Spoilers for Chapters One and Two of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles.
I played The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, a courtroom mystery developed and published by CAPCOM, on Steam for about four hours, completing Chapter Two after previously finishing Chapter One. You play Ryunosuke Naruhodo, a Meiji-era university student accused of murder before traveling to Britain. Rated T for Teen, the game seems aimed at teenagers and older players who enjoy mysteries and visual novels.
Henry Jenkins argues that designers can act as “narrative architects,” and Chapter Two demonstrates why that matters. The game lets me construct a story, an assassination, then dismantles resulting in me pitying the person responsible for the death of my greatest friend. The twist works not simply because the truth surprises me, but because I help build the wrong explanation through investigation.
To recap the story so far: Chapter One, “The Adventure of the Great Departure,” begins with me accused of shooting a British professor. My friend Kazuma Asogi helps me defend myself in court (Fig. 1), and we eventually uncover a poisoning plot. As a tutorial, the chapter teaches a pattern: get accused, investigate, present evidence, expose the culprit. I carried that expectation into Chapter Two.
Fig. 1: Ryunosuke on trial alongside Kazuma.
Chapter Two opens with an account of a snake called “the speckled band.” Aboard the SS Burya, detective Herlock Sholmes declares that the suspect in a locked-room murder is hiding in a wardrobe (Fig. 2). Sailors pull out the sleeping suspect: me. I wake handcuffed, accused of killing Kazuma. I was disappointed to be framed (again), especially when Susato, Kazuma’s assistant, suspected me too. She even throws me to the floor when I try to investigate! Only one person believes me: Hosonaga, the inspector who coughs up blood. He tells me he was assigned to protect Kazuma, and given how similarly the previous chapter began, I expected to uncover the real assassin once again.
Fig. 2: Ryunosuke sleeping in wardrobe
Jenkins describes four ways games can tell stories through space: evocative, embedded, enacted, and emergent. Chapter Two’s evocative storytelling borrows from Sherlock Holmes, especially Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Speckled Band”: a snake, a vent, and a flamboyant detective. Those references primed me to expect an elaborate murder. Its embedded storytelling is stronger still. The cabin contains evidence of an event that happened before I could witness it, and each object helps me reconstruct what occurred. The room is not just a setting, and it is the means of telling the story. The enacted narrative comes from examining objects and challenging Sholmes’s deductions. Emergent storytelling is limited: I form my own theories, but the truth and ending are scripted/linear.
The game mixes visual novel storytelling with adventure-game investigation and courtroom evidence mechanics. Surprisingly, Chapter Two has no trial. Once I realized I would prove my innocence by searching the ship, I was happy to do so. The visual novel format affords detailed dialogue and expressive character reactions, and investigation gives me a role in discovering clues. Jenkins’s accordion idea fits: the main events are fixed, while exploration lets parts of the experience stretch. Still, I sometimes found the dialogue exhausting.
The mechanics in this game is examining objects, collecting evidence, and presenting contradictions. These create dynamics of proposing explanations, checking clues, and revising assumptions, producing aesthetics of Narrative and Discovery. My favorite example was correcting Sholmes’s theatrical but mistaken deductions. He mistakes me for a revolutionary and eventually blames a trained snake (Fig. 3). But Kazuma’s post-mortem points to a broken neck, and the supposed “speckled band” turns out to be a fluffy cat toy. Instead of watching a detective reveal the answer, I participate in helping him deduct the actual story.
Figs. 3: A mistaken Sholmes deduction and the cat toy that undermines his theory.
The clues lead to Nikolina Pavlova, a fifteen-year-old runaway ballerina traveling with her cat, Darka. When Kazuma recognizes her, she fears being sent back to the ballet’s exhausting conditions. In panic, she pushes him, and he falls and breaks his neck. But Kazuma was about to consult me, not report her. The “assassin” I had pictured was a frightened girl reacting to a misunderstanding (Fig. 4).
Fig. 4: Pavlova trying to conceal her identity.
I heavily mourned Kazuma. Before I started Chapter Two, the person who introduced me to the game asked who I thought would die in this chapter. My immediate response was that Kazuma, my mentor, was the last person I expected to die. He had so much left to accomplish, and I couldn’t imagine the creators killing him off so early in the story. I was convinced he would remain an important character throughout the game. So when he died, I was genuinely devastated.
Yet, by the end of the chapter, I found myself mourning Kazuma and pitying the person who caused his death in the same breath. It felt almost unfair: I had expected a villain, much like in the first chapter, but instead discovered a frightened girl who had made a terrible mistake. Pavlova remains responsible, and she and the sailor who helped cover up the incident must face consequences, but understanding her fear changed how I judged her. This made the chapter feel even more unfair. Kazuma’s death was a mistake, a mere accident. There was something deeply unsatisfying about the way he died, knowing that he should have been standing beside me right now if it weren’t for one unfortunate misunderstanding.
What struck me most was the parallel with my own position. I had spent Chapter One being wrongly accused, yet in Chapter Two I was quick to imagine malicious intent in someone else. Pavlova was not innocent in the same way I was, but both situations exposed the danger of judging with incomplete information. Early on, gathering clues felt exciting because I thought I was hunting an assassin. Later, those same actions felt sad because I was piecing together a tragedy. The mechanics stayed the same, but their emotional meaning changed. Suddenly, I cared more about the why than the how.
Not every intended feeling worked for me. By the end, Susato becomes my assistant as I promise to continue Kazuma’s journey (Fig. 5), yet I still resented her immediate suspicion. Ryunosuke may be ready to trust her, but I still hold grudges against her. This gap between character and player emotion made me notice that narrative designers cannot fully control how their relationships land.
Fig. 5: Ryunosuke and Susato at the chapter’s conclusion.
The MDAO reading argues that aesthetics need not be positive: grief and frustration can make an experience meaningful. Beyond entertainment, I also took away Information (apparently snakes do not drink milk) and an opportunity to practice Implicit Skills, particularly questioning assumptions and revisiting evidence. I cannot claim one chapter improved my reasoning, but it certainly made me exercise it.
For my own interactive fiction, I want to establish patterns that players trust, then use clues they personally uncover to complicate those expectations. I also liked how the Court Record preserves important evidence (Fig. 6), especially when the dialogue gets dense or players skim. I would borrow that accessibility without making answers too obvious.
Fig. 6: The Court Record organizing collected evidence.
My biggest criticism is the limited agency: I can investigate and interpret, but cannot save Kazuma or alter Pavlova’s role. Yet that is also the design’s strength. By controlling what happened while letting me work out why, the game creates a precise emotional reversal. Chapter Two taught me that a mystery does not always need to hide the culprit, and sometimes it needs to hide the circumstances that change how we see them.
P.S. Unfortunately, all of the documentation and screenshots I took during my playthrough are stored on a borrowed PC that I no longer have access to. As a result, I used footage from this YouTube gameplay archive to source the figures included in this analysis.
Sketch note:
