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I went back to my room, sat on the futon, turned on the light, and booted up Gyakuten Saiban 3 on my black Gameboy Advance with a white battery lid. I still had some Coca-Cola-brand Aquarius Sports Drink and some 99-yen Mini-Stop Animal Biscuits left over. I thought of them as "Animal Biscuits," not as "Doubutsu Bisuketsu," because I had been eating them a lot. Six hours later, however, after playing a lot of Gyakuten Saiban 3, I wasn't thinking of the game as Comeback Courtroom 3, because I was too busy wondering if that was a catchy enough English title. All I was certain of was that an English title was necessary, because I want this game in English, because I like it enough in Japanese. I'm almost willing to start up a fan-sub project of sorts, were I not already so damned lazy a novelist.
What can I say about this game? It's an adventure game. It's a rather short one. By way of much ingenuity, it's a rather short adventure game where the "adventure" pretty much never leaves one district courtroom in Tokyo. The action of this adventure takes place mostly over the course of two cases, the first one being a tutorial, and a tutorial about an unconventional murder of a college student; the second taking place five years later, and being about something else entirely, and even involving scenes where you click on books and talk to people outside in places that look like American parking lots. The defense lawyer and protagonist of the second case happens to be the acquitted defendant of the first case. He was twenty-one when acquitted. Now, he's twenty-six, and he's wearing a very expensive suit -- and of course the cases the battles are connected subtly and sublimely to his past.
The gameplay, however, has not changed since his student days: listen to witnesses speak; at the right time, use the L button to question them. Question them too many times, and someone in the courtroom will notice, and maybe get angry. Questioning them may reveal holes in their stories; recognize enough of these holes, and then use the R button to pull up a long list of pieces of presented evidence, including the pendant worn by a certain girl, a police report (readable in summary form with a press of the L button!), or a photograph of a hand holding a bottle of "Cold-killer Z" pills. Point to the right pieces of evidence at the right times (hey! you can see the victim's watch in that picture with the bottle of pills!), and look really good to the judge as the witness stutters out a confession. Look good enough, and the case continues. Eventually, it ends, with your client being proven innocent. Or it ends if you reference the wrong pieces of evidence too many times -- each wrong choice rips a large chunk off your life meter -- and lose the case. Yes, lawyers have life meters in Japan. I know this because I studied Japanese law for four years. Didn't know that, did you?
. . . sadly, it's . . . true. We shall speak no further on my former career aspirations, however. I believe we were talking about a videogame.
Actually, we were done. That's the whole game, I described up there. Win the cases, and the game ends. Lose -- and lose, perhaps, you shall! -- and you start over. You will start over, of course, because you will want to beat the game. You will want to beat the game because it is damned compelling. Let me explain, now, why this is the case.
Now, if I told you Romance of the Three Kingdoms IX let you take over ancient China, you'd probably scream "HELL YEAH LET'S DO THAT SHIT!" Right? Well, if I let you know that Gyakuten Saiban 3 lets you prove wrongly accused murderers innocent, would you scream in the same way? Probably not. This is because you, dear devoted reader, are uninformed.
The truth is that taking over ancient China in Romance of the Three Kingdoms IX requires a hell of a lot of squinting at menus and plotting for six hours at a time how, exactly, you're going to get through that castle wall. Romance of the Three Kingdoms IX is about the little things, and being in control.
Here's where I would insert something saying how "Romance of the Three Kingdoms IX is to Dynasty Warriors 4 as ____________ is to Gyakuten Saiban 3, in that one game is about the finer points of being a professional in your respective field, and the other is about just beating the shit out of your opponents." I can't, however, say that, because I have nothing to go into that blank. There is no extensive lawyer simulation, and like the smoking salaryman in a Tokyo internet café who, just yesterday, at his son's fault, discovered Dynasty Warriors, I'm playing Gyakuten Saiban 3, and I wouldn't want it any other way. This is because the game has left a hell of an impression on me. Hell -- it's left two and a half hells of impressions, plus compensatory damages. And you can put that on the record.
I wondered, for about the first three hours (through the first case and partway into the second), why this game was on Gameboy Advance. As I am, as of late, something of a hermit, I have not been riding trains for about a month. If I need anything metropolitan, I walk to Ikebukuro. And while walking, I can't exactly play Gameboy Advance without getting hit by a car or an old lady or something. So it is that the joy of playing Gyakuten Saiban 3 is a joy I can enjoy only when sitting on the straw mat with my back to the glass balcony door, sun shining in thanks to my still not having the money to buy a damned curtain. I can still enjoy the game this way -- and enjoy it a whole hell of a lot -- it's just that I enjoy it like a long novel, as opposed to a comic book.
