[T] Turnabouts of the Father ★

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Re: [T] Turnabouts of the Father ☆

Post by kwando1313 »

Ooh~ Nice.

Good luck with the featuring~

(Not that you need any. xP)
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Re: [T] Turnabouts of the Father ☆

Post by Bad Player »

I've already played this so... I'm going to try to keep it short.
Spoiler : :
The "--- Turnabouts of the Father ---" title frames cuts into two lines. (For me, at least.) I'd remove a -.

Doing "3rd" instead of "3" in a timestamp seems... weird to me.
(why am i being this nitpicky if i wanted to keep it short c'mon man)
also just to be clear, comments like this apply to the entire case. i'm not going to point out every single time they pop up.

"This is the 7th suicide in the past 3 months -- with the exact same M. O.!" The space causes "M." and "O." to be on different lines for me, which looks really weird. Also this time you use " -- " while before you used " - ". Hmm...

I still don't like putting a sentence after an ellipsis when it begins a textbox, grumblegrumble

"Bastard"... IIRC that language is stronger than what the AAO mods liked. But they also don't actually seem to hanging 'round these parts anymore. Run it by Enth first (so if anything happens it's him that gets in trouble and not me~)

"Hey, here's a question - how exactly am I supposed to do this?"

"Yes, "the medium guy"." why is the period outside the quotation marks *foamatthemouth*

"Yes, I'll make everything PG-13 and ruin all the kids."

"(Actually, i was going to say just "kill you", but I guess that works, too.)" and now the comma too... (also dat lower case i)

Oh, now you say "10" instead of "10th"? I see how it is. (d)
Also, weren't we in the defendant lobby at 10:15?

"We've seen over the years that evidence, in itself, can be interpreted in many different ways..." 4 lines

"Well, at least, i did." da i

When you have a multiple choice with more than 5 choices so you need to scroll through them (like the objects in the dining room), you can set "white" color tags around the question so that it appears instantly, letting the player scroll through the options more smoothly.

"...Where police officers."

You should probably include a(n optional) super-objection tutorial. (It doesn't need to be long or anything--see the one in TPairs.)

"...As the good Ms. von Karma."
dwammit you have enough typos that fixing them all is getting annoying but not enough that i feel a general proofread will really clean it all up

It's too bad making the presents during Nick's testimony don't change the press convos in the meanwhile... oh well

For the "third" problem in Nick's testimony, I think you should be able to present it at both statements about it.

"Unless one of the witnesses was secretly be 6 and a half feet tall, blonde and male..."

"Intrigued with the concept of the trial, I decided to listen in."

idk, saying "This is the evidence that proves Krissy is lying!" and then presenting Trucy still feels a bit off to me. I would change the phrasing a little

"----------- Total Nonsense -----------" goes onto 2 lines for me

dat optional CE

For Maya's testimony, I think it would be helpful for the player if you could somewhere explicitly state that the current theory in question involves Nick leaving through the window

In the Krissy+Maya testimony, when you present the Crime Scene Info, Polly goes "What I really need is..." but the problem is that this doesn't give any direction as to what actually needs to be done, so... I'd change that to be a bit more clear/give a bit more direction.

I don't like how Ares called the Leviathan "he" when he's about to accuse Thalassa...

"----------- The Fallen God ------------" is 2 lines

A supra-objection tutorial would probably also be good

The supra-objection music/visuals are definitely the coolest part of the trial
(also presenting larry's profile worked yay)



...i still don't like giving out the answer at the very end like that. (or maybe it's just the answer itself I don't like xD) Hmm, since you made that CE optional, maybe you could make that scene a bonus reward for solving it...? idk

Anyway, let me know when you're done with the changes. Hopefully you can tell which are random nitpicks I don't really care about and which are things I want you to actually change~
Spoiler : if you're a spoilsport who doesn't like SUSPENSE :
★ The case is good enough to be featured. Please make the requested changes.
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Re: [T] Turnabouts of the Father ☆

Post by kwando1313 »

Congraaaaaaaaaats DWaM. Was pretty obvious you were going to get it... But still, gratz~
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Re: [T] Turnabouts of the Father ☆

Post by DWaM »

Alrighty, thanks for the review!

