So, first, let's talk presentation. I quite like the background music, it's pretty fitting and the main theme is super catchy. Some of the court themes are a little underwhelming, but overall I'd say the music does its job pretty well. Both the OPs and one of the EDs are very idoly - if you like idol music, you'll probably like them. If you don't, then you probably won't. The other ED is a (in my opinion) very nice pop ballad. Cool.
So, the character design. I actually think the characters generally look pretty visually appealing. They all look pretty similar if not identical to how they look in the games. Well, when they're not moving. Unfortunately, the animation is not so good. The characters are nearly always horribly off model. Not in a good KonoSuba way, in a "this anime was far too rushed and lacking a decent budget" kind of way. The animations aren't nice looking or interesting, they're just dull and bad. Also, side note, the background characters' faces in this show look hideous. I get that they're going to look as good as the foreground characters - that would be pointless - but they just look appalling in this, sometimes even to the point of being distracting. When the faces in your show look distractingly bad, that's when there's a problem.
There are also some strange changes to the story. I should note first though that there were always going to have to be some changes when adapting this series to anime. I understand this. Some changes were actually really good. Having screens in court to replace the game's UI works really well. That was a good change. On the other hand, sometimes certain characters were replaced with other ones for no reason whatsoever. It doesn't improve the show in any way, and just serves to confuse fans of the games. It's not like it ruined the show or anything, it just seemed super weird and unnecessary. Oh well.
But now I want to talk about what I believe to be the real problem with this anime is. The reason fans of the games and newcomers alike found it to be pretty "meh". These games just don't work very well in a non-interactive medium. The whole joy of the Ace Attorney series comes from that "aha!" moment when you finally find a lie in a witness's testimony, when you discover a damning piece of evidence, and when you nail a killer. The whole satisfaction of these moments is YOU working it out, and that just doesn't really work as an anime. Sure, it can still be interesting to find out who did it and how in the anime, but the real satisfaction, the thing that made the series as successful as it is, comes from the interactivity of the game medium.
So I think this anime wasn't awful. It had many enjoyable moments, and there are aspects that I really do like about it. But in somes ways, it never could have lived up the the heights of the games for me, and I think for many others too. It can be an interesting companion to the games, and I enjoyed seeing the stories I loved animated on screen, but as a stand alone series, I'm afraid that this anime was, in my opinion, a failure.
Nevertheless, I look forward to the next season. Maybe the animation will be better. I hope so.
