Operation Backlog Completion 2026

Ace Attorney’s Future Looks Brighter Than Ever

 Video games  10 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
Jun 192023
 

(Note: this is not the correct play order.)

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?

Celebrating All Things Mysterious: Ace Attorney Investigations 2

 Celebrating All Things Mysterious, Reviews, Video games  6 Responses »  Tagged with: , , ,
May 312023
 

Today is the final day of Celebrating All Things Mysterious 2023, and what better game to celebrate with than one we’ve been talking about since the earliest days of this blog?

Gyakuten Kenji 2, or Ace Attorney Investigations 2, came out in 2011. It is now the only game in the Ace Attorney series to not have an official release outside of Japan.

It did, however, receive a fan translation. I’ve spent over a decade now holding out hope for an official localization and have more hope for it in the aftermath of The Great Ace Attorney’s localization that I had in years, but last year I decided that if the year ended with no sign of further Ace Attorney ports, I would finally play the Ace Attorney Investigations 2 fan translation.

I wanted a copy anyway, just to have every Ace Attorney game, so I imported a Japanese copy of Gyakuten Kenji 2 from Play-Asia.

And when May came, I began the process of learning how one actually plays a DS game fan translation, which was a bit like jumping into the deep end since the closest I’ve come to anything of the kind was playing the fan translation of Chaos;Head, a PC game I could simply buy, download, and apply the patch to. So actually figuring out how to play Investigations 2 (particularly since I wanted it on a flash cart so I could play it on my 3DS without hacking it) took much longer than I expected.

But at last, I was able to play Investigations 2 with its fan translation.

Picking up after the events of the first Investigations, Investigations 2 once again puts you in the shoes of Miles Edgeworth as he investigates a new series of cases. If you’ve never played Investigations, it plays a bit differently than the main Ace Attorney series. For investigations, you actually walk around as an Edgeworth sprite to inspect areas in the environment. You also confront people directly, hearing their testimonies and presenting evidence against them, instead of having that occur in a trial. They are essentially investigation-only cases, but with mechanics made to adapt Ace Attorney’s regular style to that format.

Investigations 2 also adds two new gameplay features, Logic and Logic Chess. In addition to evidence, you’ll also receive clues that you can then connect to one another through the “Logic” mechanic. This is usually fairly simple, but it was fine.

Logic Chess, meanwhile, puts you in a confrontation with a character who won’t reveal their secrets. It has little to do with actual chess and is essentially a timed series of dialogue choices to break through a character’s resistance, while chess pieces float on the screen to represent the character’s defenses. There are times when you need to pick the option to wait without saying anything, so it becomes a game of judging from the character’s responses whether you should speak or not. Sometimes it felt a bit too arbitrary, but overall I found Logic Chess to be a fun mechanic.

Moving on to the story, it was easy to forget I was playing a fan translation. It feels like Ace Attorney writing. Occasionally I found the game’s questions to be worded in a confusing way so that I wasn’t quite sure what it was asking me for, but I’m not sure if that’s because of the translation or the original writing.

Anyway, it brings back returning characters while also introducing several new ones. Most of the new characters were fairly likeable, with one in particular getting such a character arc that I have to admire the writers for making my opinion of a character change so dramatically over the course of the game. And while I unfortunately got spoiled on the main antagonist’s identity ahead of time, the reveal still gave me chills.

There’s plenty of Ace Attorney humor, as well, although I didn’t find it to be as funny as some of them are. It also has a lot of callbacks to the previous Ace Attorney games, much more than I expected. That was a fun surprise.

As for the story itself, I’m going to need some time to think everything over. You see, Investigations 2 has an overarching story, but the way things come together don’t become apparent until near the end. Each individual case has its highs and lows, but once I started to see how events were connected, I found myself wanting to go back and see them again with new context. And the character writing was so good that a few key moments alone made me love the game so much more.

I only have three real criticisms of the story. First, I felt the pacing dragged on a bit. Most cases felt a little longer than they had to be. My other two criticisms are spoilers, so I’ll explain them behind spoiler tags.

Click for Ace Attorney Investigations 2 spoilers
This is partly on me, but for all this time since Investigations 2 came out, I mistakenly believed we’d play as Gregory in the trial against Von Karma that led to the DL-6 incident. Going through the investigation but having the trial summarized by Ray in the present disappointed me and feels like a missed opportunity. Actually playing through that trial would have elevated that case by so much for me.

Finally, I wish the mastermind had just a slightly greater presence in the story. Just enough to make it feel like more of a betrayal.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed my time with Ace Attorney Investigations 2. While I need some time to let the story think in to determine where it sits in my Ace Attorney rankings, I definitely had a good time with it.

You might think that this lessens my desire for an official translation… but you’d be wrong! No, I want Investigations 2 to get a port and localization more than ever now! I want more people to play it. I want to be able to recommend it to friends without a list of instructions on how to play it! The fan translation is great, so maybe Capcom could work out a deal to use it as a base for an official release, like what happened with the Crossbell games. Playing it just cemented how much I not only want the remaining mainline games to be ported to modern platforms, but the Investigations duology as well.

So I’m still hoping for an Ace Attorney Investigations 2 localization after all this time. The sole other time I’ve played a game’s fan translation, localization was announced five months later, so maybe that same magic will occur again!

Gyakuten Kenji 2 can still be found out there, but being a Japan-exclusive DS game makes it among the most difficult Ace Attorney games to play. Here’s hoping Capcom remembers it and gives Investigations another chance.

And that brings this year’s mystery game celebration to a close! You have until the end of tonight to leave comments for the contest, so join in the conversation with your thoughts on Ace Attorney Investigations 2 and all the other games we’ve discussed this month!

Professor Layton News, Ghost Trick Release Date, and Ace Attorney Sale!

