User blog:Levi Rinno/PE Proposal: Roger Retinz

Well, after seeing so many other villains up for debate in whether or not they're Pure Evil, I decided to drop a couple of names in the hat. This is the first one. From the Ace Attorney video game series, I'm going to throw out Roger Retinz, the main antagonist of The Magical Turnabout, the second case of the most recent game in the series, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice.

What is the Work?
The Ace Attorney series is a collection of novel visual adventure games, in which the player gathers evidence during investigations and uses them in trials to try and clear their clients to get a "Not Guilty" verdict. Annoy the judge too often by selecting incorrect evidence (or the correct evidence at the wrong time), and the player's client will get a "Guilty" verdict and be sent to jail. Cases are followed by, as mentioned, gathering evidence and/or questioning witnesses and then using the evidence or statements from witnesses to point out inconsistencies and contradictions in witness testimony during trials. Players throughout the series could play as main protagonist Phoenix Wright, deuteragonist Apollo Justice, and tritagonist Athena Cykes.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice is the sixth and most recent game in the mainstream series, and The Magical Turnabout is the second case of the game and follows Apollo Justice in his bid to prove his friend, Trucy Wright (whom he doesn't realize is also his half-sister, though that's a different story altogether), innocent of a murder actually committed by Roger Retinz, a man who has a grudge against her biological family.

Who is Roger Retinz?
Long before the events of the game, Roger Retinz was part of a troupe of magicians called Troupe Gramarye, in which he faithfully served under the alias of "Mr. Reus." However, he had a tendency to go too far in his magic tricks, often performing dangerous, reckless tricks with no disregard for the lives that might be put in danger from them. He also had incredible anger issues shown to both his fellow Troupe members and audience members who came to their shows. Eventually, he performed one dangerous trick too many, as he accidentally injured himself while recklessly performing another one of his tricks, causing the head of the Troupe, Magnifi Gramarye, to finally have enough and kick him out. This led Retinz to harbor a serious grudge against Gramarye, and he vowed revenge on him and the entire Troupe.

Although Retinz had been relatively obscure compared to the rest of Troupe Gramarye, he did have his fans, one of them being a man named Manov Mistree, who was such a big fan of his, he decided to take him under his wing and train him to be a magician like himself.

Years later, Retinz became a producer for Take-2 TV and gained popularity for his charismatic on-screen persona, even starring in some of the shows that he produced himself. He also, however, developed a reputation for being impossible to please and being extremely abusive towards his staff.

What Did He Do?
Retinz finally saw his chance at revenge against the Gramaryes when he heard that Trucy Wright, a skilled magician herself and Magnifi's granddaughter (through being the daughter of his own daughter, Thalassa, and his son-in-law, Zak), was making her television debut. He offered to produce and broadcast the whole show himself while secretly planning to ruin her reputation and freedom. He called on Mistree to join the show as his old alias, Mr. Reus, and even hired two other magicians, Bonny and Betty de Famme, to help out. He told them that he was merely going to play a prank on Trucy, but he actually had something deadlier in mind. Before the filming of the show, he planted a sword on the stage's skywalk, on which Manov Mistree would be impaled and killed when he would be lifted into the air as part of the "prank." This part of his sinister plan went off without a hitch, as Mistree was killed as planned. Retinz then planted blood into a coffin into which Trucy was meant to stab with a prop sword in order to make it look like she had killed Mistree by stabbing him through the coffin. He also made sure that he would be at the Take-2 TV station when the prank occurred so that he would have an alibi.

However, there was a chance that, being part of a magic trick, Mistree's death would look like involuntary manslaughter rather than the murder it truly was, so Retinz forged a note bearing Trucy's signature that suggested that she had known of the prank in advance and presumably planted Manov's notebook in her belongings. His intention was for the prosecutor assigned to the case to give Trucy a motive for killing "Mr. Reus." Namely, that Mr. Reus was going to take revenge for being kicked out of Troupe Gramarye by revealing the secrets behind their magic tricks. Additionally, he planted the forged signature that he had made earlier on a contract that would force Trucy to pay him $3,000,000 if the show was canceled because of her incompetence, ensuring the financial ruin of the Wright Anything Agency, the firm of her adoptive father, Phoenix, and where Apollo and Athena also worked.

Once Mistree was dead, Retinz took advantage of the ensuing chaos to switch out Trucy's prop sword for the bloodied real, metal sword. However, Bonny had accidentally set up Mr. Hat, Trucy's resident puppet, over the wrong trapdoor during the show, which forced Trucy to have to stab the coffin on the side opposite the blood Retinz had planted, so he was forced to tamper with the coffin to make the scenario appear consistent. He also edited the footage of the trick that his crew had taken in order to further make it seem like Trucy had stabbed through the coffin with the metallic sword, specifically by removing a set of playing cards that Trucy had thrown to distract the audience when she switched out the metal sword for a rubber one, something that Trucy actually demonstrated in court during her own witness testimony, impressing the galley and even the judge in the process.

