If you’ve seen my recent Ace Attorney posts, you know I’m very optimistic about Ace Attorney’s future.

To me, Ace Attorney 7 is a matter of when, not if.

For that matter, I even think we have a chance of seeing an Investigations Duology collection, especially given the recent attention it’s received.

But optimism still leaves us with one big question: where is Ace Attorney 7?

The seventh mainline game has been rumored since 2017, and here we are six years later still waiting for a shred of actual news. As I mentioned in my post about Ace Attorney’s future, the data breach leaks that revealed The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles and tentative plans for the Apollo Justice Trilogy also said Ace Attorney 7 was in development.

According to that roadmap, Great Ace Attorney staff would be shifted to the in-development Ace Attorney 7 after finishing work on Chronicles, with Chronicles planned for Q1 2021 release followed by a projected Ace Attorney 7 release in Q3 2021. Chronicles released later than its projected window, but Ace Attorney 7 has come nowhere close. This has led to a lot of speculation about what exactly happened to it, and I think there are three main possibilities.

Possibility #1: The delay is strategic

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles game out at the end of July 2021 and blew past sales expectations. With Chronicles selling so well, the last thing they’d want to do is release another Ace Attorney game too soon and risk cannibalizing sales – and it might have spurred them to release a collection of games 4-6 before Ace Attorney 7 after all.

Chronicles came out in mid 2021, and then they used Ace Attorney’s success to boost marketing of the Ghost Trick remaster in mid 2023, while preparing the Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy for early 2024.

If this possibility is correct, it would mean that Ace Attorney 7 is going well or even finished, but the announcement was withheld to space out releases and bridge the gap for new fans by releasing the Apollo Justice Trilogy first. We’d probably get an announcement later in 2024 or the next year in that case.

Possibility #2: It was cancelled

The worst possibility, of course, is that Ace Attorney 7 was cancelled. Many fans seem to subscribe to this theory, believing the pandemic, Yamazaki’s departure from Capcom in 2020, or general development troubles led to Ace Attorney 7 being scrapped completely.

Obviously, since I’m an Ace Attorney optimist, I don’t believe this – or at the very least, I believe Capcom would un-cancel it after seeing the success of Chronicles. It is a possibility worth keeping in mind, though, because that would account for such a big delay. In this scenario, the Apollo Justice Trilogy could be seen as either a way to fill the gap while restarting development or an alternative release.

Let’s hope it wasn’t cancelled, though.

Possibility #3: It was rebooted or revamped

While this might sound very close to the previous possibility, this is actually the one I think is the most optimistic: the possibility that the in-development Ace Attorney 7 was playing it safe, but the success of Chronicles convinced them to overhaul the project to make it a more ambitious game.

For example, they could have seen how the two Great Ace Attorney games telling a single story allowed for its story and world to be built up so well and decided to give Ace Attorney 7 more than the usual 5 cases. Or they could have realized Ace Attorney doesn’t need Phoenix as the lead character to be a success (the recent poll focusing on the Ace Attorney characters with their own games fits in with that) and retooled Ace Attorney 7 to have a different lead.

This possibility would mean Ace Attorney 7 is potentially still a ways off, with the Apollo Justice Trilogy filling the gap in the meantime, but it could be the best-case scenario. I’d like to see what they could do if they were willing to take some risks.

Conclusion

Right now, there’s no way of knowing what the current status of Ace Attorney 7 is, but I think these are the most likely possibilities. What do you think happened to Ace Attorney 7?

As you can probably guess, the absolute highlight of the recent showcases for me was Capcom’s, because it included the announcement of the Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy.

If you didn’t catch the news, the Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy is a new collection of Ace Attorney games that bundles the 4th, 5th, and 6th mainline games: Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies, and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice.

(For some reason, the official website includes a beautiful image of the games’ art… in the wrong play order, as seen here, but that’s probably because Spirit of Justice’s art looks best as a centerpiece.)

It will be out in early 2024 for Switch, PS4, Xbox One, and PC.

Even though I’ve already played all three games, I’m delighted by the news, not only because it means more people can play them, but also because I believe it’s another sign that Ace Attorney’s future is brighter than ever.

We’ve been waiting for Ace Attorney 7 for a very long time. Remember back in 2017, when rumors claimed Ace Attorney 7 was coming in 2018? That obviously didn’t happen. There hasn’t been a brand-new Ace Attorney game since 2017, when The Great Ace Attorney 2 first came out in Japan, so it’s no surprise that hopes for the series were starting to dim.

I’d started to give up hope that we’d ever even see the unlocalized entries in the series, which at the time were Investigations 2 and the two Great Ace Attorney games.

All that changed in 2021 with the release of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. Capcom had decided that the two historical spin-offs (which hadn’t sold well) were worthy of being remastered, bundled, and translated for the first time. Chronicles even got a physical release on the Switch in North America, despite the last two mainline entries being digital-only. That was enough to make me believe in Ace Attorney’s future again, especially when Chronicles blasted past sales expectations (according to the leak, their sales expectations for Chronicles were 300k copies by 2025).

Yet with no sign of Ace Attorney 7 despite the leaks saying it was in development, many fans once again started to say the series was dead.

But what about now?

In the leaks that revealed The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles and claimed Ace Attorney 7 was also in development, the prospect of a collection containing Apollo Justice, Dual Destinies, and Spirit of Justice was mentioned only tentatively, to be decided based on the sales of the other games. Many fans went so far as to say it was confirmed to not be happening due to the expenses required to translate Dual Destinies and Spirit of Justice into all the languages Apollo Justice had been available in.

Well, it seems that’s not the case after all, because the Apollo Justice collection is on its way, in 7 different languages, with Dual Destinies and Spirit of Justice being translated into other languages for the first time (previously, Japanese and English were the only languages for those two).

Since Capcom is willing to give Ace Attorney games new translations, I’m more optimistic than ever for Ace Attorney Investigations 2’s chances of being localized.

And between The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles and the Apollo Justice Trilogy, it looks like we’re finally free from the worry that Capcom believed an Ace Attorney game would only sell if Phoenix’s name was in the title. Could we see an Ace Attorney Investigations Duology in the years ahead?

Most important of all, the biggest hurdle to a 7th mainline game was the fact that only half of the mainline series was available on current platforms. With the 3DS eShop having been shut down, the 4th, 5th, and 6th games were only available on mobile devices, and even those were unavailable for a lot of new phones.

With all 6 mainline Ace Attorney games on modern platforms, Capcom willing to go the extra step to translate entries that hadn’t been translated before, and the series seeing excellent sales (enough for them to use “from the creator of Ace Attorney” in the hopes of boosting Ghost Trick’s sales, too), I don’t see anything standing in the way of Ace Attorney 7 now.

Yes, there’s a good chance it’ll have a new director if Shu Takumi no longer wants to work on mainline Ace Attorney, since Takeshi Yamazaki left Capcom a few years ago, but there’s no reason to think Capcom couldn’t put someone else in charge – and no reason to assume the new director wouldn’t understand the series, either.

This isn’t the time for Ace Attorney doom and gloom! With The Great Ace Attorney translated and the Apollo Justice Trilogy coming next year, I say Ace Attorney optimism should be at an all-time high.

How do you feel about the current state of the Ace Attorney series and its future prospects?