Playing through the two Famicom Detective Club games got me well and truly in the mood for some more adventuring. And so it was that I finally booted up the Nintendo Switch version of the first Ace Attorney Trilogy that I’ve had on my shelf for quite some time.

I’ve previously played all the Ace Attorney games except for the sixth one (and The Great Ace Attorney, and Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney… and the unlocalised second Ace Attorney Investigations game) so I already know the series quite well, but it’s been a good few years since I sat down and gave them some proper attention.

Moreover, I’ve somehow gone this long without ever writing about them here on MoeGamer, so today’s the day we fix that. Perhaps not for the last time, either.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is probably the reason I picked up a Nintendo DS back in the day.

When I was considering whether or not I wanted one, I was browsing through the available games and was struck by how strange some of them were, at least compared to the things we were typically playing on PC and TV-connected consoles at the time. And I decided I wanted to try out something that appeared to be very different from what I was used to… so my initial lineup of Nintendo DS games consisted of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney and Trauma Center: Under the Knife, which we’ll talk about some other time.

I was particularly fascinated by the idea of a game about being a lawyer. I knew there had been a couple of games about being a doctor before (The Software Toolworks’ two Life and Death games being the main example) but I’d never come across one about being a lawyer. How, exactly, would that even work? I was desperately curious.

As it turned out, the gameplay of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney wasn’t particularly unusual when it came down to it. That didn’t make it a bad game or in any way disappointing, mind you — on the contrary, I was absolutely hooked on the game from start to finish — but in retrospect, I perhaps should have expected a game about a lawyer to be quite heavy on conversations.

I suspect it’s unlikely that someone reading this is unfamiliar with the Ace Attorney series at this point, but on the offchance you are, here’s a brief rundown.

Each Ace Attorney game consists of several distinct, self-contained cases (usually four, but the first game has five, and the fifth and sixth games have extra episodes which were formerly DLC) in which you play the role of defence lawyer Phoenix Wright (or, in the fourth game, Apollo Justice). The first case is usually very short and simple and typically unfolds completely in the courtroom. The cases after that unfold across several in-game days (though never more than three, due to the in-game legal system demanding all trials are wrapped up in three days or fewer) and are split into investigation and courtroom segments.

In the investigation sequences, you, as the protagonist of that installment and their sidekick (usually Phoenix Wright and Maya Fey respectively) travel from location to location looking for evidence that you might be able to use in the trial. This involves searching locations for interesting objects and speaking with potential witnesses.

The courtroom sequences, meanwhile, unfold as a series of witness testimonies, during which you have the opportunity to either press the witness on a particular point to potentially obtain additional information, or present collected pieces of evidence to prove a contradiction in what they are saying. There are occasionally additional elements to the mix such as pointing out things on a diagram, but that’s the basic gist of things.

In essence, the Ace Attorney games are an evolution of the Japanese adventure game formula established in games such as the Famicom Detective Club series and The Portopia Serial Murder Case. It’s impossible to “miss” anything in the investigation sequences because the game simply doesn’t move on until you’ve found everything relevant; there is an interesting twist in the courtroom sequences, however, in that you can fail those, meaning that unlike, say, Famicom Detective Club, it is possible to get a Game Over and have to try again.

Ace Attorney’s investigation sequences unfold much more smoothly than earlier examples of Japanese adventure games, though, and this is at least partly due to the fact that the available options you can choose in any scene are pared down to just four: Examine, Move, Talk and Present — and if no other characters are present in the scene, Talk and Present are removed from the equation altogether.

Contrast this with Famicom Detective Club, which often provides you with the opportunity to “Call/Engage” different characters within a single scene distinctly from asking them questions, “Think” about what is going on, “Remember” things that the character might have forgotten and, in a couple of memorable cases, even make as if you are going to “Quit Investigation” (an option normally used just for saving your game) as a means of persuading characters to do things.

This isn’t that many more commands than Ace Attorney offers, but the difference is in how they are implemented into the overall game structure. In Ace Attorney, you’ll generally get the information you need about something by simply asking about it once or examining it once. In Famicom Detective Club and other games like it, you sometimes need to choose the same option multiple times, or choose options in a particular order and then return to an option you’ve already picked.

