I think CAPCOM saw too many "rise from ashes is 80% of the first game" memes and thought one single case having 3 trials cases are cancer, when those things don't have to be related.
The thing is, cases got way more bloated and time wasteful over time, to the point of absurdity.
I searched a watched a youtube lets play to compare the first case of AA 1 and TGAA 2 and i kid you not, they solved the first case before great ace attorney started the first cross examination. One can say it was just a tutorial sure but it's crazy how one tutorial is 30~ minutes and the other is 3+ hours.
TGAA-1-1 is also around the same lenght of 3~ hours for a simple case. Fun fact, Great Ace Attorney has single day trials for 4 cases and one case with... no trial. And yet the final case can easily hit +10 hours and is longer than rise to ashes. Can you imagine if this case had 2 or even 3 trials? The sequel changed in response and split the final case in 2.
3 day trials can also lead to a day wasted on red herrings or retarded witnesses. The first trial of turnabout samurai for example was
literally old bag making shit up until phoenix points out she would be a suspect and she admits they told her to lie about other people being there.
What i mean is that it's not inherently better or worse, they just need to write that shit better.. Or maybe rework the system, maybe have an intermission with no case if you just want to drop a bunch of story at once.
The issue I have with these more nebulous means of deduction (bracelet, mood matrix, chess to an extent) is that yeah, they're more about creating cool moments and shocking twists. Ace Attorney wasn't really a fair play mystery game in the strictest sense of the term, but it definitely let players figure out a lot of the case ahead of time with just the evidence and statements if they were clever. The bracelet and mood matrix are used generally to deliver twists and moments that don't use evidence and aren't conveyed to the player ahead of time. Yes, I know you usually have to present proof to back-up the speculation derived from these mechanics, but they're still leaps in logic that are impossible for the player to come to without these mechanics/with just the writing and evidence they've received. It's more shocking, sure, but it also makes everything feel a lot less organic since, for instance, you really could not intuit that Robin was a girl until Athena/the mood matrix (and by extension, the writers) decided it was time for the player to come to that conclusion.
It's kinda of the point of them, but create a circular problem. You basically have to make someone lie in a way that can't be discovered without borderline magic, which in turn leads to warping the plot and characters to justify it.
Why does scuttlebutt wear a box? So apolo can perceive through it! Why does robin hide the fact she is a girl? So Athena can reveal she likes dresses = girl! So much hype, so much aura!
We might as well make a lawyer that uses tarot cards to guess if the enemy is lying and you must play a memory minigame.
I don't even remember any of the prosecutors besides the original trilogy and the Britain spinoff one. Crazy how little impact they left.
The original trilogy was a lightning in a bottle.
It's because all 4-5-6 prosecutors get sandbagged ultra hard.
They expect Klavier to be carried by his art and animation while he has nothing to do with Apollo (who is barely the protag of his own game) and had garbage cases where the only thing people remember is the guitar solo and german. In the next game klavier is only in a
joke trial and in spirit of justice he is a background examination cameo. This guy was supposed to be apollo's rival btw.
Dual Destinies has Simon who is 3d and showcases the handcuff physics, He's a really good balance of edgy, cool and funny, managing to be an honest rival who is still antagonistic. That said, his ties to athena aren't explored much until late and he's replaced in the final case by... Edgeworth VS Phoenix again. It doesn't even make much sense when Klavier was right there. It could've been the 2 people who started the dark age of law finally having the rematch that ends it but nope, it's edgeworth again. SoJ Simon doesn't even prosecute and only plays assistant to Athena in one case that has no exploration, a single trial and mocked as literal circus filler.
Spirit of Justice brings nahyuta who is argueably the most hated prosecutor ever. His gimmick "spiritually zen but i fucking hate you yadayada" is unfunny, has zero depth and worse of all he's boring. It's only near the end that he gets a freudian excuse but guess what, he's replaced too except this time by phoenix (so we can have a contrived student vs mentor battle via recycling a previous plot) and the final boss. He never develops oncreen or lives to his potential as apollo's rival and brother.
Capcom didn't even try with them.
