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The First Turnabout
Transcript Transcript (JP)

Mia Fey
Well, I have to say Phoenix, I'm impressed! Not everyone takes on a murder trial right off the bat like this. It says a lot about you... and your client as well.

The First Turnabout is the first episode of the game Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney and the first story arc of the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy anime adaptation, consisting of the single episode "The First Turnabout". In Phoenix Wright's first trial as a defense attorney, he must defend his childhood friend Larry Butz, who has been accused of murdering his ex-girlfriend Cindy Stone. Phoenix Wright, Mia Fey, Larry Butz, Winston Payne, Frank Sahwit, and the most frequently appearing judge all make their debuts in this episode.

Even among all of the introductory "tutorial" episodes in the Ace Attorney games, Episode 1: The First Turnabout is relatively simplistic. This episode is the shortest in the series, consisting of a single trial act that is rather short even compared to other single-act episodes of the series. Additionally, although the player has the ability to press witness statements, this functionality is not formally introduced until the following episode, and thus is not strictly necessary to progress in this episode.

Timeline[]

To edit the information in this table, go to Template:Timeline and edit the information there.
Date Event type / related incident Description Notes
1972 Birth Frank Sahwit Ages three years between The First Turnabout and The Imprisoned Turnabout
December 2015 The First Turnabout (anime) Phoenix Wright is certified as an attorney. Occurs three months before the events of The First Turnabout in the anime
December 2015 The First Turnabout (anime) Phoenix Wright is certified as an attorney. Occurs three months before the events of The First Turnabout in the anime
December 2015 The First Turnabout (anime) Phoenix Wright is certified as an attorney. Occurs three months before the events of The First Turnabout in the anime
March 26, 2016 The First Turnabout (anime) Trial of Larry Butz for the murder of Cindy Stone. Phoenix Wright makes his court debut. No other date is given in the anime for any other event related to the incident.
March 26, 2016 The First Turnabout (anime) Trial of Larry Butz for the murder of Cindy Stone. Phoenix Wright makes his court debut. No other date is given in the anime for any other event related to the incident.
July 30, 2016 The First Turnabout Cindy Stone returns from her trip to Paris, France. N/A
July 31, 2016 The First Turnabout Cindy Stone is murdered. N/A
August 3, 2016 The First Turnabout (Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney) Trial of Larry Butz for the murder of Cindy Stone. Phoenix Wright makes his court debut. N/A

Arc details[]

Game Anime
Episode 1: The First Turnabout "The First Turnabout (anime)"

Crime[]

Sahwitweapon2

Sahwit examines his handiwork in shock.

A small statue of "The Thinker" was dripping with blood, while a young woman lay dead on the wooden floor with blood pooling around her head. The man standing over her began to panic, not having intended to kill her, and now afraid of being found guilty of murder. However, the man then recalled seeing someone leaving the building earlier, and he decided to pin the murder on him.

Trial[]

9:47 a.m.

Phoenix Wright was nervous at the prospect of being in court as a defense attorney for the first time, especially since his first trial was a murder case, but his mentor, Mia Fey, soon appeared to give him some moral support, along with a copy of the victim's autopsy report. Wright explained to Fey that he owed his client a favor, since he was part of the reason Wright had become a lawyer in the first place. Right on cue, Wright heard and then saw a panic-stricken Larry Butz, his best friend since grade school and now his first client. Wright tried to calm his friend's nerves, but Butz seemed to be more concerned about a life without Cindy Stone, who was the victim and had been his girlfriend, than his own verdict.

10:00 a.m.

In the courtroom itself, both Prosecutor Winston Payne and Wright addressed the presiding judge, who tested the rookie attorney on the basic details of the case to determine whether he was ready to defend his client. The judge asked Payne to submit the murder weapon into evidence: a small statue of The Thinker. Butz then took the stand. Payne told him Stone had dumped him, which Butz angrily denied, believing that he and the victim had been destined to be together, though he did admit that she had not been answering his phone calls or want to see him.

