As any PW fan knows, however, none of the above gripes about controls really matter at all. If you purchase such a game, you’re looking for classic adventure gameplay, combined with some of the best story seen on the DS so far. What PW3 has, it has in spades, and it is, quite frankly, leaps and bounds above its predecessors.

PW3’s main storyline consists of five cases, as opposed to the usual four (the original PW for DS had a fifth case added, but this case was not in the original Gyakuten Saiban). The first case will take about an hour to finish, maybe longer, and all the others will take several hours to complete. Right from the get-go, however, you can tell that things are being kicked up a notch. The first case, usually a throwaway tutorial case, has an interesting storyline progression all its own, and its story ties in intricately with later parts of the game. It also sets a stellar tone for the rest of the game, which easily keeps up.

The typical storyline progression of an individual case is as follows: you start off with a client who’s been arrested for a crime, and you need to, over the course of the case, slowly figure out what really happened through a series of revelations and plot twists. With PW3, though, Capcom tries to shake things up a bit. Case 2, for example, starts off normally, but resolves itself surprisingly quickly. Shortly after, however, you discover that not only is the issue not resolved, but everything you know is wrong. It’s a very refreshing change, and Case 2 is one of my favorites as a result. This shaking up of things doesn’t apply quite as much to the rest of the game, however; the ending of Case 4, though, is chilling, completely unexpected, and unlike any ending that came before. So Capcom is definitely trying to go for new situations, and it works very well for them in PW3.