To wit: a comic book is something that Japanese people read on the train for ten minutes at a time. This is facilitated by that weekly Japanese comic magazines often consist of a hundred different stories on multicolored paper, and that multicolored paper is ideal for bookmarking with your finger as you get off one train and make to board another. Gyakuten Saiban 3, in this regard, can be finger-bookmarked by pressing the start button at any time, even while text is flowing during a dialog oh my god and choosing to save a memo file. Unlike comic books, however, memo files are erased when resumed, meaning you either get to a save point (a recess in the case), or make another memo file. There is to be absolutely no cheating when picking your evidence. This is the game's way of making sure you pay attention to the case, or at least have a really good FAQ.
Protip: there is no official guidebook for this game. If my proposed translation is ever released in America, and someone makes a guidebook, I will buy a sniper rifle from Wal-Mart, I'm so not kidding.
If you play this game with an FAQ, though, really, what are you getting? Pretty much nothing. I guess, if you get absolutely stuck, and you've repeated the same half of a case seven times, and you still don't know exactly how to get the judge to understand that she was keeping the poison in the bottle on her necklace damn it which was so obvious from the moment Ryu showed you the damned necklace in the first place, yeah, you can use the FAQ. (Innocent of perjury, I testify, however, that I only failed said segment once.)
I took a year of creative writing classes in college before a professor told me to quit for my own sake. In those classes, I listened to one particular grown man speak on "how to keep people reading." I slept a little bit, in that class, so hell if I remember anything he said. However, now that I have beaten Gyakuten Saiban 3, I have realized that all the game really is is a lot of reading; most of it interesting, some of it supported by amusing graphical representations of the past, and even more of it still laced between repeats of this awesome speed-lined animation of the judge's gavel smashing down.
As reading, it definitely is reading that you want to keep reading. That you want to keep reading this reading despite the game's sometime-cruelty if you don't take your time to read carefully -- well, cruelty if beating the game is more of a concern to you than understanding the story -- is a bit of a miracle in itself. It is not, however, a cause-and-effect situation; the story is not interesting because of the gameplay and the gameplay is not interesting because of the story. The gameplay, for the most part, is interesting only because it is refreshing: this is an adventure game, as I have said, that involves no pointing, no clicking on flowerpots, no walking around, no choosing from a pull-down list of locations, no raping your little sister with an octopus, no asking locals for information, no quick-timer-events involving a bar full of bikers when you're supposed to be looking for sailors, no half-assed rendition of the Virtua Fighter 3 fighting engine; not even the phrase "UHO! YARANAIKA?" No -- as I have said, it barely never leaves a courtroom. Or, well, at least, it mostly never leaves the courthouse. There are occasional recess scenes in the hall right outside the courtroom. And Naruhodo's office.
(Mostly-related aside: do you think so many hentai games involve tentacles because hentai games are usually in the adventure format and Maniac Mansion, god of the adventure genre, featured a tentacle as such a . . . poignant character, and the hentai makers want to pay homage, or do you think that the tentacles in hentai games were simply the fetish of the first guy to ever want to make hentai games, and that guy didn't know what genre he wanted to make his tentacular game, so he looked up information on games with tentacles and found Maniac Mansion, then proceeded to rip it off as best he could with a basement budget? Either way, is this even a balanced question? And what does it mean if it is a balanced question?)
If Gyakuten Saiban 3 is an "adventure game," it's one with a sweetly narrowed focus. If it's a "digital comic," then it's one that plays like a catchy TV series in which every episode flows in real-time, and is just as addicting to witness in motion.
So enough of the foreplay -- I've been saying for a few thousand words that Gyakuten Saiban 3 is a simple adventure game with a narrow focus and a compelling story, and I've said that without explaining why it's compelling. So let me throw down the trump card here:
The game is fucking hilarious.
This is a big part of its charm. The dialogue is hilarious. The characters, too, are hilarious. How a young Japanese girl, noisy as hell when you put a crepe in her hand and another Japanese girl by her side, can play this game on the Ginza Line without at least cracking a smile, I don't know. It's a Japanese art. It's like the Bushido of the 21st Century.
I will not spoil the final cases, which heap such mounds of ridiculousness all over your Gameboy Advance screen. I'll stick to the first case, in my presentation of evidence:
The defense lawyer is named Chihiro. Chihiro is a pretty, young woman with a mysterious illness (which may or may not be related to her roughly grapefruit-sized breasts). Chihiro is trying her second case: defending one Ryuichi Naruhoudou, whose name everyone (even the little katakana spelling above all his text boxes!) mispronounces as Naruhodo, Japanese for "I see!" or "I should have known!" or "of course!" (something you will say quite a bit when you finally pick the right piece of evidence, allowing the story to proceed!) Chihiro's mentor is Mr. Soranosuke Hoshikage; a stupid name, the linguistics of which we won't bother exploring. Hoshikage is a big guy in a red suit and a handlebar mustache. Hoshikage, during the first part of the first case, will chime in when he thinks you're asking a stupid question. He then, during the recess that occurs immediately after the defense uncovers something hot, rushes to the library beneath the courtroom to retrieve an important document, meaning that when the second witness -- the defendant's girlfriend Chinami -- comes to the stand, Chihiro is the only rational woman in a room full of men stricken by the beauty of a mysterious second woman. The judge's judgment gets a little fuzzy. The prosecuting attorney, a Mr. Auchi ("OUCH!"), asks the girl's permission very politely before every question. His dialogue animation consists of him moving his rabbit-lips around his teeth, crossing his arms, and then flipping the end of his ridiculous toupee with his fingers.
