3 out of 5

Directed by: Ayumu Watanabe

covers season 1

Phoenix Wright, Attorney.  His friends call him Nick.  It took me a while to get how that worked, because I am very smart.

In other news, there was a video game about being a lawyer, which turned out to be rather aggressively fun, and then there was an anime.  While I don’t know if it’s exactly fun, I would say it is, at the very least, aggressively pleasant, and does a good job (in my mind) of translating a visual-novel of a game that wouldn’t have been my first pick for the ol’ animation.  Some might argue that it shouldn’t have been picked, as AA the anime is a bit stiffer and less wacky than the games, but shaving off the edges and toning down the moving bits and pieces to, I imagine, budget-friendly quality, makes it a show that’s super easy to digest.  And thanks to the well-established cast offered up by the game, the show, sticking to material from the source, circles around the same, who are also of the ‘aggressively pleasant,’ and ‘acceptably odd’ variety that amuses without annoying.

The mystery solving – Wright takes on a case, gets shut down by whichever prosecutor on the first go ’round, then must investigate and find the clues to get to the truth, which always happens to be on his side – sort of slots this into the Detective Conan crowd, but Conan’s mysteries are a lot more competent; Ace Attorney’s depth is pretty minimal, so you’re more in it just to follow along, see Nick get embarrassed, see returning characters humorously foul up the case, and see prosecutors go hilariously flying when an OBJECTION is thrown their way.