Reviewing Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane is fairly simple. It is a visual novel themed after the Ace Attorney franchise. You already know most of what is involved so the only thing you need to know is this: The story builds up and pays off well. It does not become a vehicle for the writer's pet issues. The writer has written stories before and can properly use the tension and flow of the format well. The finale is quite good. The music is excellent. It is not as good as Shu Takumi's work but even the main AA franchise was not either. The girls are all beautiful and charming and the game credits a "Waifu Consultant," alongside excellent art. Technically, that is all you need to know if you are a discerning shopper of VNs, especially OEL VNs which have a storied history (of being typically irredeemable.). This is worth your time and written by someone who has a spirit capable of good writing.
But for the rest of you, and for the sake of the format, I can go into more traditional detail. As an Ace Attorney style game, Tyrion Cuthbert (TC:AA) is a defense attorney in a fantasy kingdom. Magic is common, but wielded by the nobles primarily. The nobles rule everything and are, on average, jerks, and Tyrion wants to fight the corrupt courts and protect the little guy as a defense attorney. This quickly becomes the background as you very soon meet tolerable nobles and all the murders you then start to have to investigate are keyed around the personal drama of the story than some overarching "nobles bad" cliche. Tyrion is an orphan, you see, and he has a mysterious, even to Tyrion himself, special power to see into people's hearts that apparently has no relation to magic as it is practiced by every other character in the story. This manifests through the VN segments as seeing characters' thoughts and emotions as icons and floating text and with occasional mindreading during the trials. Tyrion's girl Friday for his adventure is Celeste McCoy, also an orphan, a charming mercenary sweetheart who is essentially every single waifu characteristic rolled up into one character. In any more serious story, a 19 year old mercenary badass, sweetheart, smug, a little dumb but gifted and talented, easily flustered, loving to her adoptive parents, and loyal to Tyrion to the ends of the earth... that would be an utterly ridiculous character. But let me remind you this is the sort of game where when you have a climactic argument, life bars for the parties involved appear in the corners of the screen. For this sort of story, I deeply appreciate the pandering and Celeste sticks all of these character traits wonderfully without being overbearing. She is technically the brawn and Tyrion the brains, but neither at the expense of the other. A modern western story would write a bunch of grrl power jokes with this setup and most Japanese stories would have pouting dum-dum gags at Celeste's expense between action scenes but TC:AA does neither. As a result, both characters feel fully featured and the romantic tension between them flows a bit more naturally than what you would expect. Tyrion still feels like the man and Celeste the woman despite the latter being the only one good in a fight.
I talk a lot about the fireworks between the hero and heroine, but this is an important part of the story in a slight deviation from the Ace Attorney formula. It is very much a story about Tyrion and Celeste meeting and bonding over investigating a series of murders together. Fairly early in the story a character with a sprite that can ONLY be malevolent shows up and immediately starts abusing the fourth wall. The game does absolutely nothing to play coy with this; it may as well be holding up a neon sign reading "Villain here!" and saying "Howdy folks, welcome to Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane! But I know none of you have the brains to make it to the final case where I'll be waiting, nyeh-heh-heh!" And there is one slight, very slight spoiler I wish to make here: The fourth wall stuff is a parlor trick to look cool. The actual thrust of the story remains entirely, thankfully, inside its own universe. I suspect it the show is all a wink and a nod from the writer to ensure the villain has a presence and to call a few of the finale's shots early. I hesitate to call it foreshadowing as it is incredibly explicit and to speculate further might lead to actual spoilers, so I leave off for now.
With five cases and about 10 hours of play, the overall product remains still structured like an Ace Attorney game. The first couple of cases are a bit rough, but stick with it and by the end of case 2 you should start to see the talent of the writer really begin to gel. Again, nothing here approaches the heights of Shu Takumi, the man who practically invented this subgenre, but very few writers can, and that is not a reasonable standard to hold people to, especially at the price point. On a more fair curve, TC:AA is a fine game and definitely worth your time if you crave another Ace Attorney style story.
