What I want to talk about with this entry is another old game I'm playing lately, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attourney, and contrast it with the demo that was released for Ace Attourney Apollo Justice, a later entry in the series.
I missed the Phoenix Wright boat by several years. It seemed like a lot of people were talking about this game in my circle of friends, mostly for the characters and dialog, but I kind of missed the cutoff point for getting an original copy of the game. When "Apollo Justice" came out for the DS a couple of years ago, a free demo in Flash, on the official web site, was available, so I thought this would be a perfect time to give the game a try and see what people were talking about. The demo still technically exists: you can play it here at Destructoid. After playing this on-line demo I was pretty convinced that the whole series was overratted: that's how much of a misstep the demo design was. It took a lot of convincing (from my brother) for me to give the series a second shot. I just purchased Phoenix Wright: Ace Attourney on WiiWare last week, and was pleasantly surprised by the game. As a fan of adventure type games, I'm enjoying it a lot.
Now while I admire that Capcom did something as neat as releasing a free Flash demo for a handheld game, this is a really crummy demo if you're trying to get new people interested in the game series. It really did the opposite of drawing me in to the characters and the world, and cemented my decision not to buy the game at that time. I'm writing here to explore why the game itself is fun, but why the free demo was such a huge turnoff for me when it came out.
More after the jump, just for space saving...
