Ace Attorney Investigations Miles Edgeworth/Fridge

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

• This Troper just got hit by understanding a pun stretching back to the first Phoenix Wright title while he was playing Ace Attorney Investigations. In the first game, there was a creature introduced as the "mascot of the police force", the Blue Badger, a creature that looks almost but not entirely unlike a badger. It struck him as weird, but then it was Phoenix Wright, so he didn't care. Cue Case 3 of AAI, where a character observes that the word "Badge" is right in the Blue Badger's name. And then the weird shape of the Blue Badger's head suddenly made sense... and a grimace that can only be caused by being hit with a pun that has been waiting to strike for three years crossed his face. YMMV, but it hurt here.
• I'd heard people talking about how the last villian of Investigations was unimpressive and lacking backstory (or that their backstory didn't clearly lead to the person they had become). Then when I played through it myself, I saw this line:

Edgeworth: Is every life not valuable? Villain: That doesn't even warrant an answer.

• • The logic here is Alba is a war hero. Of course a soldier would have been conditioned to not value the lives of others. Suddenly, his lack of empathy and willingness to eliminate his underlings made perfect sense.
    • There's a part where Edgeworth thinks, "how can that person be so proud, knowing they took life?" Taking life is probably related to what Alba did that got him some of those badges. The idea of "you shouldn't be proud of ending human lives" may feel different to someone who has been decorated for it.
• In case I-3, Shi-Long Lang uses the fact that guns are hard to get as part of the rationality behind accusing a policeman of shooting the victim. Hence, policemen are the ones most likely to have guns. And who held Edgeworth at gunpoint in his office? A detective.
• In I-1, a piece of testimony describes two pieces of evidence from "that case the other day" - a gun and a pendant. Then I-3 rolls around and, indeed, the gun and the pendant turn out to be important pieces of evidence in that case! Hard to make the connection unless you've already seen I-3 when playing through I-1 the first time.
• This isn't Fridge Brilliance, but Fridge Horror: So the Yatagarasu goes out, finds out a companies deepest dirtiest secrets and then spills it to the press. Aside from the fact that they intend to do good...isn't that pretty much what Redd White did, minus the blackmail?
  • Minus the blackmail. The line between a good guy and a bad guy can be very thin in places.
    • I just found it really odd that in-game, no one points this out. They admit it's wrong stealing and hiding evidence, but they don't mention the negative effects of revealing such secrets to the media, instead focusing on how they're "stealing the truth" and how they're "modern-day Robin Hoods". Yet when Redd White does it, because he's a bad guy, they're all quick to point out how he's destroyed lives just by knowing the information and the fact that he could reveal it to the public.
      • Let's also remember most of the pro-Yatagarasu propaganda is coming from Kay, who does not always show the most stellar of judgment. The real Yatagarasu seems to be more of the 'doing the wrong thing for the right reasons' mindset.
      • Redd doesn't get pointed at 'because he's a bad guy'. Redd IS a bad guy because of the way he does it. Yatagarasu demands no favors of the ones they 'steal the truth from'. They simply expose misconduct. But Redd White would blackmail a senator for knowing he had a one-time affair with his secretary. I don't think they're even remotely similar.
      • Redd White did what he did for self-profit. The Yatagarasu did it to expose criminal activities the companies were doing, especially since they were personally targeting companies with ties to the smuggling ring. The Yatagarasu and White did criminal acts by doing so, but at least the Yatagarasu had sympathetic motives. White was in it only to make his gaudy office bigger.
  • The only things that are specifically mentioned as being exposed by the Yatagarasu are cases of "corruption," specifically ties to the smuggling ring. If anyone committed suicide because of the Yatagarasu, it's never mentioned.
• When Kay tells Edgeworth that she's the Yatagarasu, he's incredibly skeptical at first. This might be because he was under the impression that Calisto Yew was the Yatagarasu because of what happened seven years before. He also hadn't twigged that the Yatagarasu was more than one person, so, since Kay clearly isn't Calisto Yew then he has no real reason to believe her until she whips out Little Thief.
• In Turnabout Airlines, there is a point where Franziska von Karma accuses Edgeworth of murder, which, given their sibling-like relationship, appears to be overly harsh and cold, even for her standards. It only makes sense once you remember what exactly her oh-so-perfect-and-honorable father turned out to be like. Franziska isn't ignoring the fact that Edgeworth's her adoptive brother and friend. She thinks that he might have ended up walking down the same horrible road as her father after all.

Franziska: "Even if we were related by blood, that's no guarantee that he's not a criminal!" Edgeworth: "...Franziska..."