I've fixed essentially all of those
Spoiler : :
fixed the grammar/spelling issues, graphical glitches, added the optional press convos, clarified where clarifying was needed, explained the objections, didn't change the final scene, though.

Enth says that the usage of the word is fine, too.
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Re: [T] Turnabouts of the Father ★

Post by Bad Player »

★ The QA inspection is complete. This case is now featured. Congratulations!
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Re: [T] Turnabouts of the Father ★

Post by SwagmaWampyr »

I can't get a hold of BP on Steam so I'm just showing up here to ask how exactly the process went of QAing a trial he already played went.
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Re: [T] Turnabouts of the Father ★

Post by Ferdielance »

Congratulations!
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Re: [T] Turnabouts of the Father ★

Post by nikekut456 »

Just passing by to post this, find this by coincidence
Wonder this is DWaM's new case?
http://aceattorney.sparklin.org/jeu.php?id_proces=38444
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Re: [T] Turnabouts of the Father ★

Post by kwando1313 »

No. That's an incredibly old case by him, actually.
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Re: [T] Turnabouts of the Father ★

Post by nikekut456 »

kwando1313 wrote:No. That's an incredibly old case by him, actually.
Well, it's a shame that DWaM dropped this. It's still a interesting case.
Or there was a part 2 ?
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Re: [T] Turnabouts of the Father ★

Post by Enthalpy »

nikekut456 wrote:
kwando1313 wrote:No. That's an incredibly old case by him, actually.
Well, it's a shame that DWaM dropped this. It's still a interesting case.
Or there was a part 2 ?
Part 2 was never released, and per this post, the project has been abandoned.

Congratulations on the featured status! I'm going to start my own review for this case. Depending on how long it takes me, I'll either edit this post in with it or post it soon.

EDIT:
Spoiler : Review! :
First, I need to thank DWaM. Not only has he provided a great case, but he’s provided a case so great that it has forced me to break my lethargy. I’ve been so preoccupied with other things that I haven’t written reviews or played trials lately. I gave At Dawn's Break a Stream of Consciousness (which I'll finish when SOMEBODY fixes the broken images), but that was it. Not a good thing. Well, now I’m active again.

So, what in this case has me so energized? It’s a genuinely fun case, easily in my top three of Ace Attorney Online. One component of this is the locked room deconstruction. Ferdielance plans to post a review of that, and he can address the issue much better than I. What I want to focus on in gameplay-land is the innovative way that DWaM handles cross-examinations and presents.

The fun of a normal Ace Attorney court sequence works because it feels like we’re landing solid blows against an intimidating foe, and the joy of discovery. We see a contradiction so clearly that we have complete confidence in it, and then we shove it in that lying witness’s face. We come up with a realization that’s thrilling in its absurdity and ability to turn the case around, explaining whatever the problem of the day is, and again with enough clarity that we don’t doubt ourselves. Corpse pendulums, anyone? Dahlia was actually planning to poison Phoenix?

…If you think that was ever going to work for Turnabouts of the Father, you probably haven’t played the case. The whole concept of the trial sequence is “Apollo’s line of argument gets increasingly psychotic and implausible, and he ultimately gets nowhere.” Shoving it in the lying witness’s face? A realization that turns the case around? Neither are going to work here. I believe we’re only given two solid contradictions to work with in the entire case: Mia and Kristoph’s conflicting testimonies, and Kristoph knowing about the figurine collection. But those don’t make up the core of the case. Those contradictions are only there to get the player caught up in trying to hammer all the witnesses.

What made the gameplay so fun for me is how DWaM consistently created “contradictions” that got me thinking “this is too much of a stretch, but it just might be it.” Then the “contradictions” turn out to be right, which feels great! It helps a lot when it’s not broken by alternate possibilities. Normally, just asking to present possibilities is terrible puzzle design, but here, DWaM actually makes it work! All the possibilities that aren’t completely absurd are covered, and so we have a situation where presenting something as nutty as “Phoenix was a smoker, and Larry opened the window to let the smoke out” ends up being fun instead of frustrating. I should add that the escalating silliness of the locked room deconstruction adds greatly to this effect.

DWaM even makes super-presents work, and work repeatedly! Master of mystery Blackrune couldn’t handle it in Courage. I made a mess of it in Platinum. Turnabout Revolution couldn’t handle it. This is one of the best uses of it I’ve seen, and it’s very tempting to say the best use.

