| 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. |
Episode 1: The First Turnabout is the first episode of the game Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney and follows Phoenix Wright's first case as a defense attorney. In his first trial, Wright 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, The First Turnabout is relatively simplistic. This episode is the shortest in the series, consisting of a single trial chapter. 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.
Crime
Stone lies dead on her floor.
Sahwit examines his handiwork in shock.
A small statue of "The Thinker" dripped with blood, while a woman lay dead on the wooden floor with her blood pooling around her head. The man standing over her began to panic.
| *gasp*... *gasp*... Dammit ... Why me? I can't get caught... Not like this! I-I've gotta find someone to pin this on... |
Suddenly the man smirked as he remembered seeing someone leaving earlier, and decided to pin the murder on him.
| Someone like ... him! I'll make it look like HE did it! |
Trial
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. Wright soon heard, then found, 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.
In the courtroom itself, both Prosecutor Winston Payne and Wright addressed the presiding judge, who tested Wright on the basic details of the case to determine whether he was ready to defend his client. After asking Payne for the murder weapon, The Thinker statue was accepted as evidence. Butz then took the stand, claiming that he and the victim had been destined to be together. Payne then provided a motive for Butz to have committed the murder: Stone had just dumped him and had many rich "sugar daddies" who bought her expensive gifts. Payne followed up with a question to Butz, asking where he had been on the day of the murder. Butz said that he had visited the apartment only to find Stone was not in, and so had subsequently left. Payne replied he had a witness that said otherwise.
Larry Butz leaving Cindy Stone's house, with Frank Sahwit lying in wait.
The prosecution called Frank Sahwit, a sycophantic newspaper salesman, to the stand. Sahwit testified that he saw Butz quickly leaving Stone's apartment at 1:00 p.m. Suspicious, he went to investigate, only to find Stone's dead body. He 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.
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 that Sahwit had 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., 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 it, 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. Wright then sounded the clock to prove that it was working on the day of the murder, although it was three hours slow. 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. Payne asserted that the attorney had no evidence to back up his claims, however Wright had the clock sounded in court. It announced the time three hours behind the current one, the exact same time discrepancy that was in Sahwit's testimony. Sahwit however 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. The clock was actually 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.
The victim walking in on Sawhit.
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
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.
Differences in the anime adaptation
- Main article: Gyakuten Saiban: Sono “Shinjitsu”, Igiari!
- Sahwit's toupee is blown off by the force of Wright's objection, rather than thrown by Sahwait at Wright's face when he is cornered.
- Flashbacks to Wright's fourth grade class trial are shown throughout the episode, alluding to how that impacted his decision to become a defense attorney. In the game, the class trial is not addressed until Turnabout Goodbyes. Additionally, the flashbacks make it seem as though Wright had been saved in the trial by Larry Butz, which obscures the truth that Miles Edgeworth was the instrumental party, as he had yet to be introduced by that point in the show. One flashback in particular has a young Butz standing up in defense of Wright before the shot cuts to a pointing finger while a voice objects. The hand shown and the voice heard are actually Edgeworth's, but this is barely noticeable and can be mistaken for Butz's.
- The date of the trial is March 26th in the anime and August 3rd in the game.
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.
Errors
- 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 passes out, the judge asks Payne about Sahwit's condition. However, when he does so, the judge refers to him as Payne's client, rather than his witness. This was corrected for Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy.
Notes
- This episode places the setting of the English localization of the Ace Attorney series in the Pacific Time Zone, which is nine hours behind the Central European Time Zone, which contains Paris, France. Official sources outside of the games (and two from the games themselves) place the setting specifically in Los Angeles, California.
- 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 at the time of the murder.
- This case is one of only a few in the entire series in which the killer is clearly shown in the introductory cutscene actually committing the crime (with the others being Turnabout Sisters, Turnabout Visitor, The Monstrous Turnabout, and The Foreign Turnabout).
- This is one of only three cases in which only one witness is cross-examined, with the others being Turnabout Visitor and the non-canonical Apollo Justice: Asinine Attorney.
Other languages
- Japanese - 初めての逆転 (Hajimete no Gyakuten; lit. "Turnabout for the First Time")
- French - La première volte-face (lit. "The First Turnabout")
- German - Der erste Wandel (lit. "The First Change")
- Spanish - El primer caso (lit. "The First Case")
- Italian - Banco di prova (lit. "Test Bench")
- Korean - 첫 번째 역전 (Cheot Beonjjae Yeokjeon; lit. "The First Turnabout")