To put it another way, it’s a lot easier to feel like you’re “stuck” in Famicom Detective Club (although “unsticking” yourself is generally a matter of just systematically going through every option until the game starts repeating itself), whereas Ace Attorney keeps pushing you onwards, and isn’t afraid to have some fairly lengthy dialogue sequences in response to a single input from you.

Indeed, the courtroom sequences arguably take this to an extreme, since they are primarily non-interactive dialogue, with very occasional choices to be made (only one of which is correct under most circumstances) — and the main interactivity from you is during the “cross-examination” sequences, during which your main task is to spot the contradiction and present the appropriate piece of evidence.

Although it does things in a much more streamlined manner, some folks may still find themselves bouncing off Ace Attorney for the exact same reasons they wouldn’t enjoy Famicom Detective Club. I recall quite vividly speaking with someone about Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney shortly after I’d discovered it and them complaining that there was “too much reading” — to which my response was “it’s a game about a lawyer, what did you expect?”

Thankfully, the series has achieved such relatively mainstream success at this point that most people can at least respect it, even if they don’t necessarily enjoy playing it themselves. And a lot of that comes down to its distinct sense of characterisation.

The Ace Attorney series is full of brilliant and widely beloved characters. And, interestingly, in a world where certain quarters of the Internet get massively bent out of shape if a localisation omits Japanese honorifics in circumstances where they don’t make a lot of sense, most people agree that Ace Attorney’s localisation is an absolute masterclass in westernising something and, by extension, making it much more accessible to people outside of the “anime game” sphere.

Okay, there are elements that are a bit weird, such as Maya Fey dressing in traditional Japanese clothing and hailing from what is clearly an ancient Japanese village despite the localisation unfolding in an unnamed location in California, and the fact that the court system in the game bears little resemblance to the judge-and-jury system used in the United States, but suspension of disbelief is very much present and correct in the Ace Attorney series.

A big part of why the localisation team decided to make such drastic changes to character names in particular is because so many of them were based on Japanese wordplay. While those already entrenched in Japanese popular media would be familiar with a lot of these puns, it made sense to swap them out for more accessible jokes in the English version to give the game a broad appeal. In many cases, the puns are similar; “right, Wright?” serves a similar function to Phoenix Wright’s Japanese surname being “Naruhodo”, which means “I see”, and, as you might expect, comes up a fair bit in the script.

What’s interesting with the Ace Attorney series is that unlike other situations where character names have been changed — Xenoblade Chronicles 2’s female leads being renamed Pyra and Mythra from Homura and Hikari, for example — you don’t seem to get the more obsessive end of “anime game” fandom pointedly referring to characters by their Japanese names when describing the series. The world (outside of Japan) has seemingly accepted “Phoenix Wright” as the canonical name for the series’ protagonist… and this is a good thing.

There are plenty of arguments to be made about how to handle localisations, but one of the most compelling is also one of the simplest: a localised version of a game is a completely distinct product from its original language version, and should be taken on its own merits. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the Ace Attorney series. The adoption of a particular set of names in the west does not stop the Japanese version from existing, and the western version is committed and unapologetic about its own version of the series canon. And, over time, its quirkier elements have become part of its overall charm.

Anyway, I don’t want to get too hung up on that side of things, but it is an important thing to consider when looking at the Ace Attorney series as a whole. And at this point, things are emphatically not going to change!

I’ll refrain from getting into a discussion of the specific cases’ narratives right now — at least partly because I’m only partway through the third case of the first game — but I suspect I will have more to say on the topic of Ace Attorney in the not-too-distant future.

For now, though, I will say that if you’re somehow still yet to encounter the series first-hand — and, of course, you’re open to very dialogue-heavy games — then it’s well worth your time playing through the whole series. The Trilogy packs are very affordable, great value and a brilliant way to enjoy this wonderful series.

So I’ll see you in court, I guess?

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More about the Ace Attorney series

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