The Animation of Phoenix Wright

order order everyone new frame plus is in session by order of the patrons we are here to examine the animation in the Ace Attorney series so before we begin thank you to Marina de Mar is Scout hunter 546 and Archie Andrew ski for suggesting this very good topic now I realized that this might at first seem a strange series to make an animation analysis video about because the animation in the Ace Attorney games is incredibly minimal you could even argue that it is unnecessary just a flourish a light sprinkling of movement over top of an

otherwise static visual novel but however non-essential the animation might seem it is still an important additive element and it's a big reason why Phoenix Wright games have proven so memorable game animation is always a challenge of delivering the most bang for your buck and ace attorneys developers have historically had very little buck to work with this is a series whose visual identity has been shaped by its limitations the first game was developed by a team of seven people over the course of just ten months the original Phoenix Wright trilogy was first made for the Game

Boy Advance of all things and yet despite all that these games are loaded with expressive characters and silly charm so how do these games manage to do so much using so very little to start it helps that shoot akka me and his team chose the perfect presentational format the visual novel is an ideal genre for delivering an interactive story on the cheap I mean all you really need is backgrounds some static 2d character art and a text box and you can't get much more efficient than that and if all these games had was a handful

of static poses and backgrounds in a text box they still would have worked I mean lots of successful visual novels have been just that but Ace Attorney does not stop there the first thing that really sets a Saturnia games apart from the pack is the quality of their pose design characters in these games only have a handful of poses each and you're going to be staring at those poses for hours so they have to be good and they have to somehow vade the totality of each character's personality Capcom's artists have to essentially take each character

and condense all of their body language and all of their full emotional range down into just a few snapshots and these games are so good at it all these characters are so expressive so many visual novel characters will spend their entire game standing in these relatively neutral poses letting the text and their facial expressions do all of the work but not these folks just look at the range on edge words courtroom posing you got neutral smug Stern assertive very assertive taken aback exasperated that's not a whole lot of poses and yet he is larger-than-life every

one of these characters makes an immediate strong impression like you don't need to read a single line of dialogue from red white to know that you hate him here I'll show you see just one glance at that pose and that smug expression and do you have all the information you need heck this game has some of the most iconic poses in all of gaming you don't have to have played a single Ace Attorney game to recognize this this brings us to another important element that sets these games apart their approach to limited animation because as

you can see these are not just static poses compared to a lot of their visual novel contemporaries Ace Attorney characters actually animate quite a bit you see one of the common challenges for this genre is that you want your visual novel to be visually engaging right because static images can get pretty boring to look at after a while but you got no money so you've either got to accept that your games just gonna look pretty static and that's gonna have to be fine or you've got to figure out how to liven things up in a

way that costs very little and it's pretty fun looking around to see how many varied solutions different visual novels and adventure games have used to address that problem because there are a lot of really creative approaches out there now in the case of Phoenix Wright fully animating these characters on such a tight budget and schedule obviously out of the question so what the artists did instead was work within their key poses adding just enough movement to keep the characters feeling alive I've talked before about the concept of limited animation which you often see deployed in

animation for TV which has to work on a tighter budget well this is basically that but stripped down even further down to the barest minimum possible so the characters will hit these striking poses but then as they hold each pose they will continue to blink when they speak as their text dialogue appears below their mouths will cycle through a handful of talking shapes and for certain poses characters will even have extremely limited unique animation just one or two additional drawings wherever it'll have the most impact maybe even on just one part of the body like

nervous characters will visibly sweat detective gumshoe will do this heavy breathing which just adds to his sense of eager intensity dee Vasquez will smoke her pipe Cody Hawkins will try and fail to draw his toy sword Luke at me will clean his magnifying glass thing Franziska von Karma will tensely grip the fabric of her sleeve just like her dad does by the way and they'll add these anticipation frames to the poses that really need to pop with some more energy like Phoenix's accusatory point or the moments where Phoenix or Edgeworth slammed their hands down on

the stand that tiny bit of extra animation attention goes wherever it will achieve maximum personality or appeal or comedy like the first time you're up against Godot and you see him lean forward hand outstretched and a coffee mug suddenly slides into his palm out of nowhere if that gag is not worth a few more frames of animation than what is but the real value of this strong pose design and hyper limited animation is in the ways that they can both be used to show a progression of emotions over the course of a story this is

a game of comically exaggerated courtroom drama and the posing on this cast of absurd caricatures needs to reflect the drama of the moment and not just for narrative purposes but also for player feedback in the context of a virtual courtroom visible shifts in a character's emotional state are some of the clearest back the player can get in response to their choices like if that last question got a big emotional reaction then you might be on to something or if the prosecution starts looking smug all of a sudden now that's probably a bad sign to show

you what I mean let's look at just one characters entire animation set over the course of one story and to show just how good a Saturnia spin at this from the start let's do it with a character from the very first episode in the series Frank saw it now this particular episode opens with a cutscene showing us that Frank is in fact the real killer so there is no ambiguity going into this case we know for a fact that the accused our client is innocent and that Frank is not to be trusted so when the

trial starts and it's finally Frank's turn to take the stand this is the first pose we see look at this suck-up clearly he is hoping to come in here sweet-talk his way through his testimony and get out without a scratch now obviously this is not subtle characterization but it's not supposed to be this is a game of larger-than-life caricatures subtlety has no place here and he's already got some limited animation happening in this first pose just a set of three drawings on only his body to allow him to do that little sycophantic wiggle and this

