Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, it’s a podcast all about Ace Attorney. We first, we did the Zelda podcast where you had to exhaust all of your Zelda takes from across like more than two decades. And now we’re doing the same thing for Ace Attorney, albeit covering a slightly shorter space of time. So how are you feeling about going over this series? I’m really looking forward to it. You know, I’m a huge fan of this series. And anyone who knows who’s listened to this podcast, I bang on about it a lot. But, you know, I kind of knew that, you know, with The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles coming up, that we’d probably do an episode. So I started like replaying things and just kind of really getting back into the whole kind of Ace Attorney thing and getting excited and hyping myself up for Great Ace Attorney. You know, I was already a fan, but I sort of feel weirdly renewed. I don’t know if that’s, you know, specifically because I was prepping for the episode or just because it was, you know, about time for a revisit. Yeah, for sure. This has always been one of your sort of signature series, as it were. So in the first section, we’re going to talk all about The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. Matthew’s played an absolute ton of that. That was the mystery game he was alluding to a few episodes ago, by the way, the thing he was playing in the background. So Matthew’s had review code for this for a long time, so can weigh in with detailed takes about this kind of like historical Ace Attorney game. And then in the second part, we’re going to talk a bit about the Ace Attorney series generally, do a bit of background and discuss the kind of origins of the series. And finally, Matthew’s can do his top 10 games in the series. So Matthew, I suppose then, before we get into the rankings, how was that process of trying to audit which games are like better than the other ones? When we say it’s the top 10, like it is the 10, you know, it’s a ranking of the entire series. So it’s it’s quite neat in that sense. This is like a weird series where I feel like there’s quite a lot of agreement on like the main games of the kind of order they come in. Like a lot of the fan chat is around the same. I do depart from it in a couple of important places. There’s a couple of games which people really rate that I don’t care for as much. And then you’ve also got like the weird introduction of sort of the spinoff games, the latent game. And I would also call this Sherlock Holmes a spinoff, you know, on those maybe like your mileage may vary. And that that’s kind of interesting. So, yeah, I know there’s a few relatively conservative takes in there by Ace Attorney standards, but hopefully I’ve justified the placement of the kind of the weird games around the edges. Good stuff. I look forward to hearing that ranking because it’s a mystery to me. Matthew hasn’t dropped any clues. I’ve got my suspicions about what will be number one, but we’ll see. So let’s let’s kick off with The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles and Matthew. So these were long, unlocalised 3DS games, two 3DS games that have been combined and released in the West. What does it mean to you that these have arrived here now on a, you know, on all formats basically? Yeah, I mean, incredibly exciting. And it wasn’t just that they were untranslated Ace Attorney games. It’s that they’re specifically untranslated Shootakumi Ace Attorney games. You’re going to hear that name an awful lot throughout this episode. He’s the creator of Ace Attorney, like very much the kind of puppet master sort of behind the whole things. These are not games made by like massive teams. So the kind of fingerprints of its creator are really clearly felt. But as the series goes on, you sort of split into two developer sort of timelines. Shootakumi is sort of doing one thing and the rest of the team are doing another. So the idea that there would be like two of his entries not coming over here was super depressing, particularly as it’s a combination of Ace Attorney sort of universe gameplay mechanics and this Sherlock Holmes Victorian London setting, which I’m super into crime writing. So it seemed criminal at the time that we weren’t going to get this. And I was trying to look back actually and find some of that original justification at the time. And the thing that comes up with this series a lot is this idea of localization difficulties or that they worry there may be too many cultural boundaries. So that’s kind of an interesting through line as well. But I always thought Sherlock Holmes, you know, why aren’t you bringing this to West? Everyone knows he’s Sherlock Holmes. Everyone loves Sherlock Holmes. But now having played it, I can maybe understand where they’re coming from. Yeah. So in this game that you play is Rionofsky Narohodo, so he’s like the antecedent of Phoenix Wright basically. And Narohodo is the name of Phoenix Wright in the games, right? Yeah, that’s right. So yeah, the setup of it is you’re playing as Phoenix Wright’s ancestor. It would probably make more sense to the Japanese audience because over there, Ace Attorney is set in Japan and yes, he is Narohodo as well, so it makes sense. But you can sort of… it doesn’t like draw that line too distinctly. Like obviously if you know it, you know it, but it’s not like there are loads of kind of call forwards, you know, not call backs, but references to those later games. It’s pretty sort of self-contained. Yeah, there’s no sort of like London Bobby equivalent of Gumshoe, for example, Matthew or any. There are, but because the stories are quite tropey, like there is a detective who wears like a Mac. He’s a bit more like Gumshoe, but it isn’t… I wouldn’t say like he’s intended as a direct reference. I will say actually up front that for those that are worried, I am going to avoid any like major spoilers talking about great ace attorneys because that is out today, I think, the day you’re listening to this episode. I know as a fan what I wouldn’t want spoiled, so I’ll be very careful. Don’t worry, if you’re listening to this episode, you’re in safe hands. Yeah, so it’s actually… it seemed like it was reasonably priced on Switch as well. I think it’s something like 34 quid. I should have double checked that before we recorded this, but… Which is kind of crazy because it’s two games. It’s two games, it’s massive, so it took me over 60 hours to get through this. On a very crude, like, pound per hour kind of, you know, comparison, that’s pretty great value. Like, I would have, like, genuinely, happily paid 50 quid for this. What I found funny, Matthew, is when I came round your house a few weeks ago, you said to me, oh, I’ve got about, like, 90 work things going on at the moment and I’m massively behind and then you said, I’m massively behind because I’ve done nothing but play this game. So, even though it’s very long then, you found it quite moreish. Like I said, I’ve just been waiting for this and, you know, when I get these games, I just have to devour them, you know, it’s been the same with all the newer ones, like, I’ve just played them super intensively and they’re, you know, the nature of the stories, like, they’re very layered, they’re very tangled, like, they don’t suit big gaps. Not that I would have taken, like, weeks between playing or anything, you know, it has this kind of, sort of like momentum to it in that, you know, every case kind of sort of ends on a bit of a cliffhanger for the next case and you want to get straight into it, I mean, that’s kind of a classic Ace Attorney thing is that you have this moment of victory in court and then there’s always a little bit of sort of monologue afterwards, where it’s like, you know, as we celebrated that, you know, little did I know that something really awful was going to happen tomorrow, which, you know, could be a bit hackneyed, but I think that’s quite a sort of fun part of this world. Yeah, for sure. So I think it’s really interesting the point you make about how these run in a kind of parallel timeline to the mainline 3DS entries, the two entries, Dual Destinies and Spirit of Justice. So I suppose, like, in terms of how it differs as a sort of Ace Attorney experience, what are the differences between like how Capcom did those mainline entries and how Shutokumi and his team did this one? The time difference is obviously, that’s a really big factor. This really leans heavily into the restrictions of the period and being in the 19th century and it’s kind of about crime in that era, which obviously the games set in modern day don’t have. I’ll go into that in a bit more detail, but I would say very broadly, the split you get is that there are basically two creative leads in the Ace Attorney universe. Now you have Shutokumi, who does Ace Attorneys 1 through 4 and basically goes off to do Ghost Trick and at that point the kind of creative lead becomes Takashi Yamazaki. He kind of trains under Shutokumi and is sort of the heir apparent. Shutokumi writes Apollo Justice, but Yamazaki is the kind of like planner on the game, so he’s there and he kind of fills in some of the gaps. He writes, this is quite nerdy, but like in the investigation sections in the Ace Attorney games you can kind of click on the background and get all these like silly little in-jokes and Takumi kind of delegates some of that to him. He writes some of the text in courtroom when you get things wrong, you know, so Takumi’s kind of doing the sort of through line of the kind of campaign and then you’ve got Yamazaki doing the stuff around the edge. And then he sort of takes over the series and makes Ace Attorney Investigations, which is the Edgeworth spinoff. He does two of those and then he’s the lead writer on Ace Attorney 5 and 6. So the producer of the whole series like specifically references this in that he says, I think there are fans of like Takumi’s games and Yamazaki’s games, like they are separate things. Where they differ is that I’d say Takumi’s cases are they’re slightly simpler, not in a bad way, but they’re kind of kind of purer, cleaner mysteries. Yamazaki’s stuff is like a lot more convoluted. I’d say it leans like a lot more into the very mad, tangled sort of flavour of Japanese crime fiction where Takumi’s stuff has always been like a lot more influenced by like British crime writers. He himself says Sherlock Holmes, The Father Brown books are like two big inspirations and they’re not as like nutty, you know, they’re not as like impossible crime kind of scenarios, which is more like Yamazaki’s thing, you know, without getting too deep into it. That’s like the philosophical difference between at the heart of the two sort of strands. And obviously, because Takumi is influenced by British crime, getting to play in Victorian London is obviously, you know, he goes wild, you know, in this game, he really leans into it. It doesn’t feel like just an Ace Attorney game in London, it really feels like a proper bit of like Sherlock Holmes storytelling, you know, a lot of the cases kind of lean into like technology at the time, like he’s clearly done loads of research about, you know, what was happening in London at the time, kind of. There are moments where it almost feels like he’s giving you like a bit of a history lesson in Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. There’s genuinely a prolonged bit of dialogue where they explain the concept of the window tax. That didn’t happen in Ace Attorney. And that is kind of, I feel, attached to what he did in Professor Layton, which was where he was trying to make Ace Attorney work in the kind of rules and setting of the kind of Layton-verse. And I feel like that kind of gave him the kind of toolkit to come and do this game. I’d say this has a lot more in common with that than it does the earlier Ace Attorneys. So in terms of like accounting for the setting, obviously the art looks like it was a massive undertaking for them creating this Victorian London setting. But I was curious, Matthew, what do they add in terms of like mechanics to account for the change in time period? The two big sort of mechanical sort of show pieces here are that in the court system you have a jury rather than just a judge. And so the whole concept is that you’re trying to sway these six jurors if they ever sort of sway to not guilty. And I will say like, this is all very scripted. It’s not like a simulated court system. Everything happens exactly when it’s meant to happen in an Ace Attorney game. But the sort of setup is that if all the jurors say guilty, you have to then like directly appeal to them and try and like talk them around so that the trial can kind of continue. Which is quite fun because it plays to the strength of the series is it basically means there’s another six like weird characters in every case. And you know, they’re quite, you know, they’re a big bunch of weirdos, the jurors. And it’s also like a sort of hot seat round where you’re having to find lots of like micro contradictions between what the jurors think. The core idea of Ace Attorney is that you’re in trials listening to witness testimony and you have to find the contradictions by presenting evidence. So where the jury system differs is that you’re comparing juror statements to find contradictions. The other big distinction is that in the investigation periods, which sort of happened between the trials, you’re obviously working with Sherlock Holmes and he kind of busts into the scenes and does these sort of deductions, various sort of Holmesian deductions where he kind of points out all these minute details. But the kind of joke here is that he’s kind of like an idiot Holmes and you then have to kind of correct everything he’s made, all the assumptions. And they’re quite weird. I wouldn’t go as far to say that they’re like difficult puzzles. He basically points at a thing and then you look around the scene and say, actually, I think it’s this thing is important instead. And there’s only like two or three options. Like it’s, it feels quite hard to fail them. But they’re more just like these sort of mad character sort of set pieces. I mean, they’re really like amazingly choreographed because he’s sort of dancing around and there’s always sort of theatrical stage lighting that kind of highlights different bits of evidence. It’s like, and I think we’ll probably get to this in a sec, but it’s one of the few bits of the game where like, I actually kind of wish it was on 3DS because by 3DS standards, like it would have been technically like super, super impressive. So Matthew, if I was to ask you to like just give me maybe like the tutorial case in this game, just a kind of sample case to give me an idea of what sort of things you’re up against in this setting, what would, what would you pick out? So I’d say all of the cases, they sort of lean into the historical setting as I’ve said before. I mean, that does mean that some of the actual like murder methods are quite old fashioned. Like there’s a lot of quite simple like shootings and stabbings here. It’s not massively elaborate, but what he does is really nice and easy then sort of weaves in historical details. So like that, you know, the sort of the tutorial case of the first game is set in a restaurant and someone’s been shot and there’s all the kind of logistics of where they were shot from. But there’s also the kind of the nature of the restaurant, the kind of the weird clientele who are kind of tied to the period because the opening case, it opens in Japan rather than London. And there’s some stuff in there about the kind of tensions between the British Empire and the Japanese Empire and not in like a super, super heavy way, but you know, there is some stuff about how visiting Brits are kind of treated in Japan, which adds a few wrinkles to the case. So I think that’s what he really does throughout is he kind of takes quite classic ideas, but then he kind of layers them up with things which are very specific and true to the period, which is what I think kind of delivers, you know, it feels quite sort of authentic and kind of wrapped in the time period, which I like. It really feels like someone who’s been waiting to do this game for a long time and has basically like amassed this huge sort of database of historical detail and knowledge of the time and is just sort of ready to kind of put it up all on screen. I mean, if it has a flaw, like there are bits where it maybe goes a little bit overboard with that. There’s characters who sort of talk at great lengths about all this quite weird stuff where you’re like, I’m not sure I need, like, London gas meters explained, or like the complex workings of pawnbrokers. But it’s just, there’s, you can sense that there’s like a giddy fan behind it who’s kind of maybe lost like a little bit of self-control over that. Yeah, I’ve done the research and it’s all going in this game no matter what. I can’t really see it as a criticism of that like, shootakumi is going like super hard on this game, like that’s fundamentally a good thing. It’s, it’s got a bit, there’s a sort of edge to it. I mean, I sort of mentioned it there, this thing about the tension between like, Britain and Japan, like, there’s quite a lot of characters who are basically just racist towards the main character in this. And that’s quite a, like a delicate balancing act for a game which is quite light-hearted and fun to have all these sort of bigots who are like quite sneering villains towards Narahoda and they keep talking about, you know, this stupid little Nipponese man and all this kind of stuff. And at times you think like, there is a version of this where this goes wrong and it’s just quite a bitter, unpleasant thing to play, but it sort of deftly avoids it. I think it, you know, generally like, racists in this game kind of get what’s coming to them and it kind of adds to the fun of sort of bringing them down. But like, you know, I wonder if that is some of the stuff where, like, when they originally made the game and decided not to localise it, maybe if that stuff, that’s what they’re talking about, like the cultural differences, like it’s sort of fiercer in a way than the other Ace Attorney games. That’s like a real world concern, rather than like a dumb fictional thing, which this kind of universe has been up until now. Yeah, I quite like that as a kind of little sort of touch of, let’s face it, that is, was definitely going to be the reality of that time in Britain and, you know. Yeah, but it’s not like, it’s not too hand wringing about it and like, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of good eggs and the other thing that’s quite strange is that as well as Sherlock Holmes, there’s quite a key role for a Japanese author called Natsumi Siseki, who is a real person. Like, as far as I can recall, this is the only real person who’s been in an Ace Attorney game. Like, he’s one of Japan’s most acclaimed authors, he wrote a book called I’m a Cat. I’ve heard of him because Catherine’s read some of his books and has them on the bookshelf, but that’s kind of super niche. That’s the kind of thing which in the