Today is the day. The Ace Attorney Investigations Collection is now out for all modern platforms.

Investigations and its sequel were the only games in the series that never made it to the 3DS, which made it feel a bit like Capcom had left them behind. And Investigations 2 had never received an official translation.

That makes this collection a momentous release, much more so than the Apollo Justice Trilogy earlier this year.

I already played the Investigations Collection and reviewed it over at MonsterVine, so you can head there to read my thoughts on this excellent remaster. I’m so happy this collection exists, and I’m thrilled that more people will get to play these games at last.

(Rest assured, I preordered a physical copy of the collection as well and it arrived today. There’s no way I was missing out on that!)

I’ve been waiting for this day for a long, long time.

All the way back in 2012, I blogged about the fan movement “Operation: Objection!” that hoped to show Capcom we wanted Investigations 2 localized. Two years later, we were holding a write-in/call-in event. A few months later, I was still at it. By the next year, we had a newly-revived movement to show our support.

I eventually put Investigations 2 localization on my list of pipe dreams, where it remained year after year after year…

By 2022, I had all but given up. I wanted to believe the Investigations duology would be remastered, but we’d had no new Ace Attorney announcements since The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles (which itself felt like a miracle to have translated). I told myself that if there was no Ace Attorney news by the end of the year, I would finally give in and play the Investigations 2 fan translation. So the following May, I finally played the fan translation and came out of it hoping for an official translation harder than ever so that more people could play.

And now it’s finally here.

I’ve spent so long going into every single video game event hoping for an Investigations 2 localization announcement that it feels strange to no longer have to. What will I pin all my hopes and dreams on now? I guess I’ll just have to double down on wishing for Ace Attorney 7.

In the meantime, I can’t wait to see reactions from people playing these games for the first time. Are you planning to play the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection?

Yesterday, our hopes and dreams for the past 13 years came true when the Nintendo Direct included the announcement of the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection.

This means that when that collection comes out on September 6, we’ll finally have an official localization of Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor’s Gambit.

And with an official localization… comes official names, which has been causing no end of both amusement and arguments among fans who got used to the names from the popular fan translation.

I spoke about this briefly in yesterday’s blog post, but now let’s take a look at all the names currently revealed from the official Ace Attorney Investigations 2 localization.

The Ace Attorney Investigations Collection website gives us two right off the bat, listed under the main characters for Investigations 2.

Hakari Mikagami, whom the fan translation called Justine Courtney, now has the official localized name of Verity Gavèlle. I like this one a lot. It’s an elegant-sounding name, and it plays on the same court meanings without being as overt.

Tateyuki Shigaraki, dubbed Raymond Shields by the fan translation, is now Eddie Fender. This is the one I’m having the hardest time getting used to. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s because the “a defender” pun is so blatant. Maybe it’s because I keep thinking of Freddy Fender. But like it or not, Eddie Fender is what we’ve got.

Moving away from the the list of characters, the gallery section provides us with one more, the name change that’s received the most attention from fans. Yumihiko Ichiyanagi, who was called Sebastian Debeste in the fan translation, is now officially known as Eustace Winner. And honestly… it’s growing on me. “Winner” feels a bit too on-the-nose, but it turns out it’s actually a real surname, and I can see him being a Eustace. It’s an adjustment, but it’s growing on me.

Next we need to take a look at the reveal trailer. At 1:12, a demonstration of the dialogue history shows a line in which Edgeworth mentions Di-Jun Wang. That character’s Japanese name is Teikun Ō, and the fan translation called him Di-Jun Huang. According to the wiki, Di-Jun Wang is the Mandarin Chinese reading of his Japanese name, while the fan translation then changed “Wang” to “Huang” to add an additional play on the word for “emperor.” This explains why the official name for him is so similar to the fan translation name, compared to the others.

Those are the only four new names we currently know in full. However, we have pieces of three more.

The reveal trailer also includes a scene at 2:02 in which Edgeworth is talking to a character named Knight and mentions two other characters, Ms. Lloyd and Mr. Rook.

Knight is Manosuke Naitou, who was called Horace Knightly in the fan translation. We have no clue what they’ve gone with for his first name yet, but it’s interesting that they simply went with the surname “Knight.”

Similarly, Rook is Gai Tojiro, who was Ethan Rooke in the fan translation. From Rooke to Rook, another choice that’s so close it almost seems like they didn’t have to change it at all.

And the character referenced as Ms. Lloyd matches up with the young journalist Mikiko Hayami, called Nicole Swift in the fan translation. While we haven’t seen her first name yet, the popular theory is that it will be Tabitha or Tabby to make her full name a play on “tabloid.” If that’s true, that’s a brilliant choice. I love it.

Those are all the new names I’ve been able to find. If you’ve spotted one that I missed – from an official source, not just people editing the wiki – let me know. It’s certainly going to feel strange seeing these new names after I played the fan translation just last year, but I’m so, so excited that this is even a conversation we’re having at all.

After all these years, Ace Attorney Investigations 2 is being localized. How do you feels about the character names revealed so far?