I was never a fan of Apollo Justice. He wasn’t a bad character, per se, but there wasn’t really anything about him that stood out. He was uninteresting and underdeveloped, and the fact that he wound up being completely overshadowed in his own game didn’t help his case. Despite that, when Dual Destinies was announced, I hoped that he would return.

While his game is arguably the weakest in the series and the least popular (regardless what fans of it say), I didn’t want him to just be swept under the rug and for Capcom to pretend he didn’t exist. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case. Not only did he come back, but he got a truck-tonne of personal development, which has seriously helped his popularity (apparently he’s the most popular character in Japan) and won over several of his naysayers.

For me personally, the moment I was won over by Apollo was probably when this theme kicked in during a trial. I barely remembered what his original theme sounded like, but this redo not only retrieved that memory from the darkest corner of my mind, it also did him… ahem, justice.

It’s grown along with Apollo, thanks to the use of actual instruments. Seriously, that guitar riff is sick. It gave you the impression that, despite his own “wackiness” and typical bumbling you’d expect from a defense attorney in these games, he could be taken seriously. He had just as much skill as Phoenix Wright himself, and he was going to prove it.

It’s triumphant, it’s heroic; when Apollo mentally declares “Here comes Justice,” you believed it. Apollo may have originated in a less than stellar game, but this theme partly proves that he deserves to be a mainstay of the series and I can’t wait to see him take centre stage once more in the next game.