• • Related to that scene, Franziska accuses him of tainting the von Karma name by committing murder. But von Karma did the same thing years ago. Is she actively repressing or does she believe that her own father is no longer a proper von Karma?
    • This troper thinks that Fransizka consider's the von Karma name to be above her father's ways. While she isen't the BEST person in the world (she's upset at losing, she conceals testimonies ect) she probably had no idea beforehand that her father forged evidence and made illegal deals to win cases. I believe that going this far to win was above even Fransizka, as evidence when she says that a von Karma should never break the law. Also, she acually at one point states her disgust at how "attornies defend criminals". To this troper at least, this represents how Franziska ACUALLY DOES what the truth to be found but she is in denial. When it turns out her version of events are wrong, she still wants to think that the true killer is the defendant even with evidence pilled agaisnt that fact. Not because she wants a guilty verdict (although it's stated serveal times she does her job to solely get guilty verdicts, this is probably her niaveness talking and she thinks that all those who are arrested are arrested because they are guilty) but because she dosen't want to think that she's made a mistake in her accusations.
• Fridge Badassery: It would be badass for anyone to respond to a gun at their back with defiance rather than obvious fear. However, Edgeworth's father was killed by a gunshot wound while Edgeworth (a mere ten years old) was unconscious next to him. Edgeworth spent the next fifteen years hearing the sound of a gunshot in his nightmares, because he believed that he'd accidentally murdered his own father. He's terrified of both earthquakes and elevators due to their mere association with the event. So when Edgeworth shrugs off a warning shot with "No one commits murder in my office", you know he's got ice-water in his veins.
• Just a minor one, but still quite interesting. In your second case you get Cammy Meele as your partner. At my first playthrough I wondered, why she didn't follow you around like the other partners. Obviously she is the killer. At the end it suddenly struck me: She wasn't trying to help you finding the truth, she was purposely misLEADING the main character's investigation for her own ends, instead of following him
  • Also, she may seem stupid for wanting to do cleaning on the gift shop, but this is Obfuscating Stupidity, and she presumably wanted to remove the last traces that might incriminate her for killing Akbey Hicks.
• In the fourth case, Calisto's stress animation is her calmly putting on her makeup. Why? Because she's starting to sweat — which ruins her makeup, leading to her putting it back on!
  • She's also visibly twitchy when doing so, also retouching her eyeliner and her lipstick nervously.
• In the first Ace Attorney game, Von Karma was defeated because of a wound to his shoulder, which linked him to the crime. Fair enough. But what is it that helps you defeat the Big Bad of Investigations, Quercus Alba? A wound to the shoulder.
• Lang's reason for acting hostile to Edgeworth may seem shallow... at first glance. But replaying Case 1-3, Lang claims that the murdered Agent Hicks was like a brother to him. He may have been pulling a Godot, and misdirecting his anger over Hick's death at Edgeworth, who just happened to be on the same plane as Hicks, and therefore a convenient target.
  • No, it's because of Edgeworth's amiability with Ernest Amano, Lang's target. Lang himself states he suspected Edgeworth of being part of the smuggling ring because of his friendship with Ernest.
    • That, and Edgeworth is a prosecutor. But by now, we already know the story behind that. Right?
• It can be difficult to figure this out the first time you play I-4, but the reason that Rell accused prosecutor Faraday of being Yatagarasu and of instructing him to kill Mann might be that Calisto told him to.
  • It's also an interesting twist on the series's tendency to accuse the prosecutor. This time, the guilty party is doing it to an innocent, as opposed to the protagonist doing it to the actual guilty party.
• Fridge Horror comes up in the second case of Investigations 2, which takes place in a prison and in it, convicts make death threats against Edgeworth (and he personally convicted some of them). This makes you wonder how prosecutors would fare in the prison population, especially considering that Edgeworth nearly got convicted of murder in the first game, and quite a few prosecutors are also serving time at this point in the game's timeline, and whether there is more to Lana Skye not making any more appearances since the first game and Ema's change in personality than we thought.
• In Turnabout Ablaze when talking to Ambassador Paleano about the victim Manny Coachen, he said of how he was a very competent assistant, which in retrospect, allows him to work behind his back. This becomes a bit of a Foreshadowing in revealing Shih-na as The Mole.
• In the Phoenix Wright games, there are guards in the defendant lobbies. In AAI case 4, which is chronologically the earliest playable case in the series (outside Japan), there are no guards in the lobbies. I wonder what could have happened that lead them to add guards there?