Phoenix Wright question (spoilers)
 

Okay, I finally finished Phoenix Wright yesterday, after stretching it out over six wonderful months. :D Anyway, I have a question about the last case:

Spoiler:

Why did Chief Gant kill Neil Marshall? What I got from the testimony is that Ema knocked Marshall out of the way, but she didn't knock him into the armor and just knocked him unconscious. Then Gant comes into the room, picks up the unconscious Marshall, and impales him on the suit of armor's sword... :crazy: Why? What was his motive for doing this?

I enjoyed the last case very much, with the fingerprinting and luminol, but in general it didn't seem as well written as the others. There were some pretty big plot holes.

Spoiler:

Like why they made such a big deal about the sword being removed from the proscecutor's award. I was sure it was going to play into the murder somehow... and Lana even mentions it as the murder weapon at one point, but she's lying to protect her sister... so in the end it didn't seem to have anything to do with anything. So why did they refer to it so much during the case? It almost seemed like the writers changed their minds about the murder weapon at the last minute and didn't go back to rewrite...

I guess I'll use spoiler tags too...

Spoiler:

I would guess that Gant killed Neil Marshall so that they could forge that evidence to convict Darke, but then he created the evidence to blame Ema both to force Lana to do his bidding, and to prevent anyone from blaming him if it's found that Darke didn't do it.
I do somewhat agree with you about the award... but there is a fairly big turning point that relies on it, that being that Neil Marshal, not Darke, was the one holding the broken knife that Ema saw.
I agree that both of those instances were somewhat contrived.

I was also really surprised toward the end when I realized that Angel Starr wasn't lying the whole time. She seemed a lot shadier than she ultimately was.

You're probably right about the motive, but...

Spoiler:

That's an awful lot of split-second reasoning for someone who's just walked in on a crime scene in the middle of a power-failure. :crazy:

Not to mention fairly evil, since Marshall wasn't even dead when Gant got there. :crazy: :crazy:

I figured I'd bump this thread to complain about something else that bugs me about the 5th case. (semi-spoilers dealing with the beginning but not the solution to the 5th case follow)

...What idiot decided it was okay for Edgeworth to prosecute this case? Think about it:
-He's prosecuting his own boss, if she's found guilty he could get her job
-The body was found in his freaking car!

You'd think, even if he has a rock-solid alibi preventing him from being a suspect, they'd at least bring in a prosecutor from another district given the obvious potential for conflict of interest here.