During the trial, however, something even more wicked began to be made clear as Apollo and Athena questioned the de Famme twins, particularly Betty. Just in case the young attorneys figured out that Trucy was indeed innocent, he left just enough evidence to turn suspicion toward Betty, potentially hoping to use her as a scapegoat instead of himself. They also managed to figure out, due to photographic evidence of the original Troupe Gramarye, that Retinz was the original Mr. Reus due to noticing a scar on his arm (from one of his failed magic tricks going wrong) that was not on the arm of Mistree.

Eventually, after putting every single piece together, Apollo zeroed in on Mistree being the one behind everything and nailed him as the culprit, and Mistree had an extreme breakdown, during which he tried one more time, with no luck, to claim himself as the victim of the Gramaryes, but no one was buying. He was arrested, but as he was, Trucy asked him if it had really been worth killing an innocent man, one who'd idolized him for so much of his life, just to get revenge on her grandfather. To this, Retinz replied with a resounding "YES!" as he continued to spew filth at Trucy and the Gramaryes, in general. Trucy then realized, through this rant, that her grandfather had kicked Retinz out of the Troupe not because he was a bad magician, but because of his recklessness, his anger, and his utter disregard for life. She then condemned him for his crimes against her and her family by saying that he didn't deserve to call himself a magician. Retinz responded to this by declaring how much better he was as a magician since he'd fooled her for so long, and that it Apollo, who wasn't even a magician himself, to figure out his crime. When he is then hauled off by court officers, he leaves behind nothing but a gloating, evil laugh, believing that he had indeed taken his revenge on the Gramaryes since he had fooled Trucy and was now causing her to doubt herself (although Apollo would make her feel better about herself again after he was gone).

Ironically, although Retinz had no way of knowing about this, he had still been defeated by a Gramarye, anyway, due to Apollo being Thalassa's long-lost son and Magnifi's grandson, something that only Phoenix knew.

Heinousness
Oh, I would definitely say that Retinz has a lot of heinousness to him. I'm not even going to mince words. He is definitely a sociopath. He shows himself to have no empathy or conscience in anything he does. Throughout the entire Magical Turnabout case, especially after his reveal as Mr. Reus, he is shown to be unrepentant and without any true affect. Everything that he does is done with the sheer goal of killing a young man who had admired him all of his life, and then using his death to not only ruin the life, career, and reputation of an innocent young girl, but also the business and careers of Trucy's adoptive father, Phoenix Wright, Apollo, and Athena, all without a second thought, and with neither regret nor remorse.

The reason that he attempts to foreclose on the Wright Anything Agency is for nothing other than the simple fact that they are associated with Troupe Gramarye (due to Trucy being Zak and Thalassa's biological daughter and Magnifi's granddaughter). The "trust" that he had also shown toward Mistree was actually a sham to turn him into a pawn to throw away later on, as Retinz did not truly trust anybody with his secrets, even admitting to it on the stand, as well as happily admitting to it being totally worth killing Mistree to frame Trucy. Retinz even has a pyromaniacal pose that the player can see at several points, including when he performs his evil laugh, which is one of many old criteria for being a sociopath. That, and his tendency to lie so casually, that he cannot even set off Apollo's bracelet, something he uses to detect when someone is lying.

Not only that, but once he is fully, truly exposed, as mentioned above, he has the gall to claim himself as the victim, not Trucy, the girl he framed, or Mistree, the man he murdered to frame her. And as also said, he attempts to leave Betty essentially holding the bag on the off chance that Trucy is cleared so that someone else can go down for Mistree's murder instead of himself. And throughout all of this, he takes complete, utter enjoyment in what he does, and in the suffering that he causes Apollo, Athena, Trucy, and even the de Famme twins.

Mitigating Factors
None. Although it must've been crushing to be kicked out of a job he loved, it did not justify killing Mistree, framing Trucy, or trying to destroy the firm of her adoptive father. He could've moved on and enjoyed his new career in television and entertainment, but instead let his anger, bitterness, resentment, and hatred fester until several lives were almost ruined, and one of them was taken by his hand.

Final Verdict
I apologize for the long explanation, but I felt like the entire story had to be laid out as descriptively as possible. But nonetheless, I give Retinz a big, overwhelming YES to pure evil. In fact, as said in his article on this site, he is just about as vile as most of the main villains of the games of the Ace Attorney series.