The puzzle is made of seven objection.lols, each themed after a different inane argument topic. Each objection has three parts of text that are colored orange instead of white. These act as clues - we need to identify the unique object that satisfies every clue while being thematic to the argument topic. This can be seen as finding common ground between the Ace Attorney characters, as suggested by the flavortext.
| Topic | Clue 1 | Clue 2 | Clue 3 | Answer | Explanation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Is cereal a soup? | letters floating | at least five colors | double letters | FROOT LOOPS | As argued by Phoenix, circles can be considered as the letter O. A number of cereals have Os and double letters in their name, but only FROOT LOOPS has five colors. |
| Is Pluto a planet? | smallest of its siblings | name it after a lover | discovered by Galileo | EUROPA | Galileo observed Saturn's rings, as well as the four largest moons of Jupiter (called the Galilean moons). They're all named after a lover of Zeus, but EUROPA is the smallest. |
| Does the week start on Sunday or Monday? | not Sunday / Tuesday / Thursday / Saturday | not Central | gets stuck in my head | FRIDAY | The first clue restricts the day to Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. The "not Central" clue indicates it should not be close to the middle of week, meaning not Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday (depending on what day we treat as the start and whether we round up or down). This leaves Monday or Friday, and "gets stuck in my head" disambiguates thanks to the famous song FRIDAY. |
| Is it "puzzle hunt" or "puzzlehunt"? | space | empire | favorite team in the Marble League | GALACTIC | Of the teams in the Marble League, Team GALACTIC is the name of a puzzlehunt (GPH) and matches to "space" and "empire", the latter via the Galactic Empire. |
| What's the biggest animal you could take in a fight? | live in Asia | scales | curls into a ball | PANGOLIN | Both armadillos and pangolins have scales and can curl into a ball, but of the two, the armadillo lives in North and South America, while the PANGOLIN lives in Asia and Africa. |
| Do pineapples belong on pizza? | spherical | ends in "fruit" | split it into an entirely different fruit | GRAPEFRUIT | There are a few fruit that end in "fruit", like starfruit and jackfruit, but only GRAPEFRUIT turns into a different fruit (grape) when you split it into two words. |
| Is a hot dog a sandwich? | brand in San Francisco | tautology | sandwich is really cold | IT'S IT | The trickiest part of this one is figuring out that the "really cold sandwich" is an ice cream sandwich. Given that, one ice cream sandwich brand in San Francisco is IT'S IT, which is a tautology. |
Each argument also comes with one or two pieces of evidence, presented by Phoenix Wright, Maya Fey, or Miles Edgeworth. Each piece of evidence has a number within it. Phoenix's evidence uses plain numerals, but the other two characters encode the number based on their first name. Maya Fey presents evidence with Mayan numerals, and Miles Edgeworth presents evidence with distances that convert to an integer number of miles. These act as indices into the clued object, read in order of the presented evidence.
| Object | Evidence 1 | Evidence 2 | Letters |
|---|---|---|---|
| FROOT LOOPS | Phoenix, 1 | Maya, 7 | FO |
| EUROPA | Edgeworth, 2 | Maya, 3 | UR |
| FRIDAY | Phoenix, 4 | Maya, 3 | DI |
| GALACTIC | Phoenix, 4 | Edgeworth, 3 | AL |
| PANGOLIN | Maya, 5 | Edgeworth, 4 | OG |
| GRAPEFRUIT | Edgeworth, 8 | Phoenix, 5 | UE |
| IT'S IT | Phoenix, 3 | S |
The answer is FOUR DIALOGUES.
Author's Notes
This puzzle was inspired by objection.lols like Are Markers Actually Pens? and Is Soup a Drink?. We tossed around a few ideas for how to combine memes and legal proceedings, such as Batman v. Commissioner and United States v. Forty-Three Gallons of Whiskey, but it became clear that we were most interested in writing objection.lols about dumb internet arguments.
Sorry if you got stuck on the Maya step. Unfortunately, it's pretty easy to view the dots and bars of Maya as Morse instead. We played up the "Mayan calendar" section of the days-of-the-week argument as much as we thought we could without giving away the "name = extract method" a-ha.
The days of the week argument is a reference to the dumb bodybuilding forum argument about how many days are in a week, which was funny, but too dumb for this puzzle.
We went back and forth on whether the dialogue should be in character with Ace Attorney, or closer to internet-speak. In the end, we settled somewhere in between and embraced inconsistency. This is probably one of the few puzzles in which we actually made editing passes to actively reduce proper grammar and capitalization.
We'd like to give special thanks to the objection.lol devs, both for creating objection.lol, and for being so responsive to our questions on Twitter. There's some very impressive UX work in this Ace Attorney meme machine, especially given it runs no ads and is totally free.
Alex: The research phase of this puzzle was me watching a bunch of objection.lols and searching up as many dumb internet arguments as I could find, which is by far the most fun I've ever had writing a puzzle. Some recommended arguments if you want to start something:
- Is water wet?
- What is the best letter of the alphabet?
- Does a straw have one hole, two holes, or zero holes?
- Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck, or 100 duck-sized horses?
- What is the best fruit?
- Which is more like a salad: fruit salad, or potato salad?
Personal takes: cereal is not a soup, Pluto is not a planet, the week starts on Sunday no matter what ISO says, puzzlehunt is one word unless used as a proper noun, the giant tortoise strategy is solid, Hawaiian pizza is perfectly acceptable, hot dogs are not a sandwich due to failing Cube Rule, water is wet, the best letter of the alphabet is O, a straw has two holes, I'd rather fight 100 duck-sized horses, the best fruit is strawberry (with peach a close second), and fruit salad is more like a salad than potato salad.
Ivan: Agree with Alex, except a straw has a single hole. fight me irl.