Some quick points that I should at least comment on: Ferdielance was quite right to point out that this was a highly focused trial, which I’d love to see more of. The story and gameplay went together reasonably well. For that reason alone, this trial deserves more awards than just featured status. I don’t have any fairness or mystery complaints to speak of. Unlike most other DWaM works, there was some comedy in this one. (Seriously, what happened with the judge’s granddaughter?!) It still maintained a heavy feel when it needed it. Superbly done!

There is one point where I’d love to see improvement, but I’m not sure if it can be done. I assume that DWaM was trying to make the player fall into the same madness as Ares. I’ve talked with Ferdielance, and we’ve had markedly different views on this. Up until the very end, I assumed this game was playing the “largely hypothetical, little evidence locked room” style completely straight and thought “things aren’t going to completely make sense; I’ll just roll with it.” Instead of feeling like I fell for a really stupid theory that I should have seen right through, it didn’t feel like it was a big issue to me. I’ve gotten so used to seeing the kinds of tricks from Turnabout of the Father on a lesser scale that I deliberately “turned off” the part of my brain that would object to accusing “EVERYONE did it!” (Not that everybody will do this: I know that Ferdielance, who hasn’t played as many of the sillier locked room cases as I have, took the opposite approach of recognizing that things weren’t going to completely make sense, but recognized that as a problem.) Personally, I’d have liked to see stronger cues that something was not right here, even if that risks presenting the “does this really make sense?” conflict to the player.

Overall though, a fantastic case fully worthy of featured status, by far my favorite of DWaM's, and easily in my top three of Ace Attorney Online cases. I'm looking forward to seeing what you do in future...

...by which I mean no later than January 13th.
Grammar notes coming up soon.
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Re: [T] Turnabouts of the Father ★

Post by DWaM »

*Cough* January *Cough*
Spoiler : :
In any case, thanks for the review! To be honest, I'm not sure how much of this was really intentional on my part, I thought going into making this that the whole hypothetical approach would serve as its ultimate downfall (but, as with all of my concepts, I went in anyway - this time it was for the better, it seems). I never actually went into this thinking it was going to be a deconstruction of a locked room, either. I just... came up with a locked room that would work for a suicide trial (under the assumption that blind theorizing was allowed), built testimonies around it and hoped to God that it flied. ^^" Which, yet again, it seems to have. It's actually a bit funny that people give me a lot of praise for stuff that I never actually did intentionally - it's just stuff that I thought came naturally through the writing.

Admittedly, the whole issue with the last part of the case was also something I knew from the beginning was going to be somewhat of a stretch, but I hoped that, given the amount of evidence and the small hints to the fake solution would at least give the player a general idea, or at the very least end up with them guessing the right combination to pass through the final testimony. Of course, it was so out of the box that I knew that suddenly going through everything point-by-point and then jumping at "okay you're on your own now, prove this was somehow possible" and requiring the player to have a certain character's point of view... yeah, it was a bit much on my part. Still, I think I've managed to do... a fair job of it. Ares' madness was not necessarily something I thought would be perceived as madness immediately; quite the opposite, I assumed that the player would fall for the idea that "unlikely theory that's crazy but is actually true" trope was actually going on here, so that would've given them some excuse to go "oh, okay, this woman did it, 100% nobody else, now I need to somehow piece it all together I got your back Ares bro".

In the end, glad you enjoyed it!
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Re: [T] Turnabouts of the Father ★

Post by Reecer6 »

Aww, that review makes me feel bad about not giving this like 10 times as much praise. Maybe, someday in the future, I'll actually have enough experience in AAO to make a good review.
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Re: [T] Turnabouts of the Father ★

Post by Enthalpy »

