Nina Aquila: Legal Eagle makes no attempt to hide its clear Ace Attorney inspirations, so of course it’s a game I was excited to check out.

You play Nina Aquila, a rookie defense attorney. Nina Aquila: Legal Eagle Season One contains three cases, and while a fourth is teased at the end, I believe it will be part of the as-yet-unreleased Season Two.

Unlike its inspiration, Nina Aquila isn’t a visual novel. Instead, it’s presented from a top-down perspective and you walk around the game’s environments to gather evidence and speak with characters during the investigation segments. There’s even a city map, although I didn’t feel the map added much beyond a better sense of the game’s world.

The game also includes some gameplay to shake up the formula. In the second case, this comes in the form of a card battle game, where you summon monsters to fight your opponent’s monsters, since the crime took place at a card tournament. In the third case, which involves street racers, it’s a racing game that uses a rock-paper-scissors system with a couple twists. These are mandatory sections, but there’s an option to make them impossible to lose if you don’t care for that aspect of the gameplay.

Somehow, the racing game still manages to feel tedious in spite of that just for how long the races take and how many there are. Even if you put the races on auto, you still have to sit through the entire race.

If the second season continues to have special gameplay sections like this, I hope they aren’t as tedious as the racing. Adding gameplay is an interesting idea, but I found myself impatient during it. I didn’t want to do all these races; I wanted to look for evidence and investigate the mystery! As a result, I enjoyed the trials more than the investigations even though the investigation segments were lengthier and more unique.

During trial segments, you cross-examine witnesses by pressing their statements and presenting evidence when you find a contradiction, complete with “Hold it!” and “Objection!” voice clips (like I said, it’s not subtle about its inspiration).

The first case is pretty simple, since it functions as a tutorial, while the second and third cases are more involved. I particularly liked the mystery in the third case, since it was complicated enough to have me trying to fit the pieces together the entire time and feeling triumphant when I started to see where it was going.

Along with the individual cases, there’s also an overarching story. However, since it isn’t concluded in this season, I don’t have much of a feeling for it.

The characters are more or less fine. Nina bugged me at first but grew on me over time as she developed, as did her assistant Dylan, who joins the cast in the second case. The weakest member of the cast sadly is Prosecutor Chad Hawke, who is just… kind of boring. He’s smug and sometimes rude, but not enough to be interesting or feel like a threat. Strangely, the characters talk about him like he’s more interesting than he is; I can’t share in their shock at him doing normal things like a normal person when I don’t have that strong of an impression of him to start with.

(Thanks to Ace Attorney, every prosecutor I ever encounter in a mystery game is an Edgeworth in my mind until they distinguish themselves, and I’m afraid to say that right now he’s still just a much less interesting Edgeworth.)

Anyway, Nina Aquila: Legal Eagle Season One was a mixed bag for me. I enjoyed the trial segments (aside from wishing the prosecutor would be more interesting) and solving each case, while the investigations each had something that dragged them down a bit for me. Still, I look forward to hearing about Season Two whenever the next cases of Nina Aquila are ready.

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