 Video games  3 Responses »  Tagged with: , , , , , ,
Mar 102023
 

Yesterday featured both the Level-5 Vision 2023 showcase and a Capcom Spotlight showcase later in the day, so we have quite a few things to talk about.

Level-5 Vision 2023

In Level-5’s showcase, they reiterated their new commitment to releasing all of the games showcased worldwide, in multiple languages.

All are planned for 2023 or 2024 releases (and since everything was given a 2023 window except for Professor Layton, that’s probably a 2024 title).

They started with another trailers for Decapolice, which looks like it should be a lot of fun. A detective investigation game with turn-based combat sounds like it was made for me. They also had a new trailer for Fantasy Life i (the “i” stands for “island,” “Internet,” and “individual”), and while it does look like it has more of an emphasis on customization than the first game did, it still looks like it will follow the original game’s direction. I’d like to see more of the game world beyond the town, but I’m excited.

Next came Megaton Musashi: Wired, a mech game that is an updated re-release of the previously Japan-exclusive Megaton Musashi X.

Then the fourth game Level-5 showed was the one I was waiting for the most, Professor Layton and the New World of Steam (with proper capitalization in its title and logo now). It still feels like a dream that we’re getting a new Professor Layton game, and while the new trailer is short, we do have some more details to work with.

Professor Layton and the New World of Steam is set one year after the events of Unwound Future and features Layton and Luke reuniting in America, in a town called Steam Bison (seriously). No one in America knows who Professor Layton is, while Luke has already solved mysteries there and become known as a detective, so that’s an entertaining way to play with the usual dynamic.

This trailer gives us our first look at Luke, as well as art showing some new characters and steampunk devices.

Curiously, the trailer says, “This time, it seems like the more puzzles you solve, the more the city will develop.” I don’t entirely know what that means, and some fans are worried it will feel less like a Layton game, but I’m intrigued by the potential. What I hope for from that concept is a Professor Layton game that progresses like usual, but earning more picarats and solving optional puzzles makes the city change and grow. The games always have some sort of side mini-game, and I could see city development taking a similar form.

One more detail from this trailer is that the puzzles are being developed by a group called QuizKnock. I’m not familiar with QuizKnock, but a fan on Reddit who follows their content had a lot of praise for them, so that’s the best thing I’ve heard about this new game so far. Layton’s Mystery Journey suffered from both a weak story and weak puzzles, and the puzzles are what I was most concerned about going into a new entry. So although the original Puzzle Master, Akira Tago, is no longer with us, the fact that Level-5 has called in a team of accomplished puzzle designers to work on the new game fills me with much more optimism.

The trailer also claims this adventure will “go beyond your wildest imaginations,” and I sure hope so. After Layton’s Mystery Journey, I want this one to return to form with an intense mystery culminating in an absurdly bizarre twist.

Finally, Level-5 concluded their show with Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road. I never got into the Inazuma Eleven series, but this game stood out to me for the past several years as a sign that Level-5 might be in trouble. First announced in 2016 as Inazuma Eleven Ares and expected to release in 2018, it was delayed repeatedly and then renamed to Inazuma Eleven: Great Road of Heroes and announced for 2020, only to be delayed multiple times again before being announced for 2023 as Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road of Heroes. Now it looks like it’s finally on track, so I’m happy to see this game escaping its troubled development.

Capcom Spotlight

That was it for Level-5’s show, and then Capcom had a showcase later in the day! Their release dates all leaked ahead of the show, but at least that meant I learned early that Ghost Trick would indeed be getting a release date. The remaster of Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective will be out on June 30, and digital preorders are available now.

Preorders also come with some bonus digital content, four backgrounds and two extra music tracks. The game itself features a remastered soundtrack and some other extras.

I love Ghost Trick, so I already preordered. I still wish it was getting a physical release outside of Japan (especially since Japan is getting a special edition), but I’ll absolutely buy a digital copy if that’s what we’ve got, at least to show support.

Now, they said during the pre-show that there wouldn’t be any new game announcements, so I dampened my faint Ace Attorney hopes. Ghost Trick is pretty much all I cared about from the showcase, since I’m not the biggest fan of Resident Evil 4 and therefore didn’t care about the Resident Evil news as much as usual.

(Ace Attorney did appear in the showcase when they announced their upcoming digital theme park to celebrate Capcom franchises, though. Some people think this is a means to sell NFTs. I won’t buy NFTs even for Ace Attorney. I’d much rather spend money on new Ace Attorney games, or perhaps merchandise like these adorable things if they would just please start selling them here.)

Ace Attorney 3DS Closing Sale

But while there wasn’t any Ace Attorney news, we do have reason to discuss Ace Attorney. With the 3DS eShop shutting down on March 27, Capcom put all of their 3DS games on sale, and it’s an even better sale than the last few 3DS sales they’ve had. You can now buy any of the 3DS Ace Attorney games for $2.99 each from now until the eShop closes. The DLC episodes remain $5.99 each, however.

Phoenix Wright Trilogy: https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/phoenix-wright-ace-attorney-trilogy-3ds
Apollo Justice: https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/apollo-justice-ace-attorney-3ds/
Dual Destinies: https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/phoenix-wright-ace-attorney-dual-destinies-3ds/
Spirit of Justice: https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/phoenix-wright-ace-attorney-spirit-of-justice-3ds/

(I picked up Apollo Justice during the last $4.99 sale just to have an extra copy, because I thought that was the best sale it would get.)

I still hope they’ll port the later games to modern platforms, but if you’ve been meaning to get the 3DS games, at least they have one last sale to close out at a great price.

Conclusion

Phew, we ended up with a lot to talk about today. What did you think of Level-5’s showcase and the new Professor Layton news? And are you excited for Ghost Trick getting a release date?

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