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The Ace Attorney series is a special one. What are essentially legal drama visual novels have become a beloved Capcom title, with even the most casual Capcom fan being at least tangentially aware of the funny lawyer man yelling “Objection!”
At gamescom asia 2023, we caught up with Kenichi Hashimoto, producer on the Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy about bringing the next big trilogy being released on modern consoles- as well as the popularity of a certain clown girl in recent years
What new features do you have for fans of Apollo Justice?
Kenichi Hashimoto: As you mentioned, this is going to be the third collection of the Ace Attorney series, starting from the Ace Attorney Phoenix Wright Collection, then the Great Ace Attorney Collections. In terms of how to create the current Ace Attorney Apollo Justice Trilogy, since the staff have known that fans have been waiting for this game for a very long time, so they were wondering how to create the game not only by actually putting it into the newer platform, but also adding something new. That’s how the museum function is currently present in the Apollo Justice Trilogy.
So, in plain words, only putting it into the newer platform would be not enough for the fans of the series. That’s why they were thinking about how to improve it, especially putting the higher resolution, voice overs, etc, so that players can enjoy the trilogy.
Do you have any message to both long-term and new fans of the Ace Attorney franchise?
Kenichi Hashimoto: Since the current trilogy is made with a higher resolution, there’s voice-overs added for this game. So for new fans that are coming to come to play the Apollo Justice trilogy, obviously, we would like for them to experience the new graphics and these old titles on the newer platform.
As for the older fans of the franchise, obviously, we would like them to compare how the game itself has improved from the original. For example, what things changed from the older games on Nintendo DS and how they are currently looking now in Switch or PS4. So we would like for all fans, no matter that either old or new, to enjoy our current game.
Are there any other features for fans to look forward to?
Kenichi Hashimoto: In terms of the newly added features, as of now, all of the features that have been available to the public are all of the features that will be available in game. And especially the current Museum is one of our biggest newly added features. Instead of it, you can use animation studio to use the characters and set them up in different the settings, to play around with them however you want.
Also, you can also listen to orchestral and the average versions of the 4, 5, 6, Ace Attorney games, as well as the music. So, you can listen to the music, as well as the gallery which include all the development pictures and development I guess various things that were not available to public before and that will be all things that we need have for now, nothing undisclosed that we can share to this interview and probably in future as well.
When it comes to fans’ feedback and suggestions, which particular inputs were most memorable, most interesting, and or had a major impact to you?
Kenichi Hashimoto: Yeah. Ace Attorney’s staff constantly checks on different feedback from fans. Although it wasn’t me personally, the planner for the current Apollo Justice trilogy noticed that fans for the Spirit of Justice have noticed very small details about how the time flash works in the game, how time span works. And so they noticed that the feedback from fans was quite interesting in terms of that such small and slightly insignificant things can impact majorly how fans experience the games. So they were quite thrilled about fans noticing those different things that they put inside the game.
What challenges did the team face when consolidating the trilogy?
Kenichi Hashimoto: One of the not struggles but one of the things that our stuff was faced with is importing the older games to our Capcom RE engine and especially how to put the Ace Attorney titles and to fit them in our currently running engine.
We know that Apollo Justice Trilogy has added Chinese dubbing and it’s definitely a pleasant surprise for Chinese players. What is the thought process behind deciding to include additional languages?
Kenichi Hashimoto: Well in terms of Chinese dubbing, the staff were pretty set on adding Chinese dubbing as well as Chinese localization for Apollo Justice Trilogy, even from the earlier stages of the development. So, it was a quite easier choice not to add it in the language.
When it comes in terms to Phoenix Wright trilogy even although the Chinese language is self wasn’t available from the very start of the release of the game since it was added with the language patch later on, the staff decided that it would be very easy choice to add the various languages from the very first day of the release so that you users could enjoy the full potential of the games.
Any plans to release the game with Thai localization?
Kenichi Hashimoto: Since currently with added different languages for our trilogy and since we have, unfortunately we are aware that for Thai gamers we haven’t added the Thai localization but since we are aware of that we probably think that Thai gamers will enjoy in English. But, to put it plainly, we are well aware that interest in Ace Attorney games in Asia region specifically has been rising quite rapidly over the last years.