is a particularly great touch because that back-and-forth movement not only adds to the cloyingly over friendly nature of the pose but it also gives Frank a sort of nervous energy and of course we know why he might be feeling nervous it's just two extra drawings but they have a big payoff so then the prosecutor asks his first question and it's a pretty simple little soft ball of a question but Frank's response is accompanied by a flash and a screen shake the Ace Attorney games use these full screen effects a lot for emphasis in this instance

it makes Frank's response feel kind of overeager like maybe he replied a little too suddenly or too loudly this is also where we see the additional drawings for Frank's talking mouth in this pose just his default mouth shape and three additional mouth poses playing on a loop now as Frank starts giving his testimony you might notice a subtle difference in his animation during the moments when he's speaking he is still holding that same pose as before but as the text appears on screen and his mouth flaps the speed of his wiggling increases slightly when he's

beautifully just standing there idle his little wiggle animates on twenty frame intervals but when he's talking that animation speeds up so that the drawing cycle every 15 frames or so which makes him feel a little more active on screen and I love this little efficiency the artists are altering the character's performance just through timing alone here without having to add any new art and we're gonna see them play with that timing a lot more in a second so Frank gives his testimony and wait a minute we find an inconsistency when we call him on it

that's when we see Frank's second pose and it's very similar to the first one in fact I think the body animation might be identical which again hey efficient but now his head is tilted downward slightly his brows are furrowed he's looking a little more worried he's starting to sweat and that body animation cycle is going even faster now the drawings are switching on eighth frame intervals plus we're starting to see more screen shake on his responses he is getting more and more nervous and that act he's been putting on is starting to feel less charming

and more desperate and does that not feel satisfying of course he does come up with a lie to dig himself out of that hole and he reverts to that original smarmy grin but then he gives revised testimony and aha another contradiction and with another flash and screen shake Frank is cornered again Phoenix calls him out on this latest lie and that's when we see a brief glimpse of pose number three an expression of furious shock kind of like when a cat digs their claws into your leg it's only onscreen for a second but it's a

telling sign we are beginning to break through the act and there's a little animation to this pose too so long as you don't blink you might see his toupee flap off of his forehead just a little it's a little bit of foreshadowing for you so Frank digs himself out of this lie also but this time he doesn't go back to the smarmy pose he sweats through his entire third attempt at testimony and when we call him on yet another inconsistency this time we get pose number 4 anger he's shaking his fist the screen is shaking

a lot on his dialog now his eyes are blinking just lightly out of sync which mmm that's good we are seeing a new side of Frank come out the true Frank who can't keep his anger in check we've almost got him you see what I mean about this animation acting as player feedback Frank's emotional state and also the emotional state of the prosecutor which is very fun to watch functions as evidence of your progress in this case and these emotional outbursts also weirdly function as a kind of celebration but as you wear the witness down

with more and more of your very good lawyering they're escalating nervousness and anger is your reward and if you can manage to keep pressing them and break through their last few desperate lies then the game will celebrate your victory with a relatively elaborate meltdown this is almost always the most animation you're going to see on these antagonist characters Frank's little toupee throw here requires a whopping seven new drawings or I guess closer to twelve if you include the hair and also Phoenix's expression it is no wonder players love these meltdowns so much because they are

immensely satisfying moments that you worked so hard to earn and the actual animation of these moments isn't even that impressive by most standards this would probably be considered kind of poor but the over-the-top comedy of the outburst still makes for an incredibly satisfying surprise but Frank's not done yet now that he's had his outburst we've got a sixth pose of pure rage and it has a lot of movement on it the Frank that started this trial is nowhere to be seen and when you deliver the final final blow the game has one more reward for

you a court case won by knockout that's some good lawyering we just did and that's it that's all of Frank's animation just seven or eight poses with some extremely limited movement thrown in for emphasis compared to most other hit games that's barely anything and yet it achieves everything it needs to in fact this style of limited but exaggerated animation is so effective that modern Ace Attorney titles are still using it the characters may all be 3d models now and the snippets of animation may have a bit more detail than they used to but everything is

still built on simple held poses accented with extremely limited specific motion and I'm actually shocked at how well this works in 3d granted the models aren't able to hit those old poses with quite the level of appeal as the original pixel art and drawings had but they do get like 95% of the way there and the constant use of unusually static poses makes the flourishes of animation even more appealing by contrast the animation in ASA tourney games is simple and impressive all at once aesthetically it has to strike this extremely delicate balance of adding just

enough movement to keep things feeling alive and expressive without that simplistic movement just feeling like bad animation to be cheap without feeling cheap basically the line between limited animation and bad animation can be extremely thin and Phoenix Wright does drift over that line with some frequency if I'm honest but when you're posing is this strong and when your characters are this expressive and their reactions are this satisfying I'm not sure any amount of clunky animation can ruin that like I said at the end of the day the eternal challenge of game animation is in delivering

the most bang for your buck and very few teams succeed in achieving this much while working with so little thanks once again to my patrons for choosing this topic this was not a franchise I was planning to dig into but I'm very happy you gave me the opportunity to do so if you would like to suggest a topic for a future new frame plus episode then consider supporting the show like all of these beacons of justice over here thank you for watching I'll see you next time [Music]