early days of Ace Attorney you think they would have just localised out. Yeah, I wonder if that’s just because, like, I don’t know, I suppose anime is so pervasive here, Japanese culture generally is just so far from being even considered a niche proposition for a Western audience. It’s baked into our culture now in the way that maybe, yeah. I think that probably is the case, but even then, whenever that character pops up you do have this sneaking suspicion that you are missing out on just heaps of kind of ingenious in-jokes, like the way he speaks I think is like a lot of quotes from his books and there’s references to his writing style and I imagine like an awful lot of work went into that character, but he is maybe like one of the harder elements that came to kind of appreciate as a Western player. Well maybe Katherine can enjoy those. Yeah, well she does. She’s like, oh yeah, that’s this and this, you know, these are all callbacks to I Am a Cat. Okay, that’s cool. So, yeah, I was curious, Matthew, I’ve got one last question to ask you about this in terms of like how it plays on the Switch, which I know is how you’ve been reviewing this. So I was curious if the longer cases, is that like any kind of problem in terms of pacing? Do you think it’s fine that they made that choice? Because sometimes I feel like losing momentum with a case is what has slowed me down from like getting through a Phoenix Wright game before. So do you think that that’s a problem at all here? Yeah, there’s one case, annoyingly like the last case of the first game is quite slow. That’s the only one where I think they get it really wrong and I think them not even wrong is probably too strong a word. The mistake they make is that they kind of they have the whole investigative section at the start of the case and then it’s a massive trial. When I’m doing the trials, like I’m so into it, like the time element of it and the pacing of it doesn’t doesn’t matter as much. It’s more like how they deal out the exposition in between and this feels like a huge exposition dump at the start of the case. I mean there’s so much stuff they kind of tell you and introduce that they then kind of have to reintroduce it when you’re in the in trial and you think you could have probably just introduced this in the trial section instead. They are long though. I mean that’s why I play it on Switch. I honestly don’t think these are very good games to play on console like on a PlayStation or on PC. Like I tried playing a chunk of the Ace Attorney trilogy when it came out on PC and it’s just um… I don’t know if it’s just not dynamic enough but like sitting at a desktop isn’t how a story is meant to be consumed like slouched on a sofa or playing before bed. I mean it is a handheld game and I kind of you know alluded to it earlier but it is a bit of a shame that this isn’t also on 3DS’s collection. I know they wouldn’t because 3DS is now like not a going concern. I would just love to have played this on the handheld it was clearly designed for. Yeah, I feel the same way really. I’ve always like strongly felt that Phoenix Wright more than anything else is a DS. That’s where it’s lineage is. DS is just where you’re meant to play it. I’ve always thought that whenever I’ve seen a mobile version with slightly dodgy artwork it’s like I know that just there’s just something about this series that fits that form so so so well. So even though Matthew, I thought that this still looked pretty good in the trailers and stuff. Do you think in terms of interface you take any kind of knocks without being able to look at your evidence while also reading text on the screen above, which was always the advantage of how they did it on DS? It’s very elegantly ported to a single screen. That definitely isn’t a problem. There are just moments where this was clearly meant for a 3D screen. There are animations where people throw stuff at the screen, and there’s a lot of pointing, but there’s some characters you think, oh wow, that idea or that gimmick would really come alive in 3D. There’s quite a key moment in one of the cases which hinges on stereoscopic 3D, because that has obviously been invented at the time, you had stereoscopes. I actually don’t know how it would have worked on 3DS, but the game literally gets you to like cross your eyes and like move closer to the screen to make images overlap so that something pops out and you think, wow, like that’s so made for, like it’s like an in-joke I think about like the birth of 3D. So there’s stuff like that which is lost. Hmm, okay, interesting. Well, that sounds like it’s two thumbs up from you regardless, Matthew. So yeah, so I was one small final thing then, like do you think this is a good entry point for someone who hasn’t played these games before or would you recommend starting with the Phoenix Wright trilogy? You could jump in here, it doesn’t require, like narratively it doesn’t require any previous knowledge because there are, you know, all the other characters aren’t born yet. I would probably still recommend playing the Ace Attorney trilogy first just so you can get some of like the in-jokes and some of the references. Throughout the series, the tutorial case, you’re always up against Winston Payne or other members of the Payne family and in this it’s one of his ancestors and there’s a big running joke in the series about whenever the Paynes lose, in Japanese he’s called Auchi which is quite funny, they lose their like hair, they lose more of their hair every time they lose and there’s like quite a, there’s quite an excellent gag about that in this game too across the two games which I really really enjoyed. Hmm okay cool, okay one very final thing Matthew, so this, do you think that the lack of familiar characters is, makes it a bit of a challenge to kind of, I suppose what I’m saying is like there’s a huge advantage to making a new Phoenix Wright game because obviously people know him and his universe, do you think this, does it take any extra time to kind of get in gray shit with his characters or do you think it has its own charm in that regard? It definitely has its own charm, I mean the second game of the two, Resolve, is much stronger just because it basically does the classic Ace Attorney thing of all the characters it’s introduced in the first game, you know, it doesn’t really have to reintroduce them, it goes straight into it, they’re all established, they’re relationships, you know, there are bigger twists and turns. You know, in the course of two games I think he establishes them enough that he can play with them by the end of the second game, and they’re doing some quite weird stuff, which is, you know, one of my favourite things about the Ace Attorney games is how characters snowball and evolve over the different games, and even in the course of two games he still achieves that here. I mean, I won’t spoil what it is, but there’s like a moment in the… I think it’s the last or second to last case of the second game where it delivers this sort of big reveal about something that’s been hanging over the whole game. There’s a bit of a mystery about Sherlock Holmes, and there’s quite a twist to the kind of classic Sherlock Holmes lore quite close to the end. And it’s just such an awesome bit of fan service, and it plays this amazing bit of music. It really… I was playing on a train at the time, and I was like… I had to stop myself going like, yes, this fucking rules! You know, I was so pumped by this moment. And, having now looked into the Japanese versions of the games, there’s loads of fan stuff about this particular thing as well. So it’s a long old game, but by the end, it does really deliver the full Ace Attorney experience. The characters all have an arc, everything kind of ties up, there are some fun twists. It’s established its characters enough that it can start subverting them itself, and that’s classic Ace Attorney stuff. If you stick with it, I think it gets there. Okay, great stuff. Well, there we go. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. That’s available now on Nintendo Switch PC, and I think PS4 and Xbox One as well. No Xbox. That’s so weird. It’s bizarre. I do know that the trilogy, according to a Capcom leak, sold the best on Switch by miles. So yeah, but weirdly successful, this series, it’s got an enormous fan base thanks to that collection, I think. So I hope this one sells mega as well, just so you keep making Ace Attorney’s, because it is a bit of a mystery, it’s like what Shootagumi’s doing at the moment. Right, yeah, sure. Okay, great stuff, Matthew. Let’s take a short break then, and we’ll come back with a bit of background about the Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney series, just to set up the top 10 that we’re going to do. Welcome back to the podcast. So in this section, we’re going to talk a bit about our first encounters with the Ace Attorney series and a bit about the background of the making of the series. So Matthew knows a lot about that as one of the primary sources on some of the information sort of surrounding the series. So we’ve got quite a lot to dig into here. But Matthew, let’s start then with our first encounters with Ace Attorney. Why don’t you go first? So maybe the reason I have such an astounding tie to it is that when I found out I’d got my job on Endgamer, the first thing I did was go out and buy myself a DS because I didn’t own one at the time. So I went out and bought a DS Lite and the game I bought with it was Ace Attorney because I’d heard about it but I hadn’t played it. So this combination of A, you’ve