While a witness is talking, the display centers on the witness. The witness is looking right at you, the player, through the window of the Gameboy Advance screen. The witness is also talking, animatedly -- sometimes crying, sometimes smiling, sometimes angry, sometimes with eyes glowing like a demon because she . . . is a demon. When you press the L button to question the witness, a starry dialogue balloon pops up, red text reading "MATTA!" You hear your character's voice shout this. The screen then, by way of a simple left-flowing speed-line animation, pans to the left, where your character stands, looking right. Perhaps, at some point, the prosecutor will shout "OBJECTION!" This is done both with a voice and with a big text balloon -- then with a quick pan to the right with a double-long speed-line animation. If the judge has something to say, it's a gavel-bang and then another right-moving speed-line animation, and then a shot of the judge looking down and out at you, the player. If your partner has anything to say, it's a quick, speed-line-less cut to a shot of him standing, facing left, seen as though you're looking over your right shoulder. If the jury has some reaction to share, we get a zoomed-out view of the courtroom, prosecution on the left, defense on the right, judge in the top-middle, witness in the dead center, back to the screen -- and some murmur or shout sound-effect. Then usually a gavel-bang.
Witness the following exchange, then. The judge asks Chihiro to present a certain piece of evidence, the evidence that will prove something important. You do not have unlimited chances to do this. You search through your list of evidence, and choose the one you think is right. When you choose the wrong one, Chihiro slaps her hands down on the bench, making the sound of a MegaMan MegaBuster colliding with Dr. Wily's big white head. She then points her finger forward, and the selected evidence flashes in front of our eyes.
"It's THIS!" she screams, like a kung-fu fighter in one of those Chinese cartoons.
Speed-line-flash left to the judge. He shakes his big bearded head, and makes a half-angry face.
"You are wasting my time, counsel," he barks.
Speed-line-flash left to Auchi, the prosecutor. He crosses his arms, flips his toupee, and sneers.
"She's wasting my time, too, Your Honor."
Double-speed-line-flash left to Hoshikage, your partner. He looks left, and whispers.
"You're, uh, kind of wasting my time, too."
Speed-line-flash right to Ryuichi Naruhodo, the defendant, now at the witness stand, surgical-masked face looking down sheepishly, pink-sweatshirted arms folded. He looks up. The growingly tense music pauses.
Ryu sneezes. It makes a sound like a sharpened bamboo pole tearing through the Mona Lisa. The music instantly picks back up.
Super-speed-line-flash back to the judge.
"Show me what you got, counselor."
My jaw drops at the hilarity. So many funny things have just happened, on levels ranging from sinisterly subtle to slapstick, that even my human mind may well not be able to comprehend them all in one play-through. When I first saw this, I had a reaction something like the reaction the twelfth time I watched Rushmore, at the scene where Mrs. Bloom gives Max back the tuna sandwich. Only I couldn't rewind the game and scream with joy at the screen. What's best is that, in the context of the game, this is something that only happens once. Sure, there are plenty of times the judge will tell you that you're wasting his time, and there are plenty of times when your partner will chime in with something witty -- there just aren't any where, following a long discussion on the nature of Ryu's cold, you'll get that sneeze as the punctuation mark on a sentence that predicates with the music's pausing momentarily.
And what's more -- you might not ever see this scene, if you pick the right piece of evidence on the first try!
So it is, then, that seeing the animations and all the possible outcomes of even the most wrong choices is compelling. And a lot of it has the setting to thank -- that cramped little courtroom is perfect for speed-zooming around.
It's not high-art, no. It's not literature. I do, however, want to put that little scene mentioned above on something of a pedestal. I want people to at least be able to read about it, because it's a good illustration of the game as it plays as a game, and how this is hard-wired to the characters as they're written as characters. The game is full of little things like that. Each case has these howling little moments of joy, things you can walk in on or even just read about in a too-long review on a website without any prior knowledge of the game, its story, or its gameplay, and look at, and laugh like a maniac, and I think that's most certainly something worth sharing with a number of people pretty close to everyone.
[Next: Wherein Ally McBeal is referenced far too often]
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