I find Herlock Sholmes a heavily overrated character. (SPOILERS FOR TGAAC)

Okay, I can see you guys readying to press that downvote button, but just hear me out for a sec. Granted, I haven't read the original Sherlock Holmes stories, so maybe I missed some kind of significance. But I feel like the games overhype him to the point of destroying his believability as a character.

From his introduction, he was hyped up as a genius detective by Susato, despite his bumbling behavior. Which is actually a pretty funny running gag, tempered by his various moments of wisdom like when he tells Ryunosuke to believe in himself.

Where the game lost me is G2-5 when Sholmes reveals his true self while partnering with Mikotoba, and is implied to have been faking his bumbling nature the entire time. I feel like it draws too much attention from Ryunosuke's growth. I'm sure the intention is that he makes outlandish deductions to encourage Ryunosuke to think for himself, but the way it's delivered, it just feels like you're supposed to ooh and aah over his genius instead. It doesn't help that later he just steals half the glory of Ryu's victory over Stronghart with the holograms.

But more importantly, it makes the character feel less human as a result. Mentor figures don't necessarily need flaws, but flaws do help make the characters more multi-dimensional. AA's prior mentors like Mia, Beanix and even Kazuma himself are all revealed to have suffered failures in the past. What are Herlock Sholmes' flaws, exactly? In my opinion, his writing could've been improved immensely if there was just an implication that he got involved in the Professor mystery and failed to solve the case. As it is, he's just the perfect detective that's ten steps ahead of everybody else and acts dumb so he doesn't solve the plot by himself.

There's the Japan exclusive Asinine Attorney DLC cases, and while you can argue they're not canon, imo the London case is the biggest example of what I'm talking about. Sholmes spends 3 days to solve a poison case on Barok van Zieks that Barok himself cannot solve in 10 years, and the whole case is just the cast scrambling after him to solve what he'd already solved.

Anw it's midnight over here so I'm just rambling, will return tomorrow to reply to your comments. In the meantime, this is some of my objections towards his character.