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Why Everyone Hates It: By popular opinion, Apollo Justice ruined the Ace Attorney series by totally derailing the main character of a very plot-driven series, and for some reason leaving all the others out. Another large number of people avoid the whole series altogether, on the assumption that there's nothing to it but frustrating adventure game non-logic, with the only solution being to think of the one single solution the designer happened to in any situation.
Legitimate Issues With the Game: Both of these publicly perceived flaws actually are to be found in the game. They are however fairly vindicated when viewed in proper context.
Why I Like It Anyway: The Ace Attorney series in general makes for a really interesting and unique experience, while standing out as just about the only mainstream source of solid adventure games available between the horror genre phasing puzzles out of their equation and Telltale single-handedly reviving the LucasArts approach. Apollo Justice, over all its predecessors, has the most variety to its gameplay, and quite frankly, the least reliance on magical deus ex machinas.
Let's begin with a look at the series as a whole. The premise of every game is that you are playing as a defense attorney in a world which, on the surface, is extremely light-hearted and goofy, where cartoonish weirdos with bizarre joke names, zany tics, and an almost universal trend of being unbelievably dense. This makes it all the more jarring when you realize that every single one of these characters actually has an extremely traumatic backstory, half of them are depraved murderers, and the criminal justice system ruled over by the kindly absent-minded judge has everyone who is ever brought to trial on murder charges sentences to death unless the defense can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that someone else was the culprit, ideally with a full confession, within a maximum of three days in the courtroom. The contrast is honestly somewhat horrific.
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Naturally, every single trial presented in the games involves you defending someone who has been framed for murder, often with an outlandish backdrop, like a circus, the set of a Super Sentai show, or a seance. The actual gameplay shifts between two general modes. The first is a traditional point and click adventure as you explore crime scenes, interview people, and gather evidence, or just relax on future crime scenes the day before things go down. The second is in the courtroom, as the prosecution presents various witnesses, whose testimony the player then runs through line by line, optionally pressing for extra information on each, and presenting contradictory evidence when a statement is clearly untrue.
This is the point where the flawed logic enters into things. Frequently, you will know exactly how a murder happened and have a piece of rather damning evidence, but can't present it yet. Frustrating, sure. However, in a world with such rigid and arbitrary legal system, populated with people with exceptionally poor reasoning skills, having to really hold everyone's hands to get from point A to point B can't be argued not to make sense. Jump too far ahead and everyone would just be confused.
The first three games in the series tend to focus very heavily on a small number of characters. Someone involved in an alarming number of cases is closely related to the protagonist, his mentor, assistant, or chief rival, if not one of those characters directly. This is especially true in the final case of each game, where in an effort to top the rest of the game to that point, the culprit tends to be a total monster, having some decades spanning laundry list of crimes, framing children for murder, trying to wipe out entire bloodlines out of pure spite. The end result of this after three games is that all these cute cartoony characters have astoundingly horrible and traumatic lives that just seem to get perpetually worse.
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Wanting a clean break, since frankly, these characters are as saturated with drama as is possible without outright murdering them, when the series made the move to the DS from the GBA and began incorporating some interesting multimedia gimmickry into gathering and presenting of evidence, the lead developer wanted to make a clean break and focus on a completely new cast of characters. This would likely have worked out fine, had it been allowed. Instead, pressure was put on the team to include, at the very least, the main character of the previous games as a prominent character. This lead to the rather gutsy decision to skip ahead several years and bring back Phoenix Wright, the goofy, bumbling, inexperienced lawyer, as a disbarred, friendless, jaded wino, serving as a mentor figure to his amusingly named replacement, Apollo Justice. Somewhat understandably, this was upsetting to most fans of the series, not so much because of the treatment of Phoenix, which is honestly handled surprisingly well, but because the other regulars are nowhere to be seen. While in practical terms, the reason none put in so much as a quick cameo is that the game is really trying to focus on its new cast and mechanical changes, having no in-game reason given is rather disconcerting. For everyone to have just drifted apart goes against everyone's established personalities, making it a little too easy to imagine that future games may reveal all sorts of tragedies during the timeskips, where assorted fan favorite characters are revealed to have been killed off or framed for murder during the gap between the third and fourth games.
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The end result of this is that the whole plan to make a clear break became a bit of a backfire, with very few people willing to give Apollo Justice a fair assessment on its own terms, and apparently scaring the developers into abandoning sequel plans, shifting to a focus on spin-offs set close to the earlier games and the characters from them. This is real a shame because in many ways, Apollo Justice was setting off in a much better direction than it's predecessors.
Tonally, it's a much more balanced game. While we still have high drama and cartoonish characters, the mood swings are less extreme, and the general implication is that the corrupt, dystopian legal system is undergoing some reform, which is both comforting plot wise, and frees the designers from a few conventions that were getting a tad long in the tooth. The gameplay in general is more interesting, moving beyond pointing out suspicious bits of photographs to things like isolating sounds with high end recording equipment, 3D object manipulation, and dusting for prints with an amusingly DS-specific interface.
Then there's the primary gimmicks of the game. After the original Ace Attorney, increasing emphasis was placed on the use of a magic necklace that shows when people are really holding back some dark secret. While this added to the investigation scenes by adding in an in-depth interrogation mechanic, it's really not something that fits in a game about exercising pure logic in a real world setting. Nor does the number of cases directly involving an order of mystics channeling the spirits of the dead and taking on their physical characteristics, another thing the second and third games brought to the table.
Apollo Justice replaces this with the ability of the main character to spot tells. At various points in the game, an option exists to zoom in and carefully observe a character, as they deliver a chunk of dialog in slow motion, trying to identify subtle tics that indicate they may be lying, giving you a focus for further questioning. Much more appropriate to the game's premise, and a welcome break from the present item, discuss item flow of the game. Granted, this mode is still activated by selecting a magical totem from your inventory, but at least they made an effort.
