Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney/Fridge

Take moments specific to the Phoenix arc or Investigations to those pages, please.

• Two things, both to do with the first poker game between Zak Gramarye and Phoenix Wright. At first, I asked how Phoenix could beat such a seasoned player, who had previously only lost to someone who literally had a super-power that allowed him to pierce through others' lies... and then I remembered how Nick wings his way through every trial he's ever been involved in. He's a master of bluffing, and that's how he won. -User:Anomaly
  • Secondly, the question of why Zak tests people in such a way in the first place. Then it finally hit me, just a little before Apollo said it outright: it's not whether his opponent won or lost, but how they played the game. Their play style gave Zak a way to get their measure.
• In Apollo Justice, I never had much respect for the last case. Mostly because of the second day of court and the lack of testimony. But I just realized, it's a difference in the gameplay/story ratio. We're not supposed to revel in attacking the witness' lies with our evidence. We're supposed to revel in the best Villainous Breakdown in the series. Kristoph did all he could to cover his tracks and leave no evidence behind. He made no mistakes, his plan was perfect. And his perfect plan meant nothing. All the weapons he could use, all the power he could wield? GONE. We can't prove you murdered Drew Misham, but we only need to convince the jury. Oh wait, you just did with your breakdown! You dug your own grave. On top of that, people say Apollo didn't get enough action in this case. I say, he intentionally stood back and let Phoenix take the credit at the end for the sake of hitting Kristoph's Berserk Button. Yeah. Awesome.
  • I heard somewhere that the final case kind of had a case of Deus Ex Machina with you winning not because of your cross examination and evidence but because of the new jury. But for me, this reflects the personalities of the hero and villain. Apollo doesn't mind the deus ex machina (though he should have remembered anyway) as he accepts change as a good thing while Kristoph goes into a rage for being beaten by said deus ex machina; a change to the system he couldn't accept.
  • Looking back, I think there's even another bit of brilliance here. I think Phoenix had known that Kristoph was guilty all along, being the master sleuth he is, but he'd also known that Kristoph was perfect in his murder, and that nobody would be able to prove Kristoph was guilty. So he picked the case for the jury system test. With the jury system, he need only convince the jurors, and so Kristoph could be found guilty enough without really having to prove it.
• The ending of the last case when Kristoph is found guilty only due to the jury system being introduced may seem like a giant Ass Pull from a Western perspective. But that changes completely when put in the context of what was happening to the Japanese legal system at the time. Japan made the decision to introduce a jury system in 2004. The last time juries had been used in Japan was 1943. The system was set to go into effect in 2009. However, in the lead up to the introduction of the jury system, many Japanese citizens expressed concerns about the wisdom of the jury system with 80% of Japanese citizens "dreading the change and [not wanting to serve as jurors."] Apollo Justice came out in Japan in 2007 in the middle of an all-out PR blitz by the Japanese government to get people to accept the jury system. And in that last case you know Kristoph is guilty but you just can't prove it! The villian is going to get away with murder! But what's this? The jury system sweeps in to save the day! The jury system succeeded where the old system couldn't! All glory to the jury system! In other words, the entire ending of the game, and, for that matter, the purpose of the game is to serve as pro-jury system propaganda.
  • On the other hand, the strength of the jury comes from its weakness of relying on emotional anecdotes rather than proof. Phoenix picked the perfect case to take advantage of what could potentially have been a disadvantage for the defense in some types of cases.
    • On yet another hand, the jury not requiring as much proof as the Judge may seem like a disadvantage, but remember, that's to convict a witness. The Judge's standards of evidence to convict a defendant are much lower than, say, a sane normal person who can tell things don't make sense. Thus, until the police start arresting actual murderers, the Jury System will make the defense's job much much easier.
• Phoenix's involvement with the Misham case goes much further than his disbarment. Kristoph poisoned and betrayed Drew (by sending him the kiss of death under the guise of monetary reward). Due to his experiences with Dahlia Hawthorne, Nick can't forgive people who are cowardly enough to use those tactics - and, given that Kristoph tried to kill two neurotic agoraphobes and tried to make it look like a murder-suicide, Nick likely considers him the epitome of dirty cowardice. No wonder he spent seven years looking into it - the whole thing is personal in many levels.
• Not long after the game's initial release, there was some complaining about how cocky and out of character Phoenix seemed to be during the flashback case in 4-4. But the fact is, he had every right to be. Phoenix had just beaten both Dahlia Hawthorne and Godot and had finally surpassed his mentor in the process. In other words, he had just closed the book on basically every piece of unfinished business in his entire life. Plus, for the first time, he was the one up against a newbie. Sure, Godot had technically never prosecuted before, but he had already been set up as being a challenging opponent by Luke Atmey, and he also had years of experience being a defense attorney under his belt. In contrast, Klavier was a rock star who randomly decided to become a prosecutor. No experience, no reputation, no grudge against Wright... it was natural for Phoenix to be feeling good about himself during the trial. Of course, that just made the whole diary page debacle that much more depressing. To be fair, said complaining has essentially ceased, possibly because people came to a similar conclusion.