Payne, looking to agitate Butz into incriminating himself with a motive, revealed that Stone had returned overseas with one of "them". He presented Stone's passport to the court, explaining that she had been in Paris until the day of the murder. He further disclosed that she had maintained relationships with several "sugar daddies" who gave her money and gifts to support her lifestyle. Payne's plan worked, with Butz calling Stone "a cheatin' she-dog" and saying that he would get to the bottom of it when he met her in the afterlife.

Sahwitmemory

Butz leaving Stone's house, with Sahwit lying in wait.

The prosecution then called Frank Sahwit, a sycophantic newspaper salesman, to the stand. Sahwit testified that he had seen Butz quickly leaving Stone's apartment at 1:00 p.m. Suspicious, he went to investigate, only to find Stone's dead body. He subsequently left to find a public payphone in order to contact the police. The judge asked why Sahwit had not simply used the victim's phone, but Payne explained that there was a five-hour blackout at the time that prevented him from doing so.

Sahwitmemory2

The scene as testified by Sahwit.

In the subsequent cross-examination, Wright pointed out that the autopsy report placed the time of death at 4:00 p.m., so it would have been impossible for Sahwit to have found Stone dead at 1:00 p.m. Although Payne objected, claiming that Sahwit must have simply forgotten the time, the judge doubted this; Sahwit had been very sure of the time in his testimony, and so the judge asked him why this was.

Sahwit claimed that he heard the time from the T.V., and that the victim must have been watching a taped program at the time of her death, but Wright pointed out that the blackout would have made it impossible for him to do so. Sahwit then claimed that he saw the time on a clock in Stone's apartment, which was also the murder weapon. Wright objected again; the murder weapon that had been accepted into evidence earlier was a statue, not a clock.

However, Payne revealed that The Thinker statue did indeed double as a clock; by tilting the neck of The Thinker, it spoke the time. However, Wright refused to back down; there was no way Sahwit could have known about the clock function without having held it in his own hand, yet he had claimed to have not entered the apartment upon finding Stone's body. Wright stated that Sahwit assumed the time to be 1:00 p.m. because he was the real killer. As he killed Stone, the clock announced the time, leaving a strong impression on him.

Sahwit, infuriated at Wright's ruining of his testimony, began to breakdown on the stand, discarding his sycophantic demeanor and angrily throwing his toupee at Wright's face. The enraged witness asserted that Wright had no evidence to back up his claims, to which he responded by having the clock sounded in court; the time it announced was three hours behind the current time, which was the exact same discrepancy that was in Sahwit's testimony. However, Sahwit asserted that this was meaningless without proof that the clock was running three hours slow on the actual day of the murder. Although Wright briefly panicked at what seemed an impossible thing to prove, with some assistance from Fey he realized that he already had what he needed and presented his final evidence: Stone's passport from her trip to Paris. Rather than three hours behind, the clock was in fact nine hours ahead at Paris local time; Stone had taken the clock with her on her trip and had neglected to reset the time upon her return. Sahwit, finally defeated, hyperventilated on the stand, foamed at the mouth and collapsed. He was soon arrested and Butz was cleared of all charges.

Whathappened1

The victim walking in on Sahwit.

It was revealed that Sahwit was actually a common burglar who masked his trade by posing as a newspaper salesman to learn when residents left their homes, and had planned to rob Stone's apartment while she was on her trip to Paris. When he arrived, he saw Butz leaving the apartment and decided to steal the valuables quickly before anyone returned. However, Stone happened to return just then and caught him in her apartment. Sahwit panicked and struck her over the head with the nearest item he could find, The Thinker clock, killing her. The clock's voice rang out "I think it's 1 o'clock", and Stone died from the head trauma.

Aftermath[]

2:32 p.m.

After the trial, Fey congratulated Wright on his win. Butz interrupted in hysterics again, this time believing that Stone had not cared about him at all. Wright then presented The Thinker clock to him; she would not have carried such a bulky clock around unless it had some significance. Butz gave Fey another Thinker clock; he had made two as a memento of his and Stone's relationship. Fey then offered Wright dinner to celebrate Butz's acquittal. She also told Wright to tell her the story about how Butz had influenced his decision to become a lawyer over drinks sometime. Butz then slapped Wright on the back and told him: "Gee, Nick, it's good to have friends!", but the defense attorney had the feeling that he was not going to get paid, unless the clock he had given Fey counted.