So, we are currently considering in future also adding Thai localization as well. It’s not really set in stone as of now, but we are currently thinking about expanding in order to have different players from different Asian regions to enjoy our games. Just currently, we would like to players to enjoy our Ace Attorney trilogy as it is.
Will there be a physical version of the game eventually?
Kenichi Hashimoto: Physical release will be in the future.
Apollo Justice Ace Attorney Trilogy included 3 interconnected cases. So could you elaborate on the challenges and creative decisions involved in tying these cases together into a cause cohesive narrative?
Kenichi Hashimoto: Since the games at the original games the Ace Attorney 4,5,6 made in the way that they were originally planned as intertwined to share the whole story of Apollo Justice. It wasn’t really that big problem to put them in a trilogy since it was pretty much planned from the original games to be made as one entire story.
Considering that the Apollo Justice trilogy was originally made for the Nintendo DS, was it difficult to translate the DS-specific features, such as like dusting for fingerprints, to PC and Nintendo Switch?
Kenichi Hashimoto: To elaborate more on the previous statement about it being difficult, since the Nintendo DS was split into two screens, for the staff it was quite a challenge to put all the mini-games like dusting fingerprints or taking footprint sample into one whole screen.
So they remade the UI, they remade how the mini-games were working. And actually one of the other difficult things for the development staff was the newly added story mode function for the Apollo Justice trilogy. It’s the automatically, not skippable, but it’s basically the story mode where you can enjoy the game without doing basically anything.
It just automatically scrolls through the game and mini-games as well. So how to make mini-games solve themselves automatically was one of the difficult problems that staff was faced with and after many trials and errors, they managed to do it. So that’s one of the things they want you to also experience in the upcoming Ace Attorney trilogy.
Looking Back On The Ace Attorney Series
Considering the Ace Attorney series is a legal drama, was there any worry about some legal nuances being lost in translation?
Kenichi Hashimoto: So, yes, to put it plainly even though Ace Attorney Series is involving the law itself, it doesn’t really strictly need to be so in touch with law, it just basically has it as its setting. So the game wants players to experience different settings for different characters and see how interesting solving mysteries can be.
So, in terms of localizations for each country and appropriating different laws for different countries it’s not that, it wasn’t that difficult for the series itself.
The Ace Attorney series in general is often considered a golden standard for localization in general. Can the team talk about how well the localization is done, considering how most fans are unaware that the setting and character names are completely different in the Japan and English versions of the game?
Kenichi Hashimoto: As to put it simply, the Ace Attorney series, especially in terms of localization, has come to its current form almost 20 years ago, since the very first game, and the very first entry in the series.
At that time, the internet itself wasn’t really as powerful as it is now. So, at the time when developers were working on localization, they come to realize that if you just translate in Japanese various terms and questions as it is to American or European users, they wouldn’t really understand much of it.
So, that’s why the current theme of Ace Attorney localization or the way of localizing Ace Attorney has come to its current form. Not only localizing it, but also culturalizing it, so that players from different language families could understand various questions and various tricks inside the game and enjoy it.
That’s why even in the current Apollo Justice Trilogy, we’ve retained the same way of localizing Ace Attorney. And that was a team effort of developers, localization team, as well as outsourcing translation companies.
So, we’re working on players to have very easy to understand translation inside the game, especially so that players from different language families with having their world, preset world views and their preset language understandings could easily play the game without any additional knowledge of all the laws and other things.
Was the team aware of the resurgence in popularity of Geiru Toneido in Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney Spirit of Justice, specifically in the West?
Kenichi Hashimoto: Yes. The staff were well aware about the popularity of Geiru Toneido, and they even put it inside of the PV just to spice things up for the fans.
Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy drops January 25th, 2024 for PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4 and Xbox One. Our thanks to Kenichi Hashimoto for taking the time to talk about what’s new in the remakes as well as Capcom Singapore for giving us the opportunity to chat with him.
