With Ace Attorney Investigations 2 being officially localized for the first time, one point of particular interest is how the names will be changed compared to the fan translation names.

(This post is spoiler-free, but you may want to avoid it if you don’t want any idea about the characters in the first two cases.)

Shortly after the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection came out, we came up with a list of names that had been revealed through the trailer and website: Eddie Fender, Verity Gavèlle, Eustace Winner, and Di-Jun Wang, as well as the partial names Knight, Lloyd, and Rook.

New previews went live yesterday, and I scoured them all searching for new names, only to find none… but then fans discovered that the French website Nintendo Difference had posted a ton of screenshots in both English and French that revealed more localized names.

First, we now have full names for two of those partials. The popular theory that Lloyd would be Tabby Lloyd turned out to be true, and I love it.

And Knight’s full name is Bronco Knight, which is… funny-sounding, but apparently Bronco really is a name. This is probably the one I’ll struggle to get used to the most (alongside good old Eddie Fender, of course).

Now, onto some characters from case 2.

Sōta Sarushiro, called Simon Keyes in the fan translation, is officially Simeon Saint. This name made me tilt my head when I first saw it, but after thinking about it, I like it a lot. The similarity between first names is amusing, but both translations were clearly going for a monkey pun and just took it in different directions.

Marie Miwa, whose name was Patricia Roland in the fan translation, is Fifi Laguarde. I think that’s a fantastic one. Ace Attorney has used the “patrol” pun so many times now that it pretty much had to change, and I can see her being a Fifi.

Shuuji Orinaka was known in the fan translation as Jay Elbird, and he will now be called Rocco Carcerato. If anyone tries to claim “Carcerato” is too on-the-nose, I repeat that his fan translation name was Jay Elbird. Subtlety was never involved here.

(Though I’m now really curious about what they’ll call his pet, since it’s unlikely to be Rocky if his name is Rocco.)

Finally, Ryōken Hōinbō was named Sirhan Dogen by the fan translation and now has the official name of Bodhidharma Kanis. Now, I have no idea how to pronounce that first name, but it’s the real name of a legendary monk. To be honest, I was never sure how to pronounce Sirhan Dogen either, so I’m on board with Bodhidharma Kanis.

I know there was some doubt about the new names when the first batch came out, but I really love some of the ideas they’ve gone with here.

Meanwhile, the screenshots confirm that Verity’s interjection is still “Overruled!” though no longer broken up onto two lines. The French screenshots also show that Eddie (though he’s Freddie Lapointe in French) called Edgeworth (Benjamin Hunter) “Benny,” and I love that too.

The Ace Attorney Investigations Collection is out on September 6, which means I’m just a little over a month away from holding an officially translated Ace Attorney Investigations 2 in my hands after all these years. I can’t wait!