Maya finally gets the fuck out of the way so that Edgeworth and Phoenix can hug it out. Edgeworth still has troubled puppy dog eyes, and finds himself unable to say anything for a while. So many emotions! “Wright. …I…I’m not sure how to say this,” he begins, clutching his sleeve and looking down to the side. Unlike yesterday, when Phoenix thought Edgeworth was going to break up with him in front of the entire courthouse, he knows Edgeworth is just struggling for a way to express his deep feelings for the man who saved his sweet ass in there. But then fucking Maya has to butt in and go, “I know! I know! Try ‘thank you.'” God damn it, Maya! Edgeworth manages an awkward thank you, but that isn’t good enough for Maya, who I guess wanted him to blow Phoenix right there. It’s all kind of adorable because Edgeworth is bad at feelings, but that’s for the two men to work out later using various body parts.
I’m sure Phoenix would be willing to teach you.
Speaking of which, Phoenix is just about to head down the hall to the plush spacious men’s room, with Edgeworth following a discreet distance behind, but then Gumshoe has to barge into their moment to yell a congratulatory “Whoooooooooooooop!” in Edgeworth’s face. He’s so stoked that Edgeworth won’t be the girlfriend of a large hairy inmate, he offers to take them all out to dinner to celebrate. Although he has no money so they’ll have to eat at the Junes food court or whatever. Anyway, Maya thinks Edgeworth should use Gumshoe’s spastic behavior as an example of how to thank Phoenix. So Edgeworth lets out an extremely awkward “Whooooooooooooop!” and immediately feels like a huge jackass. I don’t know why he went along with it at all, but I still don’t know why he went out on a midnight boat ride with a skeevy old dude, so this, too, will have to remain a mystery. Even after that display, Phoenix’s boner for Edgeworth has not died, and he remarks to himself, “It’s been fifteen years since I’ve seen Edgeworth this…unguarded.” Yeah, so get in there already!
But before he can, fucking Lotta of all people shows up to provide her congratulations, instead of serving time for her crimes against humanity and recappers. You know what? Fuck this. I have written way too much to deal with her fucking bullshit right now. I don’t know why Edgeworth doesn’t kick her in the ovaries after what she pulled on the first day of the trial, but everyone kind of plays off that incident like it was no big deal. Phoenix, his boner now a thing of the past, even asks her what she’s doing with her life. She quit her short-lived career as a photographer and went back to her crap college. WHOOOOOOOOOOO CAAAAAAAAAAAAARES.
Oh man, and then Larry Butz shows up. Of course he does. He’s acting all suicidal with the sparkly jizz tears again, and says that Kiyance is leaving him to move to Paris. Oh my stars! I can’t believe Larry’s totally legitimate girlfriend left the country just as Miles Edgeworth was found innocent! How terrible that she will never get to meet Larry’s childhood friend because they are not the same person! Larry and Edgeworth have a short reunion, and Larry, blushing, slips him a gift inside an envelope. “That’s unusual for you,” Edgeworth comments, hoping the gift isn’t a close-up photo of Larry’s penis. Not that he would have a problem with that, but right in front of Phoenix is not a good time. Gumshoe invites “Harry Butz” along to the party, which will surely not be full of tears and drunken slapfights, with all this soap opera love quadrangle stuff going on.
When did Maya become such an expert on buttsex?
So Edgeworth shows Phoenix what was in the envelope Larry gave him — apparently it wasn’t anything private, but $38 in cash. Phoenix doesn’t get the significance of that at first — beyond it being the number of buttsex — and then basically goes, “Oh shit.” Even Maya remembers where that number came from. It turns out that young Larry Butz was the actual culprit in the Great Lunch Money Heist of fifteen years ago. Phoenix screams at him with lots of exclamation points, and Edgeworth just says, “What are you so surprised about, Wright?” He narrates the facts of the case, which is so what I need right now after the last Jesuszillion pages of recapping past cases. Edgeworth reminds Phoenix that Larry “took the day off” from school — like how is that even a thing? — “[B]ut he was bored, he came into school anyway. Then he saw the money lying there… and the rest is history.” Wow, so this was a secret that Larry and Edgeworth kept for all these years, while ignorant Phoenix built his entire life around Miles Edgeworth? I can’t say that comes as a surprise.
So it turns out that Edgeworth was lying all along about not remembering the incident. Until now, he claimed he only suspected Larry. Mainly because it was so out of character for Larry to stick up for Phoenix like he did. “Wright, you may not know this, but we used to have a saying back in school. ‘When something smells, it’s usually the Butz.'” So we’ve come full circle back to this saying, all the way from the beginning of the recap and even the game. Edgeworth continues to rub it in that Phoenix was slow to figure out the truth, like that’s a major surprise to anyone. Phoenix is hurt that his sweet Miles would keep such a major secret from him all these years. There’s some banter about the statute of limitations on Larry’s crime running out — oh, how fun and appropriate to joke about this topic today!
“Where does that leave me!? I became a defense attorney because of what you two did!” Phoenix cries. “Well, I’d call you a goody-two-shoes to the extreme,” Edgeworth responds. “Yeah! And you get worked up too easily, too!” Larry adds. Oh man, these three dudes are going to be angrily fucking each other in about five minutes. Against a passionately shaking screen, Phoenix claims that he would have become a prosecutor instead of a defense attorney if he’d known the truth. Edgeworth says the opposite — he became a prosecutor partly as self-punishment over the belief that he killed his own father. “If I had known the truth, I might have become a defense attorney after all.” There’s a buttsex-related moral in here somewhere, and Edgeworth nails it when he says, “Want to switch, Wright?” Awesome.
