Fandom Friday-Turnabout Musical Soundtrack Review

It is once again Fandom Friday, and me oh my time to talk about what might be my favorite series of any medium, Ace Attorney. For those of you who might just vaguely know about Phoenix Wright through general internet osmosis and "Boot to the Head" memes, Ace Attorney, or Gyakuten Saiban in its home country, is a series where you play as an attorney. It's basically a mystery where instead of playing a detective searching for a culprit, you defend someone who has been wrongfully accused in court and find the real criminal to clear their name.

The series has amazing music, a good sense of humor, lots of delicious melodrama, and more plot holes than you'd expect. The games are flawed, but fun as hell and easily my favorite series of visual novels. And while it isn't the most popular series in the world, the Ace Attorney fandom has a reasonably sized presence online, making fan games, fan art, fan fiction...and today's review, a full musical.

Turnabout Musical, originally called "The Phoenix Wright Musical Project", was a community effort first put together by Pleading Eyes in 2007, and adapts the entire first game of the series into a musical. It's a full 4-act play, with a script and cast recorded soundtrack and everything. While I'd love to review the play itself, it has yet to actually be performed unabridged, what with it being 4+ hours in total, so instead I'll be focusing on the soundtrack put out by the team after nearly a decade of work.

Originally the team put out half the soundtrack, a highlight real as it were, but more recently the full album is out and available for free download. The whole story takes place in four acts. Act 1 has ten songs, and is adapts the first two cases of the game, The First Turnabout and Turnabout Sisters.

They give just enough time and focus for The First Turnabout, enough to make it clear that it's a small, fairly silly story that acts as an introduction to the world of court for Phoenix and the audience, and I love how well the song "Reawakening" transitions between the two cases. The songs for Turnabout Sisters cover the right parts of the story, though I do wish there had been a song for Redd White's testimony. As much I enjoyed Payne's "Rookie Killer", I think I would be willing to sacrifice it for the story beat.

Act 2 is entirely comprised of Turnabout Samurai, which is known as the "filler case" of the first game. While some use the word with derision, many fail to see how these cases, especially Turnabout Samurai, exist to firmly set the prosecution and assistant's characterization for the audience, so that they're well-acquainted enough by the game's climax for it to have the maximum impact. For all it's faults, the game's Turnabout Samurai accomplished this task quite well.

Now, Act 2 only has seven songs, and most of them focus on the cases's story and characters, so Maya sadly doesn't get much to do. Edgeworth, on the other hand, gets a good showing in two different songs, including his monologue song, "Decree of the Prosecutor". While I do overall like what they did with Act 2, they definitely could have put more focus on Maya, and emphasized different aspects of the original case than the ones they chose to.

The way the play is structured, there's a break between Acts 2 and 3, which is very much necessary because Acts 3 and 4 are both all about Turnabout Goodbyes, the last case and epic finale to the first game. Because of this, the case gets fourteen songs total, which more than allows it to fully encompass all the best moments of the case.

More than any of the other cases, Turnabout Goodbyes easily gets the best representation in the play, and the songs for it include some of the best in the entire musical. Overall, the play adapts the story of the game better than the film did, and in some ways even better than the anime adaptation.

Now, as much as I love it in terms of story adaptation, Turnabout Musical doesn't hold up as well musically. Now, this is a harder area for my to critique, because I know next to nothing about music theory, but I've listened to a lot of musicals, so I'll try and explain it as best I can.

Some songs sound really great, and while clearly were produced on a low budget still are enjoyable to listen to. The standout songs of the musical, for me, would probably be "Reawakening", "The Samurai Always Wins", "Decree of the Prosecutor", "It's Gotta be the Butz", and "600,000 Volts". Not only are all of these songs gifted lyrically, but they're well composed in addition to that. A lot of songs in this musical feature large numbers of characters all singing different lyrics at the same time, and in the ones where that happens listed above, it flows very well in a way where different characters move into the musical forefront in a way that naturally shifts your attention, but if you wanted to listen to what the others are singing, you can. It's good.

There are also a lot of generally okay to good songs, most of the ones in the musical are around that level, I would say. They capture the spirit of who or whatever they're adapting from the games and make you laugh as you listen, so good. But there are a few songs that really don't work. "Make it Right", "The Way Things Were", and "Beautiful Christmas Day" all try to use multiple characters but fail at composing it or arranging it in a way that keeps the listeners attention, and more often than not just sound messy and confusing.

On the subject of local talents, I have to heap more praise upon them. PleadingEyes, the creator of the project, also voices Maya Fey, and she captures the character's kindness, mischievousness, and quiet despair so perfectly that I can't stop hearing her voice whenever I read Maya's dialogue now. Enigmafade is similarly perfect as Larry Butz, the perennial lovable loser. Arri's performance as April May has ensured I can't imagine the character not having a Joisey accent now, and Arimnaes's demonic baritone and stellar acting as Manfred von Karma must be heard to be believed. There are a few people here and there that don't quite work, but they don't harm the production.

Overall, if you like musicals but know nothing of Ace Attorney, I'd definitely recommend downloading the full album. If you like it, maybe try the games? They're fun, I promise! And if you're a fellow Ace Attorney fan and you haven't listened to the finished product, you're doing yourself a disservice. Turnabout Musical is one of the most complete and most enjoyable fan-project experiences I've ever experienced, and it's inspired others to try and adapt Rise from the Ashes and Apollo Justice into their own musicals. So please, click the link and enjoy what you find.

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