just got your dream job, B, you’ve just bought a fun toy and C, you’ve just discovered this thing which you just click with so quickly. It kind of combines and locks that game in as quite an important formative game for me. I realise that isn’t how everyone comes to play Ace Attorney. And from that point on we just had such a healthy flow of the new games, they seemed to be coming out, it was less than a year between some of them. We got Trials and Tribulations and Apollo Justice, I think they were reviewed opposite each other in the magazine, they were so close together, in fact, yeah, it was just an instant love and a habit that was just very healthily fed by Capcom. Yeah, so I had a similar encounter with Ace Attorney minus the getting a job bit, that was a very Matthew Castle specific element to that story. I think it was March 2006 at the DS Lite launch, it was around that time, and I went and bought a DS Lite with two games, I bought Animal Crossing, Wild World and Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney. I was obsessed with the idea that there was this lawyer game you could play on DS, it seemed to like perfectly encapsulate the type of like oddball software that was just taking off on the DS, just because it was such a monstrously popular console. So I just really dug the idea of it, plus it was made by Capcom, so I was, you know, that was probably the peak of my Capcom interest, like, you know, I was massively pumped about like Akami and God Hand, Big Devil May Cry 3, Resi 4 guy and Onimusha series. That was like my sort of peak interest in Capcom for sure. But they’ve continued to make great stuff, of course. So yeah, that was my first encounter. I really loved it. I was obsessed with that first game I played through in about two months. I think I then tried to recommend it to a bunch of friends and they just were not engaged with the idea at all. They’re just like, annoy a game, which is funny because it kind of like mirrors Tsutakumi’s own experiences for trying to pitch this game to internally at Capcom. So I think it is like a hard sell unless you’ve got it in front of you and then you can go, well, this is what it is. It’s kind of just like a really kind of goofy anime adventure, but you know, with just a really, really good sense of humor and legit good mystery. So yeah, that’s how I kind of got into it. So, Matthew, this is like an unlikely series, basically, like, like you say, it’s been around for a long time. You know, there are many entries that people can go out and play now, it’s still like one game that hasn’t been localized for the West, as I understand it. So you know, there’s been some dry spells in there, for sure, in terms of like releases. I mean, it’s been a dry spell for the last few years, really, if you don’t count the re-release. But let’s dig into the origins of it a little bit. So you know, Shootakumi, this guy joins Capcom in 1994. He wants to make detective games, which is odd, because I don’t think Capcom really had any sort of heritage in that, as far as I know. And then he basically ends up bouncing between the two Dino Crisis titles. And then after the second Dino Crisis game releases in 2000, Capcom has an internal project where they give staff members, younger staff members, a year to work on whatever they want. So this is when he took his opportunity to make the basic, well, to create the basic principles of what would form Ace Attorney. And what’s funny is, this project then moves ahead. He’s got like a seven-person team making it. And the really funny thing is that at one point, after he writes the design documents, Shinji Mikami calls him and says, maybe you should just give up on the whole idea, because the whole idea of like a lawyer and courtroom game seemed like a tough sell to make sound exciting. And he could see in his head why the kind of mystery element would keep things interesting. But it seemed like a lot of what he did with this series was, how do you make the experience of pointing out contradictions and unraveling the mystery feel exciting to the player as a combination of presenting the evidence, but also the sound effects and the kind of visuals and the animation, all that stuff feeds into making it feel, as you alluded to earlier, a bit set PC. So, talk to me about the origins of this series, Matthew. What’s your take on it as someone who’s very well read on the subject? I think the thing I find really interesting about it is that, you know, he starts off wanting to make a game about detectives. I think their original pitch is, you play a detective in it rather than a lawyer. He’s trying to work out the balance of solving mysteries and the kind of power and excitement of that, but also combined with like the ability to surprise people, which is, you know, comes from someone being kind of powerless in a story. So, you know, the two things he’s trying to do are actually quite sort of non-compatible weirdly. You know, the key decision to basically to shift it into a courtroom and make it about a lawyer, that is the kind of genius stroke, you know, enables this like far more aggressive style and it feels kind of classically Capcom. Like, I’m not saying it is like a fighting game, but it comes from that tradition, you know, the early games have a health bar that’s sort of depleting as you kind of get things wrong and everything. I’m not saying it looks like Street Fighter, but with the sprite art, the music, the sort of dynamism of it, you know, it feels like a kind of Capcom game through and through, which is super cool. So yeah, that original decision to make it into a lawyer game is interesting. And we’ll come back to it when we do the rankings. It’s a mistake, they kind of flip that decision in one of the other games. And that’s why it’s not very good. The other thing with it is that I think what it gets is the, like the complexity of the mysteries is actually when you replay them, they are quite sort of simple. And a lot of the contradictions are kind of set dressing around it. Like the truth of the matter is often quite basic, but he’s really, really good at kind of plotting backwards and dressing it up. And I think that is how he writes them. He kind of starts with the revelation and then sort of work back and then he starts layering characters on top of that. So you know, he’s not thinking about like big complex emotional arcs to begin with. I think he, he comes from these from a very like mechanical place, which I think is the sort of skeleton of why they work so well. I think that one of the things I found really interesting about Shootakumi as a kind of person working on these games, he was, I did a bunch of the extra reading you sent over, like the blog entries you did for the first game. It makes it sound like I’m a teacher, it was fun. No, it was good. It was, you know, I didn’t have time to read every single one, because there are so many actually different resources on them. Should we give a shout out to that website, Matthew? Yeah, absolutely. Gyakuten Saiban, the Japanese name of the game, Gyakuten Saiban Library is basically a site which translates archive interviews from the making of Ace Attorney 1 forwards. It is ludicrously good, that site. And it is like a Watarask’s levels of good, I think. Yeah, and it is such a weird variety of interviews as well. The tone of them is completely different depending on what the context is. Yeah, I found it really illuminating. But yeah, he did do these blogs to mark the release of the game on Game Boy Advance in Japan in 2001, which of course is where the series started before it moved to DS when it was released in the West. So I found a bunch of the anecdotes in there really funny, not least the one where they went to like a real courthouse and watched a couple of cases, and like the first one they went in, the idea of like seven Japanese game developers going into an indecent exposure case and just like, well, we’ll just sit here and listen and get ideas for our game is like, quite funny as a kind of field trip. I actually think I sometimes find that like, Capcom interviewees seem a little bit more sort of open than maybe some other Japanese publishers. I think they’re just a little bit, I think you can kind of see that ethos and whenever you see like Kamiya and Mikami being interviewed, you know, they’re quite open. Yeah, I mean, and he really does like, Shujikumi like is very much of that generation. Like he comes up at the same time as Kamiya, they sort of work under Mikami. I mean, Kamiya is the voice of Godo in the Japanese version of Ace Attorney 3. You know, they’re there and they’re kind of cut from the same cloth, but they just go in like very different directions. Another trip story I really like is because they do research trips to the circus for Ace Attorney 2 and then they go to this like gorge for Ace Attorney 3, which is a bit for the sort of setting of the final case, and they’re all there camping out at night to kind of get the sort of energy or vibe of the place and they get like a call from the producers who are all in like a luxury spa down the road, like eating lobsters, and they’re like, this is terrible. Why are we here? Which I like the idea of these sort of, sort of underlings sort of slumming it for the love of the art. So I did want to read a bit of that was translated on this website, Matthew, from one of his blog entries, which was, I just found really funny. It’s a story. It’s a really funny story for a few reasons. But he had basically been told the game is not fun, like in its kind of in its early form. And