Heeeeeeeeeeee
Lotta ruins things once again by nonconsensually taking a group photo, and some Wankese from Phoenix the next morning mentions the insane off-the-hook party they all had that night. I expect it ended with a very drunk Phoenix and Edgeworth working off months of tension via their penises. I can’t imagine how long it will take for Edgeworth’s house staff to clean up the aftermath. (Okay, yes, I admit that in the actual game version, Edgeworth was still in detention during the party in his honor, but not in the VGR version. Let me have this one. Let them have this one.)
Phoenix wakes up in his office the next morning at 5 AM, so I guess the action moved there at one point. Edgeworth must have the worst crick in his neck (and possibly elsewhere) from sleeping tangled up with Phoenix on that couch. The office backdrop has been reused, so sadly, we don’t get see the men naked on the couch together. Nearby, possibly on his pile of clothes, Phoenix finds a letter from Maya. Well, that’s uncomfortable — she must have seen the two of them. At least she didn’t make a big thing out of it.
Maya’s letter is all emo, about how she’s useless and Phoenix is so amazing, so she’s returning to the mountain to finish her training. Oddly, Maya’s sprite recites the letter against a black screen. I guess even when Phoenix is reading a letter, he needs to pretend someone else is reading it out loud to him. Maya didn’t want to disturb him and Edgeworth with an awkward goodbye, hence the letter. Phoenix panics — who will provide the name of the true perp in his next case if his teenage girl assistant isn’t in court with him?! He throws on his clothes and with a quick apology to Edgeworth, rushes to the train station before the train leaves for “the mountains.”
How is that any different from Phoenix?
It turns out Phoenix arrives at the brand new train backdrop just in the nick (sorry) of time. The conversation with Maya starts out as mostly a repeat of the letter, with the same melancholy version of Maya’s theme accompanying it. “HOLD IT!” Phoenix yells, just because it makes him feel like a strong brute man. There’s really no other reason for him to randomly scream his catchphrases outside of court. “I never could have saved Edgeworth without your help,” Phoenix says, way, way past the time he should have shown her any appreciation. He mentions that he was able to hear Mia’s voice tell him important things about the DL-6 case. This doesn’t work as Phoenix had hoped — Maya just adds her sister to the long list of people who helped Phoenix while she failed. “I’m the only one who couldn’t help. I was useless, Nick,” she whines. This is dragging on way too long. Instead of pointing out the many things she did to help, like confront Lotta in court, get the parrot to talk on the stand, and name von Karma as the murderer, he just shows her the DL-6 bullet that she wrested from von Karma’s leathery grip. What a great guy he is for waiting this fucking long to tell her about that. At least he’s honest that the case would have been lost without that piece of evidence.
This doesn’t convince Maya to stay — she’s still determined to do the spirit medium thing. And why not? There’s always plenty of time to be a better lawyer than Phoenix after she finishes her training. Maya cheers up a bit, promising to return to help Phoenix after she’s a full-fledged spirit medium. They say goodbye, and we get a special anime still shot of Maya, trailing sparkly Larry tears, saying thank you to Phoenix. Yeah, thanks for nothing. After the train leaves, Phoenix goes back for another round of uninterrupted time in the bone zone with Edgeworth. Seriously, I hope no one ends up with any injuries — this is getting out of control.
Phoenix Wankeses some more, coming dangerously close to saying, “This is my story.” I’m getting worried about him, you guys. And then the credits roll. There’s nothing amazing worth noting in the credits — it’s several mini-scenes with characters we mostly don’t give a shit about, interspersed with the actual game credits. So we revisit Edgeworth having another sexy courtroom battle with Phoenix (yay!), Edgeworth embarrassing himself by yelling, “Whoooooooooooooop! Detective Gumshoooooooooooe!” on New Year’s (which probably made Gumshoe jizz himself), Larry talking about another supermodel girlfriend who is real but is conveniently in Hawaii at the moment, and then a bunch of shitheads from earlier in the game. Like, really, we need to catch up with Cody Hackins? Not on my watch. Ugh, and then this parade of asshats finishes with Lotta, who announces she’s going to quit school again to become a paranormal photographer. “You know that picture I took of everyone? Well, just behind them there’s a ghost!” she gushes. We get to see this photographic masterpiece and indeed, there is Mia, mostly transparent and hovering behind the crowd, her ghost cleavage very prominent. The photo also features Larry looking like he might vomit from being too close to Maya, Maya herself hiding Phoenix’s obvious painful erection behind a Victory sign, Edgeworth leering at Phoenix and looking oddly like he has tits and a camel toe, and Gumshoe with a massive Jon Hamm-style bulge, throwing confetti jizz all over the two horny lawyers. Such a fitting way to end the case.
Stunning.
In the original Gameboy Advance release, this was actually the end of the game, hence the credit sequence and Phoenix’s final-sounding Wankese. Luckily for you, but not for me and Sam, when the game was rereleased on DS (and in English), the game designers tacked on another even more bizarre and convoluted case. Sam will be tackling the first part of that case in the next recap. Thanks for reading this far, and I’ll see you in Part 10!