In which Enthalpy one again laments that people forget commas before coordinating conjunctions...
Spoiler : Technical Notes Incoming :
F0020: “The one who pulls the his victims”
F0030: I had a spacing issue when I played this in v6… which is pretty much the only issue this has in v6, by the way.
F0033: The graphic looks oddly resized.
I’m moderately bothered by Thalassa having the scarf on her profile.
F0228: Wrong voice blips.
F0267: This sounds a bit awkward to me.
Ares’s Profile: Change “despite” to “despise”
F0308: “involved it” to “involved in it”
F0313: “I’d had raised” makes no sense.
F0366: Comma after “age.” The English rule for this one is subtle.
F0409: You have two spaces between “Karma” and “even”
F0467: “shouldn’t you’ve” sounds really weird.
F0488: Transpose “just” and “say”
F0516: “hasn’t” to “hadn’t”
F0527: Remove “for”
F0540: “earlier but” to “earlier, but”
F0588: “angle, and”
F0607,0662: In v6, “was” wraps onto the next line.
F0698: "duty and" needs a comma.
F0733: "Far" to "For"
F0746: "properly or" needs a comma.
F0776: "stressing is" to "stressing, it's"; Remove the double "that"
F0858: "went" wraps onto a second line in v6.
F0971: Remove the second space between "as" and "to"
F0996: Capitalize "it's"
F1001: "night and" needs a comma.
F1022: "call out them" to "call them out" and "call them as the culprits" to "call them culprits"
F1065: Capitalize "much." This is awkward.
F4684: ??? What are you trying to say?
It makes sense why I have to present the Crime Scene Report at "heard a gunshot." However, it would be nice (but definitely not required) to hint in Apollo's co-council conversation that he'll need to attack this piece by piece.
F1279: "them man" to "the man"
F1294: "who" to "whom"
F1590: Capitalize "i"
F1599: "bed and" to "bed, and"
F1665: Missing verb.
F1757: "window" word wraps onto another line in v6.
F1959: "listening late-night" to "listening to late-night"
F1976: Word wrap problem with "giving" in v6.
F1978: "question, and"
It would have been fantastic if resolved problems in Wright's testimony were hidden.
F1993: "little of opinion" to "little opinion"
F1994: "supposed be" to "supposed to be"
F2032: Highly awkward.
F2062: ELLIPSIS TIME
F2075: "fabrication or" to "fabrication, or"
F2279: Change "And was " to "And it was"
F2390: "would a help" to "would I help"
F2922: Awkward.
F3166: "like that state" to "like to state"
F4711: Random I.
F3338: There's a double space between "proven" and "that"
F3633: "say and" to "say, and"
F3679: "accept, could" to "accept it, could"
F3787: "addition all" needs a "to"
F3841: Do you mean one occasion?
F4493: "hat" to "that"
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Re: [T] Turnabouts of the Father ★

Post by Ferdielance »

A spoilery commentary on TotF follows. It's not a review, I sort of had a review earlier. Synapses fired at some point, and this resulted.
Spoiler : I'm not sick, but I'm not well :
"Paranoid A: Unfortunately, there's a radio connected to my brain.
Player: > ACTUALLY, IT'S THE BBC CONTROLLING US FROM LONDON."

- Bureaucracy, Infocom

One morning some years ago, our dog died, or so we assume. She vanished from a locked yard with brick walls too high for a coyote to leap. My father had put her out and taken a shower, and when he was dressed, she was gone, without a trace of blood or - as far as he could hear - any sound of a struggle. Our other dog, her daughter, had retreated into the kitchen and shuddered under her blankets.

She had not vanished under the house; the cobwebs that blocked the crawlspace opening were undisturbed. No ransom note was left, either, and all gates were shut.

I was away from home at the time, and only heard all of this second-hand. The aftermath was eerie, and the family invested in a chain link enclosure. Was it an unusually large owl? Two raccoons working together to heft our dog over the wall? (There was no guarantee against accomplices in red.) We don't know.

We found ourselves revisiting the problem over and over. What happened? Had we been somehow negligent? How could a pet just vanish?

A locked room mystery in real life is maddening. All sudden deaths are to some degree. There was a living person, and suddenly they're gone, always mysteriously, always inexplicably. But locked rooms are the worst, even if the victim is a dog.

Now, when I had heard my father's account, some strange, obsessive part of my mind thought "Ah, but you only have your father's word for it? What if he lied?" And I shut up that part of my brain posthaste. Not only did he have no motive to kill a dog, create a locked yard mystery, or lie about it, he also just wouldn't do that. But what if you were in a position where you had to find a definite answer, even if it was crazy?

That strange, obsessive way of thinking is real and dangerous, and not just the province of mystery novels. To a conspiracy theorist, everything has a definite answer, and the evidence is all there for those who can put the pieces together. It's like solving an Ace Attorney case. Nothing is coincidence, every piece of evidence is useful, it all fits.