he said, I had not expected such damage. My head was spinning. There was the option of starting all over again from zero. But where was zero? I didn’t know what to do. And another head aching problem followed right after this one. It happened at the end of year party of production studio four. I had promised to do a magic show in front of about 100 junk and men. I’ll leave out why things had turned out that way. But I had said I would, and I have my own pride. So I definitely have surprised them. What am I supposed to do? As I was thinking sadly about that in mind, I was making a silver orb float in the air, cut a beautiful woman in half and made the Capcom building disappear, brackets partially exaggerated. And so the 20th century was about to end. But just as we were finishing our work for the year, one last incident happened. It had come to finish us off amidst the chaos. Of the mere seven people in the team, one had quit their job because of personal reasons. The Phoenix Wright team was facing its greatest crisis. So, I mean, I just found that story so funny. The magic show element and the idea that he was processing bad news while like, having to do a magic show in front of a hundred drunk men is so funny. But also, I think that I really got the sense that he was quite, like he felt a bit out of his depth making that first game. Like I really got that sense for reading it. Like he just felt like it was barely being cobbled together. And he was just fighting for it the whole time. Is that the sense you got from reading about it? Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that like amazed me when I did the couple of big sort of email interviews with him over the years was when you ask him about like these very intricately plotted stories, which, you know, is kind of one of his trademarks. You think, wow, this is so beautifully put together. This must have been years in the making. A lot of it comes about by accident and like mistakes he makes and technical limitations. But they’re constantly having to cut stuff and reuse stuff. And so this this thing I was talking earlier on about like how characters keep reappearing and you know, that’s literally because they didn’t have the kind of space to have different character sprites in the first game. So they’re like, well, in the last case, you know, all these characters are going to come back again. But there’s, you know, in slightly different roles now because we just need to reuse the sprites. But that becomes like a key part of the DNA of the game. And it’s so much of this is like a happy accident. I mean, there’s really some big emotional notes where you think not just by video game standards, I’d say just general standards, that would be pretty great in a TV film show, whatever. And then you hear him say like, yeah, I totally wrote myself into a corner and that was like the only way out. And like, we’d established all this stuff. I mean, one of the recurring things with him is he loves characters who’ve like, never lost a case before or never done this or this is the first time this has ever happened, which is really cool and dramatic in the moment. But it also means that if you ever choose to go back in time, like you’re really screwed because you’ve established that these people have like unfailing records. And you know, there is a case where two people who’ve never lost a case go up against each other and but like after the case, they’ve never lost a case. And he was like, well, how do I solve this? You know, they both got a win. And you know, it is one of the you know, one of the better moments in the overall story. But it’s, it’s, he’s kind of a bit of an agent of chaos, which I like. Yeah, it’s quite interesting, because he’s obviously still at Capcom. But he almost has the profile of someone I feel like would have left Capcom just in terms of like, yeah, he’s just interesting. He’s still there, you know, he is really odd, because he’s off that off that set, he has to be like one of the longest lasting people there. And, you know, there are great stretches where he’s not obvious what he’s doing, you know, like, basically since the second Great Ace Attorney game, you know, which, you know, which was four years ago, I think it was finished, you know, they haven’t announced anything new. He himself hasn’t been working on the mainline games, if we’re even going to get one of those. I was sort of visioned him to sort of sitting in a room by himself kind of tapping away and like occasionally he happens on something which kind of goes ahead, you know, like Ghost Trick is the one kind of weird exception where he sort of steps away. Yeah, it’s quite hard to get a read on him in terms of like in all this material. He sounds super enthusiastic and he clearly loves it. Like he’s clearly incredibly passionate about this series and he is totally the ringleader of it. You don’t get a sense of him bit like he doesn’t sound fatigued. I’d love to do a deep dive interview with him just generally about his career and see where he’s at and it would never happen but he’s still there and he’s just… what’s he up to? He’s a very, very strange character. Whereas as you say like at a certain point Shootsakumi stops working on the mainline series he seems like I think it was actually a quote in your interview Matthew where he says that I felt like Phoenix the story was done and so he works at Apollo Justice and then moves off of the series and yeah so at that point like you say you have a different team take over. Did you know that Yamazaki left Capcom last year by the way? Yeah, that was sad because he’d actually like 100% hit his stride with Ace Attorney 6. I was so pumped for what that team did next. Ace Attorney 6 is such a banger and I was like this guy, he’s finally got it. That was the game I felt like he finally really stepped up and now he’s not there, which is so dumb. I wonder if it paints a bleak story of what’s going on with Ace Attorney. Yeah, it’s now been four years, five years since Spirit of Justice. Hard to tell what the future is there. Like you say, surely Shu Takumi himself has been working on something other than just trying to get Capcom to localise these games or whatever. Yeah, he’s got a credit as a quest writer on one of the Monster Hunter spin-offs, which isn’t necessarily on. I don’t really remember. Was that the quest where you have to accuse a wrath-a-loss of blackmail? Oh, good stuff, yeah. I would actually play that. That’s a bit similar to the game I pitched for my handheld last week. Yeah, I suppose it is. I would love that. The idea of Shu Takumi doing a guest DLC. DLC for every Capcom game. Like Devil May Cry 5 and Resident Evil Village and stuff. That would be great. It could put Twitter on trial for being too horny about Big Vampire Lady. Matthew, more generally, what do you think makes a Great Ace Attorney case? For me, I’m looking for that very difficult balance of plenty of eureka moments where I get the breakthrough and I feel super powerful because the game really sells those objections. When you get it right and the music changes and the speech bubble comes up, that’s really satisfying to me. I also like to have a breakthrough in the case. I don’t know if that’s something that’s maybe true of the later games. One of the big criticisms of Ace Attorney is that you often are ahead of Shotokumi and you know the piece of evidence that’s going to solve it all and he hasn’t hidden it as well. Interestingly, that’s my perception of it anyway, is that he hasn’t hidden it as well. Something that’s come out in some of these other interviews and I’ve not really heard him talk about this, he definitely didn’t talk about this in the interviews I did with him, is he’s not as hung up on the who’ve done it. As you’ll know in a lot of the earlier games, in a lot of the earlier cases, the introduction movies show you who did it, it shows the criminal right there, and he actually likens it in his blogs and things more to Columbo, where you know the person is and it’s about the thrill of nailing the bad guy, rather than the thrill of working out what’s going on. Which is interesting, because actually, cinematically that is true in the games. There is something really good about having a clearly bogus liar on the stand, and the moment you’re working to is when they break down, and they refer to it as the break moment, which is when they kind of explode and their sprite reveals its demonic form or its hair blows off, or when you really do a number and that’s when the music kicks in, and it’s really really satisfying. I think he values that sort of drama more than necessarily the kind of cleverness of the mystery itself, and he obviously wants to surprise you, and you know he wants there to be a few breakthroughs which you didn’t see coming. Weirdly I think like Yamazaki is actually slightly better at that side of things. I think his mysteries, because they are a bit more complicated and tangled, can leave you kind of confused and have a few more surprises. But generally like I prefer what Takumi does, which is you know give you a give you someone that you’re kind of like looking forward to taking down. Maybe deliver a few surprises along the way. I think the way he kind of weaves in like bigger storylines into cases so you have the case itself and then you have kind of what it means for like the wider game arc is really beautifully done. Although again as I said mostly accidental it seems. Yeah I think I think that attracts yeah I feel like he’s quite careful with when he decides to do it, who done it and maybe