Having finally completed The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles I can say this is probably my new favorite Ace Attorney game. I know it's actually two games from 3DS that only got a Japanese release in 2015 and 2017, but they were meant to be played together. The story was written as a whole by series creator Shu Takumi, who wasn't working on the mainline games anymore. It did take me about six months to complete as I took breaks between cases to not get burned out and to better absorb the story.

The tone of the game is much more grounded than other Ace Attorney games. No longer set in the nebulously defined land which fans call "Japanifornia" but primarily in London *around* 1900, but don't bother looking for a definitive year that aligns with real people and events.
The Japanese protagonists have to deal with quite a bit of xenophobia from the people of London who would already see them as untrustworthy, especially in a court of law. However that doesn't mean the game isn't funny or without ridiculous characters. There are many ridiculous witnesses and jury members, and of course, Herlock Sholmes. His character is already hard to describe, but he will also create inventions that mirror our current technology that put him pretty far into steampunk fantasy.

Ryunosuke feels more competent than Phoenix, relying less on bluffing and more on eliminating the impossible. He's earnest but still fun with his interactions with Sholmes. I do wish his voice actor gave a stronger "Objection!" Assistant Susato is pretty calm, knowledgeable, sweet but serious, but is a total fangirl for Sholmes. Meanwhile the primary antagonistic prosecutor feels smarter when it comes to standard law practices when compared to those we've seen in the past. All of the other main characters were very enjoyable. If I didn't care for character initially, I had grown to like them by the end with their complex motivations and moral shades of gray. Most 'one-off' characters were good as well, but there were a few annoying ones too.

The music is phenomenal with many songs that stick with you long after you stop playing, orchestral sounding pieces with lots of stringed instruments, accordions, and harpsichords. There isn't much else to say besides me just gushing about each song individually.

The overall story is great with several shocking moments. There are are some moments that were less shocking and were more expected. I suppose that balances out but some of the unsurprising moments reminded me of events in the original trilogy. For the individual cases, most I couldn't stop once starting. The first two cases did feel a little slow, like I had figured out things out ahead of the story, and the first case took about 4 to complete. And there was one case that kinda annoyed me with its crime and characters, but the rest are some of the best cases in franchise. All of the cases are pretty long, but it's not a problem for the good ones.

The game has many quality of life features that make it hard to go back to previous entries: reviewing recently mentioned text, seeing at-a-glance how many parts a witness testimony has and which part you're currently viewing, and an auto-play toggle to automatically advance dialog after short moment so you don't have to press a button to advance to the next text box. The game also has a 'story mode' setting where the game plays itself for you to watch, solving puzzles for you. I never used it to try it (it disables achievements.) I hope future games have full voice acting. Also many characters have their dialect written into their text, so I had to read some lines aloud to understand what they were saying. I can see this being more difficult for non-native English speakers, so an option for plain text would be cool to see.

Graphically the game looks great. The backgrounds and character designs are fantastic, no complaints here. While the other Ace Attorney 3DS games kinda made me miss the 2D sprites, this game is how I want to see the series look going forward. Characters are able to interact and look at each and into the background. The camera pans and sweeps add a lot of flair to the scenes they're used. The game is locked at 30fps and looks fine, but if you have it on Steam, you can install a mod to increase it to 60fps and the character animations look so silky smooth.

I highly recommend this game for fans of the previous game, or ones who thought the prior games were too silly, or newbies who have been interested in these silly visual novel games and want to see the best they have to offer.