As a defense lawyer, you're suppose to protect your innocent client by providing evidence and pointing out contradictions in witness testimonies. Your first case has you learning the basics of the game. Listen to a witness testify and then cross examine them. If they say something a little off, you can "Press" them to see if they'll say a little more, and if you find a contradiction in their testimony, you can "Object" and provide evidence showing that they're lying. The first case moves pretty quick and it's over in no time, making you really wonder if five cases total will really be enough to keep you satisfied.

But when you start your second case, you're not thrown into the middle of a case you haven't heard about, you take on a case about a murder and have to investigate the crime scene. Pretty soon you'll have some leads, so visiting with them and asking some questions is a must since you'll find evidence that you can take with you to court the next day.

Soon, gathering evidence and questioning suspects is as much of a role as the actual court battle itself. It's once you realize that these cases can go on as long as three days that you understand why there's only 5 missions. They can become rather lengthy.

Almost too lengthy, as a matter of fact. If I wasn't interested in a particular story, the case would just seem to drag on and on forever. However, cases I thought were clever and fun had me intrigued and excited to see a case keep taking twists and turns.

The whole game is presented with still images and text. Basically it's a text game with a large amount of reading to be done. The character sprites are made well, and have slight animations to them, such as the blinking of eyes, or the twitching of a hand - and each character seems to have a set number of pictures for each expression: laughter, confusion, embarrassment, outrage, etc.

You can use either the stylus or the buttons to click through the game. Thankfully, all of the communication between characters is well written and makes things light and fun. The cases are very well written. There's a lot of mystery to them, and plenty to be discovered. Cases have taken some very interesting twists that I wasn't prepared for. If this game had boring predictable cases - wow it would really be a waste of everyone's time. But there's a lot to be figured out. Sometimes I would be on top of the case - and dish it out with quick thinking, but other times I would be absolutely lost - blindly throwing out evidence to see if I hit the right one.

At one point, it got so difficult that I had to look up the answer online, in which I couldn't believe they ever would have expected me to figure out a certain clue. It was ridiculous. But thankfully that was in the last case. The game gets more and more difficult as you move forward - and you need to be paying attention to what others say.

Sure you did, April...

The last mission, number 5, took such a sharp turn from the rest of the game. Suddenly, I was able to do features not available in the entire other part of the game - looking at evidence in true 3D, dusting for fingerprints, using a special spray to reveal blood, even watching a videotape of the crime committed with 3D character models, not 2D sprites. What I've come to realize is that this must be the additional case added to the DS, since dusting off fingerprints involved blowing into the microphone to blow away the access powder.

This began showing me that this game do do so much more than its simple "text-only" style gameplay. Suddenly I was turning pieces in a three-dimensional space to fit a broken piece of evidence back together. The game's previous four missions felt restricted. As though they "had" to keep things in the same sort of flow and presentation simply because that's the way they had programmed it initially. It felt like they couldn't break out of their own shell until mission five - which raised the question, "Why not take what you're doing in mission five and really expand upon it?"

Oh, "Objection"... classic. This is obviously a very unrealistic court game - which is probably why it's fun, and not boring.

The game is far from realistic. For instance, if I can't prove my defendant is not guilty in three days, they're automatically convicted of the murder. It seems more like a guilty until proven innocent instead of the reverse. I could also provide evidence that I stole from people's rooms. "Yes, your honor, here's the illegal wiretap I stole from their apartment while they weren't there... and without a search warrant."

Of course, I understand exactly why they do this - to keep the flow of the game running smoothly. One way they've made things interesting is instead of simply pressing the "object" button, you can activate the microphone and say it. You really have to say it too. It's interesting it doesn't pick up really well, especially since I'm activating the microphone specifically for the purpose of saying the only thing I can say.

The only thing that really bugged me about this game is my odd sidekick/friend who has ESP and can summon the spirit of her dead sister. Does that even really need to be in the game? This may not irritate everyone, but I was getting tired of having her doing all the talking for me at every scene - instead of my character thinking thoughts to myself. If I had it my way, I would have axed that little girl and done all of the talking myself.

I think this game is a lot of fun, but a little bit too restrained to a simple presentation. Plus the replay value is lacking - once you solve the cases they're done. They could really make this interesting if they built it up - they already have outstanding stories for the cases. Playing mission five shows they've got some neat ideas - now they just need to take things like that and really roll with them. This isn't to say that the game is bad - it's really good. I just know they could make this so much more if they didn't keep things quite so simple in terms of presentation and visuals.

Verdict: Fun game.