Wright was unaware of it then, but the clock given to Fey would soon be at the center of another incident, and his promise to tell Fey about Butz and himself would be one he would be unable to keep.

Development[]

Turnabout Sisters was the first case in early drafts of Gyakuten Saiban. However, major changes in character designs and roles, notably of the mentor, the assistant, and prosecutors Winston Payne and Miles Edgeworth, called for drastic changes to that case, and so another case was placed before Turnabout Sisters as the first case, which became The First Turnabout.

Cultural references[]

  • When describing his relationship to the victim, Butz states that they were like Romeo and Juliet, or Cleopatra and Mark Anthony, to which Wright thinks, "Didn't they all die?" Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra are both tragedies written by the playwright William Shakespeare.
  • When asked for evidence to prove why the clock was running slow, if anything other than Stone's passport is presented, the judge will challenge Wright, who then thinks: "D'oh! That wasn't it!" "D'oh!" is a catchphrase often used by the fictional character Homer Simpson in the long-running American animated sitcom The Simpsons, normally when something's gone wrong for him.
  • When Fey questions Butz's belief that Stone didn't care about him, he says "Ex-squeeze me", instead of "excuse me". "Exsqueeze me" and "baking powder" are used as substitutes for "excuse me" and "beg your pardon", respectively, by the fictional character Wayne Campbell in the Wayne's World films.

Localization changes[]

  • With Japan being in a single time zone, the main setting of the original Japanese version of the games is unclear, aside from that it is somewhere in Japan. Mika Takabi (Cindy Stone) instead travels to New York in the Japanese version, and The Thinker clock is 14 hours behind due to being set to Eastern Standard Time. This is actually an error on the part of the developers, as New York practices daylight saving time like most of the United States, and thus it should be 13 hours slow in August.
  • The English localization of The First Turnabout places the setting in the Pacific Time Zone, which is nine hours behind the Central European Time Zone, which contains Paris, France. Other lines in the series place the setting specifically in Los Angeles, California.
  • In the French localization, Cindy Stone visits Sydney, which is said to be nine hours ahead of France. This time difference is an error, as the actual time difference would be eight hours in August. Although the difference between the two locales during their standard times is indeed nine hours (France UTC +1; New South Wales, Australia UTC +10), August falls during a time period when France observes daylight saving time (and thus UTC +2) while New South Wales does not.
  • In the unofficial Brazilian Portuguese fan localization[1], the setting is changed to São Paulo, a Brazilian city with a sizeable Japanese community; in order to keep the time difference contradiction at the center of the episode, the clock is eight and a half hours ahead as the victim traveled to Mumbai, India.

Trilogy script changes[]

The following changes were made in the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy releases of The First Turnabout:

  • One of the questions that the judge asks at the beginning of the trial is what the victim's name is. When Fey realizes that Wright has temporarily forgotten the victim's name, she says, "Look, the defendant's name is listed in the Court Record" (instead of "Look, the victim's name is listed in the Court Record"). This was corrected for Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy.
  • After Sahwit hyperventilates and collapses, the judge asks Payne about Sahwit's condition. When he does so, the judge refers to him as Payne's "client", which would actually be correct terminology when referring to an attorney's witness. However, this was changed to Payne's "witness" for Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy, presumably due to the likelihood of a player erroneously considering it a mistake.


Other languages[]

  • Chinese - 第一次的逆轉 (Dìyīcì ·de Nìzhuǎn; lit. "Turnabout for the First Time")
  • Portuguese - A Primeira Reviravolta (lit. "The First Turnabout")
  • Arabic - التّغيّر الأوّل (lit. "The First Change")
  • Russian - Первое дело (lit. "The First Case")

References[]

  1. Nossa tradução de Ace Attorney Jacutem Sabão. Retrieved on 2019-02-08.
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