  • In addition, only a prosecutor who is really searching for the truth could ever defeat Phoenix Wright in court... and unlike Payne, Edgeworth, the Von Karmas or Godot when Wright initially faced them, Klavier Gavin began his career as a prosecutor searching for the truth. It only makes sense for Wright's ultimate defeat to be from a prosecutor such as him. The only other time when Wright had been defeated in court was by Edgeworth who had chosen to become a prosecutor who wanted to search for the truth.
• They probably brought back the "poisoned coffee" thing from Trials and Tribulations so that you'd be surprised when they put a new twist on it where it wasn't the coffee that was poisoned.
• I just realised some major Fridge Horror with the third case, The victim, Mr. Le Touse was shot during the second set, but Apollo and Ema don't find him until the third set of the concert. The Fridge Horror part comes when Apollo finds him alive. That means Le Touse was there, lying on the floor bleeding to death for that entire time. Also consider, what if Apollo and Ema had found him earlier? They may have found a way to save him before he died...
• Guy Eldoon's blond hair looks like noodles. The fact that his eyebrows are black foreshadows the fact that the blond hair isn't real.
• During the first day of the last trial, Vera keeps staring at Klavier. Trucy thinks that it's because Klavier is handsome, but the real reason is that Klavier looks like "the Devil" who gave her the diary page forging job. This is actually similar to what happens when Apollo meets Klavier and Klavier thinks Apollo is checking him out.
  • Around that same time, Klavier starts sweating bullets when he hears that there was a request for evidence forgery around the time the 7 year old letter was received and that Vera likes Troupe Gramarye. He asks to know what, exactly, the request was. This is because he suspects that it was the piece of forged evidence he remembers from 7 years ago in a case involving Troupe Gramarye!
• Symbolic name that isn't immediately obvious: Misham contains the word "sham."
  • "My sham", no less.
• The bloody card was removed from the crime scene in case 1 while Phoenix was heading upstairs to call Kristoph. This means that the call was placed while Kristoph was tampering with the crime scene! (Apparently Kristoph has a better cell network than Phoenix.) Suddenly, it makes a lot of sense that Kristoph made the fatal slip-up about the "flawless bone china pate" when he forgot what he was and wasn't supposed to know about the man he had seen while leaving the restaurant. Trying to talk to Phoenix, be casual at first, pretend he has no idea what happened until Phoenix tells him about it, and talk about the victim using his typical erudite speech without revealing anything he shouldn't know about him, all the while with a dead body and unconscious Orly nearby and the concern that Phoenix might come back down the stairs, must have been hard.
  • I don't think this is what happened. The first time that Phoenix went up stair was to call the police after the victim had knocked out Orga Orly. It was during this spam of time that Kristoph came in through the secret passage, hit the victim and hid the evidence. Then when Phoenix came back down from calling the police, Kristoph had already gone, taking the blood card with him and he found that the victim had been killed. It was then that he went up to call Kristoph AFTER Kristoph himself had escaped. In other words, by when he was talking to Phoenix Kristoph was already away from the crime scene. Let's not forget that it's clearly stated in the case that cell phones don't get reception at the crime scene (this was why Phoenix had to go upstairs to call both the police and Kristoph) so it's impossible that Kristoph was at the scene when he was called by Phoenix. Your basic point still stands, he had just killed the victim and when Phoenix called he had to act like he had no idea about the murder. It's still easy to understand why he slipped up.
• Some fans tend to make fun of the name Apollo for the title character and even I had thought it a bit over the top until I read the Oresteia, an ancient Greek play wherein the character Orestes is defended in the first ever court presided over by the goddess Athena and defended by, you guessed it, the god Apollo who won the case and earned himself the title, god of justice among other things. For the ancient Athenians, this made the god Apollo the first ever defense attorney. And suddenly the name Apollo Justice becomes a brilliant, high-brow wink to the well-read gamer.
• When you listen to it closely, the prologue song and the song for Drew Studio sound a lot like each other. If you think about it, this make sense. The beginning opens with (probably) Drew (or Vera) drawing the scene of Phoenix playing cards with Shadi. In case 4-4 you actually find out that Drew (again, or Vera) actually had drawn that scene. Listen to this first and then this and you will hear what this troper means.
• Case three involves an item that can be used to create a never named deadly poison, and then case four comes along revolving around a "rare and hard to get" poison.
• Apollo's japanese name, 'Odoroki Housuke' always bugged me, because it's by far one of the worst, most unnatural sounding puns in the japanese versions of the games... Until you realize something. Apollo is an orphan, most likely even a doorstep baby, given his last name... So Apollo Justice/Odoroki Housuke might not even be his real name. No wonder it sounds unnatural!