to these minigames, I personally recommend going with the Story option (or try it out and find out for yourself of course)
- as with all fiction, you have to suspend your disbelief at certain points to some extend; in chapter 4 there are two particularly egregious examples where I was a bit flabbergasted (again, mild spoilers) and I can imagine that they can ruin the enjoyment of that case in particular a bit for some people;
1. one is the fact that the victim is allegedly 100% incinerated by some special device, as in, there are absolutely no remains whatsoever; and even if you buy that, nobody mentions anything about the horrid smell that (I personally assume) must be created by such an action; but not only does nobody in the game think that burning up a human person whole-sale would create a horrid smell, there's an entirely separate piece of smell-related evidence that makes it even weirder, that nobody is confused by the lack of burned of flesh and hair smell;
2. The other I cannot go into detail really, because even naming the piece of evidence and the fact that there is something obviously weird with it, will spoil the reveal which comes pretty late into the chapter; suffice it to say, you find a piece of evidence that the game tells you is one thing, and I IMMEDIATELY though "oh, hopefully this is not revealed to be a , because that's NOT what a looks like" and yeah, one of the big reveals at the end is just that, which felt kind of me

ANYWAY:

I still highly recommend these games to anyone who likes Ace Attorney. Looking forward to Chapter 5