Updated Autopsy Report... Season 2
After several years, the podcast I started with my wife (Dessy) and two friends (Rose and Tiago), Updated Autopsy Report, has completed its original goal: play all of the Ace Attorney games. It was kind of a weird and long road, but we made it, and I'm really proud of us completing the project. I also recorded my playthroughs of the games with Dessy and Iro (another good friend who you may know from Obsidian Moonshine) and posted those let's plays on my YouTube channel.
(While I'm happy with how everything turned out overall, I probably won't ever commit to such a lengthy let's play project ever again. That pushed our various schedules to their limits at times. Definitely going to stick to shorter let's plays for future YouTube videos that will hopefully stay under a more ideal dozen-ish episode total.)
Anyway, we did it! Yay!
Then came the next question: do we wanna keep doing this podcast? Or are we done? And we found that as we talked, we indeed wanted to keep recording and chatting! But the question that immediately follows is: what would we cover if we continue things?
We had several ideas:
- Simply start over and replay the games again (we didn't particularly like this idea, although I did consider doing this with a new crew of people if Rose, Tiago, and Dessy didn't want to continue).
- Watch the Ace Attorney anime, read the manga, and other side media (given that much [but not all] of this is retreads or retellings of the games, we also felt like this didn't have enough meat on the bone).
- Play another game series or Ace Attorney fan games (we wanted to keep the podcast closer to the Ace Attorney umbrella, so no Danganronpa, et al, and while fan games can be fun, we didn't have a ton of love for this idea either).
- Cover media that inspired the Ace Attorney series (the one we picked!).
The reason we picked the final option was threefold: one, it kept us close to the Ace Attorney umbrella, and hopefully would be of interest to our existing audience. Two, it also gave us plenty of media to choose from. Dozens of authors who wrote piles of mystery novels, scores of movies and TV shows with a variety of tones, and also several games sprinkled in there occasionally too! Third, while we had read/watched some of them before, many of those books and movies were things we had on our "to-read/watch" lists, and we all liked the idea of expanding our horizons.
I also hope that this will allow the podcast to function as a sort of "complete package" for a listener. Not only do we now have the entirety of the series covered in book club format, now we'll also have a literal book club that encompasses as many of the inspiration and influences upon that series that we can find! And again, it gives us, the hosts (selfishly), plenty of variety in our prep before each bi-weekly episode.
That's all a lot of words that basically boils down to "this is what we found most interesting!" I am, of course, a bit worried that our audience will wane as we talk less about wacky lawyers. But I know they'll come up plenty, as it's always going to be our "lens" on the upcoming media we cover, and I believe our energy will keep up with this new focus. Hopefully everyone listening will still find all this compelling!
And who knows, maybe Capcom will throw us a curve ball and announce a new Ace Attorney in the next year or two. If so, we'll cover that when it comes out!
Cheers!