Vinnk Edit: As has been pointed out, this is not Phoenix Wright 5 but rather a spinoff from the Ace Attorney series starring Miles Edgeworth. Sorry if anyone felt deceived by the title.

“There’s more time to play games when you have a straight perm,” I advise Holli on the necessities of life at 8am on Sunday.

I am a self-confessed Phoenix Wright addict. When a new game comes out I play non-stop until it’s finished — you won’t see me and I don’t want to go out for anything, but when I do I bring my DS. If I’m talking to you, yeah I may be nodding along, but I’m actually thinking about how that salt got in the box and why the dead body of a ringmaster is lying on it.

I was super excited when I found out that the newest instalment was going to be shown at the Tokyo Game Show! My one drawback was my skills in Japanese, because right now the game isn’t in English. I do well on an everyday level, but thankfully I’ve never had to use words such as ‘objection’, ‘kill’, ‘murderer’, etc. So I was feeling so-so about the possibilities of doing a good write-up on it — hopefully I can do the game “justice”…

The Phoenix Wright booth was one of the most amazing at the show — it was set up in a court room style (Vinnk told me that they did this for the release of number 4 too) that’s actually the first scene when the game starts up. Edgeworth’s overly frilly pink outfit is up on the wall, and at the back of the booth was a desk with all sorts of memorabilia from the previous games.

Being one of the most popular games at the show, we had to line up for 30 minutes to play. We were given roughly 10 minutes before we were told to get out, although as we left we were given cute little ‘blue badger’ towels!

The new game is currently called Gyakuten Kenji, and it’s going to be released in Japan in the Spring of 2009. There was no mention of a Western release date or English title, unfortunately.

As for the storyline, you play Edgeworth for the first time in the series. I’m guessing Phoenix is going to be against you in the trails, but I didn’t get that far due to time constraints. Many of the characters are returning, including my favorites — the idiotic Gumshoe and the rather bizarre Oldbag. There is also going to be a new girl character who looks to be in her late teens and has a big key stuck in her hair, not sure why…

The biggest change to the game, apart from playing as the prosecution, is the new style of investigation. You can now move Edgeworth around the screen with your stylus or keypad so that he can talk to people or look at things around the room. He walks around in the style of a character from a classic point-and-click adventure, and I think this works really well. Another nice thing is that you can watch the characters interact with each other. Since your character is now on-screen, too, the little animated interactions are a nice change from the still pictures you got in the previous games.

Also, having a new character brings a new skill — Phoenix had his magatama, Apollo had his bracelet, and now with Edgeworth you have a ‘Logic’ button. With it, you can add clues together to draw new conclusions by logic, something Phoenix never had, that’s for sure. In previous games, the clues were all used individually, but Gyakuten Kenji has a new ‘Logic’ screen that has buttons for each of the clues you’ve found so far. For example, you can join the information about a dead body you’ve found to the murder weapon, and if it looks like the information ties together, Edgeworth will investigate the link further and find out something new. For example, he could decipher that the murder weapon belonged to the victim. However, get it wrong and you lose a little bit of your green life bar.

So what else can I say? Even though it was in Japanese, I thoroughly enjoyed playing Gyakuten Kenji, and so did Holli who doesn’t speak any Japanese at all! The new game looks to be different enough from its predecessors to be exciting and new, but still has all the great things a Phoenix Wright game should have, with some slightly better graphics and music (don’t worry, the music is the same, it’s just been vamped up a little). I can’t wait to play this game when it comes out and am sure it will live up to my expectations.