In AA, nobody questions this. Even the series bastion of sanity, Miles Edgeworth, cheerfully theorizes systems of pulleys and body swaps and secret tunnels. That's just his world.

Turnabouts of the Father is about a man forced to make the pieces fit against his will, at least at first. And it's the story of his father, who won't accept any sane answer. The core of the story isn't the puzzle, but the way this kind of thinking changes the main character. He begins to believe that what he's saying is sane, and, if the game has played its cards right, so does the player.

But locked room mysteries, especially of the Dickson Carr mold, are never sane.

"Tell them it's just a bloody game!"

DWaM creates this escalating madness by turning the rules of good contradiction design on their head. Instead of requiring the player to present a solid contradiction, he demands a "possibility" every time, usually made by connecting two pieces of evidence. The design is just consistent enough to make this possible, and offers just enough cues to make most of the problems fair. But as the solutions demand a larger and larger conspiracy, the player is suckered in to presenting an absolutely bonkers answer at the final confrontation. Or, if they picked up on the underlying theme of the case, they present that same answer out of an understanding of obsessive psychology.

All of this is tightly paced, with the exception of one needless cross-examination. And even though the mystery itself is of almost no consequence to the final plot, the events surrounding it, the development of Apollo's character, ring true here. Because the gameplay itself ties into the pursuit of a white whale, a nonexistent Leviathan, the locked room puzzle itself doesn't need to link to the frame story too closely. The player's actions make a story.

And that story is basically the story of every Ace Attorney case, but played out the way you'd really expect insane attorney bluffs - as something kind of compelling, but desperate and sad. This case isn't as dark as, say Turnabout Tomorrow or Turnabout Cascade, but the underlying message definitely is. This is a game where people sometimes prefer the comfortable lie, and the truth doesn't always dispel it. The main character and his father are playing games and trying to sucker other people in, but - for the most part - nobody else is.

TotF is similar enough in theme to The Empty Turnabout that I'm tempted to say that TET was like a practice run for this. TotF strikes many of the same notes, but more assuredly and in a more focused way. ToTF didn't take very long to write - but that may be because DWaM already knew the kind of story he wanted to tell, and had gotten the mistakes out of his system.

Alternatively, you can think of TotF as Phantasmagoria of Betrayal played crushingly straight - the conspiracy theorizing, the grief-driven psychosis, the fake trial, and the increasingly elaborate explanations all end in a pile of rubble, with only the hope of some kind of healing afterwards between father and son to ease the ending.

Not far enough

So Turnabouts of the Father is a locked room mystery that treats the locked room in its backstory as a psychological problem, not a puzzle, and ably deconstructs the genre.

But does it deconstruct it enough? Is everybody allowed to be as human as they could be?

In spite of the case's general strength in making the insane solvable and the finesse of many of the individual puzzles, the characters in the mystery-within-a-mystery, the Butz locked room, just don't gel. Maya and Kristoph especially seem to have been imported from another case, one where people take courtroom antics seriously; Nick is somewhat more effective. This isn't significantly worse than the characterization anywhere else on AAO, but it could have been better. Fortunately, the father-and-son character arc and the sparring with Franziska (who is well-handled here) keep the case going, but it doesn't give us very interesting suspects.

The dialogue lapses into a kind of visual novel melodrama, too, when it's least called for. Repeating words over and over to show obsession or rage, scenery-chewing dialogue, and awkward soliloquies all happen. They don't break the mood entirely, and may actually help sell the case's central trick to the player, who's more likely to conclude it's a generic locked roomer if the characters talk like generic locked roomer AAO characters. But the words ring less true than the ideas behind them. If this case tried less hard to conceal its central twist, DWaM would have been freer to write people acting like human beings.

...but further than anyone else

That said, DWaM's strengths - an eye for style and pacing, a willingness to tell ambitious stories, a wry sense of irony - are all there, and his old weaknesses are almost gone. The puzzles are the best in any DWaM game, and many stand up next to the ones that BP and Blackrune deliver. The ending is satisfyingly ambiguous, rather than unsatisfyingly ambiguous, and no scene goes on any longer than it needs to. This is my favorite trial of the year so far, I think, and would have been a likely winner if it'd been pared down to enter the "Short and Sweet" comp.
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
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