Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law

By: RadcliffeV
Date: Tuesday, January 29, 2008

I’ll put all my cards on the table first, and admit that I’m a huge fan of the show. I had every episode recorded on my DV-R and watched them over and over again. It was great television, and I was sad to see it pass. When I heard word of Capcom making a Harvey Birdman game ala Phoenix Wright, it was like seeing vanilla wafers at my local supermarket. Vanilla plus wafer equals taste-gasam. But, does the Harvey Birdman video game live up to expectations?

The answer is yes, if you like the unique flavorings of Phoenix Wright and Harvey Birdman. You see, not everyone enjoys the taste of vanilla wafers, and not everyone will enjoy the outer texture of Adult Swim humor surrounding a creamy “point and click” adventure filling. Here’s why.

Not everyone will enjoy the crunchy humor Harvey Birdman has to offer. It is an acquired taste, and requires a childhood of watching old Hanna-Barbara cartoons, and a love of both slap-stick and satirical humor mixed together. The fourth case suffers the most from this, because to get every joke, you must have seen the Deadly Duplicator episode, watched Birdman as a child, be a huge Street Fighter fan, and be a patron to more than one tech blog that covers RIAA cases. That’s a lot of demographic overlapping that leaves a large portion of the population out of the loop. I happen to fit into all of these categories, making me an uber geek, but it also makes this case my favorite amongst the five.

The gameplay may also leave some people with a bad taste in their mouth. I’ll be honest, I’m also a big fan of Phoenix Wright, and I found the cases to be rather easy. So, if you wanted a new challenge after finishing the rest of the series on the DS, you’ll find this to be a bit too watered down for the sake of the humor. It’s also only snack sized, and can easily be finished in two hours or less.

In the end Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law will turn a lot more people away than it will win them over, and this may be the last we see of our faithfully foolish litigating foul-slash-man. I really wish everyone would pick this game up so we would see more Birdman, but it’s a rental at best for those who liked the show and a buy for die-hard fans only. So I guess this is so long Harvey, I hope I see you again in the junk food isle in the sky someday.