that not having the repetition of always doing it that way in between cases means that it can really sort of hit you when it when it does happen. And hence the character I won’t spoil anything but the character who when they reveal swishes around a glass of wine when they’re doing this sort of crazy person animation. So that that one is a real kind of like because the game works really hard to not make that character seem like the killer and then when it emerges it’s actually like quite nasty and I think that yeah like you say by mixing that up with them some cases where you do actually know who the culprit is it means that the mysteries aren’t necessarily repetitive also at the same time I think I think setting is like a big part of what makes a case in this series exciting like obviously that you know the the background art in these games is very nice but I one of the things I was really interested about The Great Ace Attorney actually is they don’t have some of the same stuff they like to do in these games where they can pick very modern settings like a circus or you know the set of a TV show and I think those end up kind of informing how good or well how kind of engaging a mystery is in this series as much as the characters do it’s like it kind of gives it a theme to each one you know yeah yeah definitely feels like you’re dipping into like different corners of the world I mean that’s true of Great Ace Attorney it’s just that because Because it is a historical thing, it maybe feels a little drier. There’s a case that’s set around the great exhibition, and it’s all about science and technology gone wrong, for example, which feels like quite a classic Ace Attorney twist on something like that. But there are also just a lot of cases set in run-down tenement buildings, which isn’t as hilarious on the surface. So it’s not particularly hilarious in general in that stuff. It feels like that game value is being quite true to that situation. Yeah, I really love in the Ace Attorney games, regardless of how good or bad the individual entries are, how its universe has grown out over the whole series, how it has its own law which gradually kind of seeps in. Not only do you have the Steel Samurai, which is the fictional TV show in the first game, but then that keeps coming back with all these weird spin-off shows and other spin-off characters. It feels like quite a complete universe, which again is a miracle given how much he makes it up as he goes along. Yeah, for sure. It can be quite surprising which characters end up popping up again from maybe just one case and then they appear in a future game. So yeah, great stuff, Matthew. So before we get into your top ten then, or sorry, rather the ranking of the series, what are your hopes for this series going forwards? If you’d asked me a couple of years ago, and I said bleak just because we’d heard so little, the fact that they have localised this quite strange Great Ace Attorney gives me hope that the series is worth Capcom’s time. And I think the Ace Attorney trilogy has, you know, the vibe is that it sort of surprised them, like how well it did. And that’s why we’re getting the localisation. It’s kind of my read on it. And did it surprise them enough to want to make more? And continue the main storyline? That would be interesting to see. Like I do wonder if they’d ever try and do a compilation of four, five and six, like they did with the original trilogy. If they want to continue seven on, they may need to kind of plug that gap for some people. But it’s also quite hard because that like stylistically, those games, you know, one is a DS game, two or three DS games. I mean, they’re very graphically, you know, technologically very, very different. So I don’t know if it would feel like a bit more of a jumble, but, you know, I’d definitely be up for them releasing that. I mean, I think this is a series people should be able to replay. I mean, at the moment, 3DS is the closest thing you have to like a universal Ace Attorney machine in that it’s got, you know, hasn’t got the localized version of Great Ace Attorney, but it’s got every other version you can download and play on it. So I’ve got a 3DS, which is just like, it’s my Ace Attorney 3DS basically. And it would be great to get to a point where you can say that of Switch 2, you know, or that Switch has all of them or something. Yeah, it was maybe unlikely. I think it was that was rumored quite a long time ago that this was going to exist. And then there would also be a seventh entry in the series. But it’s hard to tell what might have changed in the meantime. Because I think that was the rumor was like more than two years ago. So, yeah, it’s tough to call. But yeah, hopefully Great Ace Attorney Chronicles does well. And then we we see more coming over here. I feel like in some ways, being a kind of digital only 3DS proposition made it more niche in that generation. Like it was already on a smaller sort of platform. And then you could only get on the digital store. I mean, Great Ace Attorney Chronicles doesn’t have a physical edition, for example. Right. Like that almost feels like a downgrade by Capcom. You know, that’s not to say the game, you know, they reflect poorly on the game. But maybe they just they’re a bit more conservative in how they think it will do. But yeah, I don’t know. It’s just just like you say, they released like one DS game after another. And I wonder if there was just a certain point where it kind of slowed down and then like they thought interest in it had cooled. And then, yeah, like you say, Ace Attorney Trilogy comes out and actually surprises them. So hard to tell what they’ve made of it behind the scenes over the years. Very. Yeah. Yeah. Very confusing. Yeah. Well, you know, we live in hope. Absolutely. OK, Matthew, let’s take another short break where you can select some more music from this series that you know so well. And then we’ll get into your ranking of the best games of the series. Welcome back to the podcast. So Matthew is going to rank the Ace Attorney games. Obviously, he is a series expert, knows these games better than anyone I know, and I’m excited to hear how he’s ranked these 10 entries. So Matthew, is there anything you want to say before we get into this, any kind of preamble about how you’ve ranked these games? I mean, the thing I’d really say is that, like, none of them are, like, bad bad. I would play all of them and would happily replay all of them. Like, there’s a quote on one of the Shootakumi’s blogs where he actually says, you can’t rank the first three games, like, together they are just Ace Attorney. Like, that’s what they are. So you shouldn’t really split them up. I have split them up. Like, I’m not treating the trilogy just as a whole, just because I think it’s more interesting that way, though that probably is the way to play them. And you kind of have to play them all anyway for the last one to work. So, yeah, we’ll just get into it, I guess. Yeah, what’s your number 10, Matthew? So my number 10 is Ace Attorney Investigations Miles Edgeworth, which is the Edgeworth spin-off game, which is the thing I was kind of alluding to a bit earlier, where I was saying right at the start of this series, Shooter Kimmy wants to make a detective game and then thinks, you know what, this doesn’t really work, I better set it in court. So I always thought it was mad that they then gave the series to someone who went, you know what, let’s get it out of court and try a detective game. And lo and behold, it doesn’t really work. Have you played this one? No, I think it’s because it’s got, well, first of all, I hadn’t actually finished all of the other games of the series to play this. I always liked the pitch of it in terms of like, you know, spending more time with Miles Edgeworth and Gumption. Yeah. What is it that doesn’t work about it? There’s a couple of things. One, it’s be careful what you wish for. Like, Miles Edgeworth is the prosecutor, the main prosecutor of the first game and then kind of comes back at other times. He’s a fan favourite. He’s a brilliant character. Like he’s this sort of sleazy, sneering, elitist guy who you kind of, you know, you take great pleasure in bringing him down, but at the same time there’s this like grudging respect that sort of develops between him and Phoenix Wright. And he’s a really like important piece of the puzzle. If you play it and go like, I’d like loads more of this guy. And actually he works, he works in the role he serves. He works as an antagonist more. They have to kind of not dumb him down, but simplify him a bit. Why Phoenix Wright is such a good character is he’s not really a character, you know, as an avatar for you. There’s not a lot going on with him. He’s just there, you know, he’s obviously got this like drive and sort of commitment to his clients and that’s all great, but he’s not a very complicated sort of psychological being where like Edgeworth kind of is as a non-playable character, but I feel like they have to soften him too much to make him more of an avatar. And I don’t really recognise him as the Edgeworth from the other games. Like he’s just this sort of nice guy, you know, he’s, they obviously didn’t want to make this game where you’re just going around being like a huge asshole to everyone, but it doesn’t feel true to Edgeworth that he isn’t. So this is the game that the people who were going to make Dual Destinies and Spirit of Justice kind of cut their teeth on, right? Yeah, this is the first one that’s sort of written, directed by Takashi Yamazaki, who’s the kind of the