We live in an age where, at the upper end of the market, video game budgets are spiralling out of control in a relentless pursuit of movie-like photorealism.
And yet, a series of games that first appeared just under 25 years ago (at the time of writing) has pretty consistently been doing such a great job of telling its stories with minimal tech that its publisher, Capcom, still regards it as one of its most valuable intellectual properties.
I am, of course, talking about the Ace Attorney series, and I thought it might be fun to look at some aspects of how these games present their stories to the audience — something that has remained fairly constant over its complete run, despite spanning several hardware generations. So let’s do just that!
The Ace Attorney games began their life as Game Boy Advance releases, though we only ever saw their Nintendo DS ports over here in the west. Regardless, that means they were always designed for hardware that was relatively limited in capabilities compared to the PCs and TV-connected consoles of the era.
One of the most notable limitations on the series is the matter of how much storage space they were able to use; having been initially released on cartridge-based platforms, all the Ace Attorney games to date, including remasters and rereleases for platforms with no storage space restrictions, have deliberately foregone full voice-overs in favour of a “babbling” sound effect that accompanies the text appearing on screen in “typewriter” style, a letter at a time.
This, in itself, is nothing unusual; most games that adopt visual novel-style presentation to this day still use the “typewriter” effect to make text appear more dynamic rather than all appearing at once, and the babbling sound effect was commonplace right from 8-bit console games that had a heavy textual component.
Ace Attorney builds atop that foundation a little, however, and it’s here that we start to see how the series distinguishes itself from titles with a similar style of presentation — and how it does a lot with just a little.
Unlike many visual novels (and games that use the conventions of visual novels to present their story), Ace Attorney’s text does not flow at a constant speed. Indeed, unlike many games of its type, you can’t actually change the speed at which the text flows — though you can skip the animation and babbling if you so desire.
It’s actually relatively undesirable to do so, however, because the simple combination of the babbling noise and the uneven pace at which the text appears gives a surprisingly good approximation of getting across exactly how people are talking — all without a smidge of voice acting. Indeed, to this day, the only speech heard in the Ace Attorney series are the iconic “Objection!”, “Take That!” and “Hold It!” outbursts — and even some of those remain unvoiced.
And yet, the way in which the text is presented can tell us a huge amount about a character. Take how the elderly security guard Wendy Oldbag has a habit of letting her mouth run away with itself, for example: this is represented by text progression being taken completely out of the hands of the player, with her utterances being “typed” out at high speed, automatically advancing to the next text box for several pages’ worth of dialogue, making it quite likely that you’ll miss at least some of what she says.
Rather than the player feeling frustrated that they didn’t have time to read everything, they’re instead left feeling quite clear about what sort of person Ms. Oldbag is. And this is far from the only example — many more are much more subtle.
For example, it’s not uncommon for Ace Attorney characters to pause mid-sentence to reflect on something or hesitate to share something they’re unsure of. Rather than this being presented as separate text boxes, perhaps with one just being filled with ellipses, we see and hear those pauses in what they’re saying, just through how the text is presented. Sometimes the thing they’re unsure of comes out excruciatingly slowly; sometimes it’s blurted out hastily. It’s always meaningful.
In many of today’s games that use visual novel-style presentation, much of what we’re talking about here is taken care of by voice acting. We read the text, but we also hear the emotion in the voice of the actor delivering the lines. It’s something we can understand even as an English speaker listening to a Japanese language track without any real knowledge of the language. In rare instances, the text is synced up completely with the spoken lines, but more commonly the text finishes appearing before we finish hearing what the person is saying, sometimes leading to a slight feeling of disconnect.
In Ace Attorney, meanwhile, all of the “delivery” is handled through the text. We simultaneously read the dialogue and understand how the person speaking it is feeling and acting, even though all we’re hearing is a babbling sound with two pitches: one for male characters, and another at a slightly higher pitch for female characters.
That’s not all Ace Attorney does to increase the impact of its text, however. The other things it does might sound ridiculous on paper and divorced from context — but while you’re engrossed in the story, you almost don’t actively notice, so well are they integrated into the overall presentation. I’m talking about sound effects, screen shake and screen flashes, which are all things Ace Attorney uses a lot.
It’s not unusual for some games to make use of certain sound effects to highlight particular things happening. For example, the Famicom Detective Club games have little musical stings that you hear when you’ve uncovered a particularly important clue. Classic Sierra adventure games often had a little jingle to highlight when you’d scored some points — including during dialogue. And there are plenty of other examples.