other Ace Attorney lead. The problem with taking it out of the core is that it still sort of has the fundamental structure of like presenting evidence to testimony, but outside of the core, it doesn’t really make any sense. Like, you’re just a prosecutor who goes to crime scenes, meets criminals, says, I think you’re a criminal, and then the criminal like is like, well, you have to make your case to me, the criminal, and you’re like, well, I said, no, that doesn’t make any sense. Who is there is no arbiter of like, who is right? And that may sound like a really like nerdy pedantic point, but like, who is giving Miles Edgeworth his penalties when he’s just arguing with a bloke? It can’t be the bloke. He’s the guy he’s accused of murder. You know? It’s logically, it makes no sense. And the whole thing is so much weaker for it. It’s just Miles Edgeworth arguing with like weirdos in a room. So like mechanically, I think it’s like a huge, huge bust compared to the main series. And the other problem with it is like the overarching story is about this legendary thief. I just, I’m just not interested in the story of this, this burglar and it all comes to a head in this case in a, in a foreign embassy, which basically all comes down, that then all comes down to a question of like diplomatic immunity, which is like for me personally, the worst trope in all crime fiction. I have no interest in like diplomatic immunity and what it means and the idea that someone could just be a shitbag villain, but they’re like diplomatic immunity. Ha ha ha. But that is an interesting twist to me. It’s all again, that is a really niche criticism of this game, but it is that last case is such a bust because of it. The lethal weapon to criticism. Yeah. Oh, it just sucks. Like it’s, it’s such a sort of bureaucratic sort of thriller element, you know, it’s like, you can’t do this because of it. And it’s, it’s just not very, it’s not very interesting. And that’s, that’s what’s wrong with this game. Like everything is just a little bit off. That said, one of the things we’re going to do for this ranking is I was going to highlight the best cases from each game because I can do that. What’s the, what’s the best arguing with a guy in a room in this game, Matthew? So there’s a case called Turnabout Reminisce, which is a flashback case. There are loads of these in the Ace Attorney series and it’s set in the courtroom. It’s a murder in the, in the court building, which as a sort of expanded universe thing is quite fun seeing that building from a different perspective. So you know, annoyingly, you think if you go through that door, there is a judge there and this game would become so much better, but it’s quite fun. Like seeing the kind of defendant’s entry chamber from like a different perspective and there’s some stuff about other lawyers, you know, it’s a case that involves lawyers and detectives and judges and things. That’s quite fun, like it has fun with the kind of the law of the kind of this world’s crime system, but it’s it’s it’s definitely not a classic. Okay, good stuff. Well, I guess the other thing we got to talk about with this one, Matthew, is there is a second entry in this sub series that never releases in the West. What do you think this story there was? Do you think the interest in this first one was just too cool or do you think that it was just a bit too late in the DS’s lifespan? I have actually included that in the rankings. Oh, okay, of course, because there’s a fan translation out there. Yeah, so we can maybe chat about that then. Okay, great. So what’s your number nine? My number nine is Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney Dual Destinies. Yeah. So I actually played this one and it was the first one they did in 3D. And as we mentioned earlier, this was, you know, the same team who had made the Miles Edgeworth Investigations game. So they were kind of moving into this mainline series. Shu Takumi was sort of done with it. It introduces, well, it has both Phoenix Wright and Apollo Justice in the story. Apollo takes a bit of a fall in the first case, and I kind of thought, was that them just getting him out of the way so they can focus on Phoenix Wright for a bit? Also introduces Athena Cykes and is set 8 years later in the series timeline. So I actually, I really enjoyed this at the time as a kind of like a rush of Ace Attorney nostalgia Matthew, but it wasn’t maybe the strongest in terms of like cases or mechanics. What did you make of it? Maybe this is just me being like overprotective of the original Shootakumi timeline, but I, it felt like a bit, a little bit fan fiction-y to me, felt a little bit off. The characters didn’t quite sound the same, it didn’t really have the same energy to it. I think like the fact that they chose to have Phoenix Wright as the main character felt like, I mean it makes sense, because enough time had passed that he wanted to reintroduce people to the series, but it also felt like they were kind of chickening out a little bit on Apollo Justice, who’d kind of been set up as the new kind of protagonist. You know, it basically like, it feels like they just took the whole of Apollo Justice and pressed a big old reset button on it. I think Athena Cykes is a really weak character in this game anyway, like her whole thing is that she’s sort of a psychology expert, and she has this sort of heart monitor, which can sort of detect the inner turmoil of witnesses. And it adds this little kind of mini game where, as you’re questioning people, you can see their emotional response, and you have to try and find emotional contradictions. So like, if they’re getting like kicked in the head, but their emotional response is like, I love this, you know, you might go, well that’s weird, but it’s kind of as broad as that. Like, I don’t feel like there’s a huge amount they can do with it. It’s a lot of people who are like, then a bomb went off in my face, and like, I felt a deep love. And you’re like, well, it’s not subtle. So I’m laughing because I was playing it last night, and that is literally one of the examples. I was like, what? This is so dumb. She’s also got like a little robotic necklace, which kind of wisecracks, which, I mean, that can basically fuck off. Just a weak character. Like her gimmick, one of her other gimmicks is that she occasionally says stuff in foreign languages. I think she’s meant to be quite well traveled. But like, that isn’t, that isn’t like a character trait. That’s just a very annoying tick. Is she what you mean by it being a bit fan service-y? Does she not quite feel like? Well that, and it feels like someone writing Phoenix Wright who hasn’t written Phoenix Wright before. Like, he just doesn’t, he doesn’t quite land for me. Like this depiction of him, and it’s, there’s something off about it. I don’t think it’s as funny. The thing I will say, amazing production values. Like the trip into 3D, which if you read the stuff on that library site about this game, like gave them no end of trouble trying to decide, like they bet that right at the start there was a big debate of like, should this be like the best 2D game we’ve ever made, or do we make it 3D character models? And part of me would love to see what like, like 2D Ace Attorney to the max on 3DS would look like. But the 3D models are amazing. Like the animations, when you break the suspects in this step, they look just incredible. You know, in the first case there’s a bomb detonation guy. He’s constantly like dissembling and reassembling this bomb in his hand and it really does blur the lines between like the 2D sprites and a 3D model. It’s so beautifully done. Like major kudos for that. Also the soundtrack is absolutely banging to this game, which is like a huge part of the Ace Attorney puzzle. It almost doesn’t really matter what they do in the games as long as they get the music right. Because you’re just like, yeah, this music’s great, I’m having a great time. I definitely felt like the production values were sort of like powering my excitement when I played it. I was like, oh wow, they’ve actually like, you know, this, they probably cost them like four times more to make something this elaborate than it did the original ones. And yeah, I think the investment really pays off, which is why it’s a bummer it’s been so many years since it’s been a new one. But one of the bits of trivia I really liked from the making of notes was that because they’re 3D models, Phoenix has like a giant hand. I wrote that down in my notes, too. I was like, we have to talk about the giant hand. Yeah, like when he points, because of the perspective, it just has to be a giant 3D model hand on the end of this like normal arm. So I found that very, very funny. Yeah, I like that they have like different hands swapping and out based on the poses he’s doing. So he works at different points. That really made me laugh. I think the other thing here, and like another really key thing that defines how well the individual games work is the prosecutor. It’s no coincidence that the best games have the best prosecutors in them. You know, that antagonism in the courtroom is super important. On paper, this one’s an absolute winner, because it’s Simon Blackwell who is on death row. Like he is a convicted murderer who’s waiting execution, who somehow gets let out to be the prosecutor in other cases, which is so wild and he has like, you know, he’s there in shackles the whole time. But it just never translated on the screen in like any interesting way. Like he’s just this grumpy bloke who shouts at you a lot. I thought a