Ace Attorney goes all-out with these effects, though. It’s rare to go more than two lines without some combination of a “ping!” a diminished 7th vibraphone arpeggio, a kung-fu style punch sound, or an explosion. And these are often accompanied by full-screen shaking (which can be turned off in the more recent ports) or flashes of colour, usually white.
Sitting back and looking at Ace Attorney from afar, it’s honestly quite surprising how these effects aren’t way more intrusive and annoying than they actually are, because they’re incredibly frequent and if, say, a YouTuber was putting in this amount of “funny” edits while trying to keep your attention on something they’re talking about, it would be infuriating.
But it’s testament to how involving and engrossing the stories told in these games are that they just feel like a perfectly natural part of the presentation rather than something out of the ordinary; compare to any other game with visual novel-style presentation and you’ll see that they are, of course, quite out of the ordinary, but taken in context, most players probably won’t actively notice them.
One way that these sound effects are made to work well is through syncing them up nicely with both the way the text appears gradually on screen, and the way the character sprites animate while “speaking”. It’s rare for a sound effect to come right at the beginning of a new text box; instead, you’d likely hear a “ping” at the exact moment the most important word of the sentence appears on screen, or a punch sound during the most aggressive words in a sentence, highlighting how the “speaker” might be emphasising things.
In other words, the reason why these work well in context while they would be incredibly irritating in the aforementioned example of a YouTuber is because they’re part of the “script” rather than things added after the fact for attempts at comedy. They are, in effect, “stage directions” for the in-game cast — though with the cast being unvoiced 2D artwork for the majority of the series, Ace Attorney’s creators have had to think a little outside of the box.
The character sprites are an important part of this equation, too. Ace Attorney rather sensibly doesn’t reveal a character’s full range of expressions and visible emotions right away; instead, they often gradually start to reveal more about themselves from a visual perspective as we learn more about them in the story.
A good example comes in the second main case in the first game, during which one of the main witnesses is an overbearingly attractive, heavily sexualised young woman who, at first glance, appears to have the entire courtroom wrapped around her little finger with just a giggle, a boob jiggle and a wink. But as protagonist Phoenix Wright starts to uncover the truth behind her relation to the case, she starts to reveal other sides to herself — sides that are markedly less “attractive”.
Interestingly, Ace Attorney often takes cues from action games in how it presents the way characters — particularly witnesses and suspects in the courtroom sequences — react to the unfolding narrative. Of particular note are the times when a witness in a case is uncovered to be the real perpetrator of the events that unfolded — the point at which it’s clear there’s no way out for them is often accompanied by a combination of animations, sound effects, screen shaking and flashing that wouldn’t look out of place during an RPG when the final boss had just been defeated.
This is especially apparent in “Rise from the Ashes”, the fifth case of the first game, which was added atop the original Game Boy Advance version’s four cases. This fifth case initially appears to be set somewhat apart from the original four cases, which have certain narrative threads running through them — understandable, since it was added later — but over time it shows itself to be particularly important to the depiction of the relationship between Phoenix Wright and Miles Edgeworth, as well as representing the most powerful “foe” that Wright has to overcome in the entire game.
In keeping with that idea, the depiction of the perpetrator’s response to being cornered towards the conclusion of the trial is heavily exaggerated — more so than any other character’s reactions in the rest of the game. It’s full-on “final boss” territory — all it’s really missing is some unique music for Wright’s confrontation with him that contrasts with the regular game’s “battle” themes, heard during the witness testimony and cross-examination sequences.
Through all these factors, coupled with an incredibly strong script that strikes a great balance between vaguely believable drama and elements that require a certain amount of suspension of disbelief, the Ace Attorney series successfully manages to deliver considerably more involving, engrossing and genuinely engaging narratives than any number of photorealistic triple-A titles you’d care to mention.
The series as a whole is testament to how you don’t need a big budget and elaborate resources to tell a good story — what you need, first and foremost, is simply that good story, and then it really doesn’t take anything all that fancy to successfully deliver that narrative effectively.
This is why Ace Attorney has endured in popularity for nearly 25 years at this point — and why I suspect it’ll still be around more than 25 years from now, long after people have completely forgotten about games that, while technically more impressive to a significant degree, simply don’t tell their stories anywhere near as well as Ace Attorney does.
Want more Pete? Check my personal blog I’m Not Doctor Who, and my YouTube channel ThisIsPete. If you enjoy what you read here, please consider buying me a coffee.
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Ace Attorney is one of my favorite game series, and this article highlights some of the reasons why.