real bust of a prosecutor, which is a shame because I was really looking for it. I thought, oh, this sounds great, but that’s such a funny Ace Attorney idea. So sorry, Simon Blackwell, but you didn’t really make the cut. But you’re a great writer on The Thick of It and Veep, so. So, Matthew, what is the best case from this game? So, the best case from this one, I’m actually going to recommend the DLC case, which is called Turnabout Reclaimed. It’s about how Phoenix Wright comes back into the courtroom after a pull of justice, because he’s not a lawyer in that anymore. And it’s wild because the person you’re defending is a killer whale who’s been accused of killing someone at an aquarium in like an accident. And it’s really silly, you know, like there’s literally a whale in the courtroom. But that’s like a big Ace Attorney swing, and it feels like it’s kind of riffing a little bit on some of the other dumb stuff you’ve interrogated in the other games. It’s completely self-contained, so it’s not part of the kind of underwhelming game arc of the main game. It’s really, really good. I was actually going to do a little shout out as well. If you don’t have a 3DS, you can buy a lot of these games on Android. They’re pricey for phone games, but they’re cheaper than they are to buy on 3DS, weirdly. And if you buy… I’m pretty sure Dual Destinies comes with a DLC as part of its… I think it’s like £15 on Android, but it’s a pretty slick version of the game. Hmm, can you… you just have to download this DLC via the menu inside the game in the 3DS one, Matthew, is that right? Yeah, well yeah, it’s a pain in the arse if you haven’t got credit on the 3DS store because you can’t buy the DLC on… The 3DS store now is like a nightmare to buy anything on. Like, I basically… if I want to buy anything on my 3DS, I buy it on the Nintendo website and it’s connected to my account, but you can’t buy the individual DLC so you do have to buy it through the game, which means somehow getting credit onto your 3DS, which actually struck… like, it’s quite hard to do these days because, you know, do they still do the prepaid cards? I don’t know. And you can’t add credit with a credit card onto the 3DS directly anymore. But you can do it if you can add credit to your Switch, then it works for your 3DS. Yeah, but that is so weird that you have to add credit to your Switch to get it onto your 3DS. Like, I would say that’s bad. Yeah, I don’t disagree with you. So what’s your number 8, Matthew? My number 8 is Apollo Justice Ace Attorney. Oh, tough break for Shootakumi. I mean, I thought all of his games would make up your sort of top list. What’s interesting about this one is it’s the first one they made entirely for DS. So, you know, we’ll talk about it when we get to the first game, but that originally came out on the GBA, then they ported it to DS and they made like an exclusive DS case on the end, which kind of showcases what the DS can do. So, you know, I was really excited for Apollo Justice because I thought, oh, I can’t wait to see that style of Ace Attorney case kind of blown up to a full game. The thing about this one is that Apollo Justice isn’t particularly well served by it. It introduces this new character. There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s a nice chap. His whole thing is that he’s like practicing his shouting, his chords of steel. He just doesn’t get a massive amount of time in the spotlight. Even though Phoenix Wright isn’t the main character anymore, he sort of hogs it a bit and there is this strange tension that it never really takes off as its own thing. It’s a little bit of a limbo game. I do quite like what they do with Phoenix Wright in this, and I do think it is a shame that they don’t explore this down and out version of the character a bit better. It’s definitely quite shocking when you first see him and he’s unshaven and he’s a bit like a big divorced dad energy. So that has a big impact. My favourite case is the first case in the game, just because it establishes the world, seeing Phoenix Wright again. There’s quite a good twist with who the villain is in that case and it’s relatively nifty in and of itself. Then Apollo Justice gets these two cases which are not Shuchikumi’s best stuff. There’s one where there’s lots of smaller crimes that combine into a bigger case and then there’s this one at this terrible music concert which involves this video that you have to re-watch about 8 million times in the course of the trial and hear this god awful song and it just feels like the team are like, we can do full video clips now on DS and so they really lean into it and go, we’re going to make you do it over and over again and it’s kind of agony by the end. I think fans are really split over the last case in this game as well because it’s all about the introduction of a new jury system which feels like it could have changed the series quite a lot and there’s this weird time hopping mechanic in it and I quite like that case but it doesn’t really go anywhere because, as I say, Ace Attorney 5 then just comes in and goes, yeah, none of that really happened, is Phoenix Wright a lawyer again? It’s basically a big reset button, so yeah, I apologize, this doesn’t quite land for me. That’s fair enough, yeah. I was curious, this has its own kind of like, sort of perceived system, right? Where it’s a bit of a different… Ace Attorney often brings in a sort of high concept mechanic but this is kind of like a sort of poker face interrogation thing, right? Yeah, you look for sort of tells. As people are doing their testimony, you sort of zoom in on the art. I mean, it was basically just designed to show off that the artwork was a lot more high resolution on DS than it used to be on GBA. You look at them and you look for them like picking at their nails or kind of flinching or whatever and it’s not complicated. It’s like another string to its bow. I flip-flop on these like gimmick ideas that they add. It’s kind of an unfortunate series in that it nails its core mechanic perfectly in the first game, which is the finding the contradictions. That is what’s good about the game and you feel that they’re constantly trying to add new things on top of that, which don’t ever really change the overarching thing. There is an exception to this, which we’ll get to in one of the later games. As an idea, it doesn’t leave a massive impact on you. Okay, fair enough. So what’s your favourite case from Apollo Justice Ace Attorney Matthew? Yeah, that would be the first one. Turnabout Trump is quite good. There’s a really good witness who’s like this sort of Russian waitress and she keeps flinging all these plates in the air and then catching all these complicated sort of soup bowls and things which I really like. Okay, good stuff. So what’s your number seven, Matthew? Ace Attorney Investigations 2. Interesting. I’m sure you imported your copy from Japan legally and then used your language skills to play the game, no problem. You can patch the Japanese import of this on your DS with some shenanigans, which allows you to play Ace Attorney Investigations 2, the only now-unlocalised entry in the series. This is actually the one I think would cause fan upset. People who have played it tend to rate it really highly. Like I’ve seen some people say it’s the best Ace Attorney game. I’ve seen a lot of fan polls put it comfortably in the top five, if not top three. I think it’s hugely overrated. It’s way better than Ace Attorney Investigations 1. It has all the same problems with that. It’s Miles Edgeworth going around shouting at people in car parks, which is kind of weird still I think. But it kind of acknowledges that the set up of the game is a bust because, light spoiler alert, in this story it’s basically about him questioning whether he wants to be a prosecutor or a defence attorney. And for a large portion of it you basically play as a defence attorney, which feels like them going, you know what, that is kind of what these games are fundamentally about. That is better. Like, it’s a better role to have you going up against a prosecutor than you just going up against a criminal as a prosecutor. So I feel like, slightly vindicated by that, that they’re owning up to it. It’s hugely complicated. The most complicated cases in the series by far, which on paper should be like my dream game, because I love that. I love Japanese crime fiction. I love really convoluted, impossible murder scenes, and this has loads of them. I think Yamazaki is like super ambitious, but I think he loses the thread of like most of the cases by the end, and you’re kind of sort of scraping by a little bit. They’re not as satisfying to solve as the Takumi ones. It just feels like there’s a mass of quite confusing information. It feels like he’s just… he has overcomplicated everything. I mean, there’s a central case in this. It flashbacks in the case to Miles Edgeworth’s dad. So you’re playing as his dad and Miles Edgeworth in the present, investigating two related cases. And there’s all this evidence that was like hidden in the past, which is having an impact on the crime in the future. It is so convoluted that when it finally reveals why the person did what they did, it is for such a stupid, silly reason. It’s such a simple crime that they’ve basically dressed up with hours and hours and hours of like time hopping. It made me really, really cross. I think it’s so overcooked this game. It is better than the first one, but it also has so many like supporting characters who aren’t necessary because it introduces Miles Edgeworth’s dad in that case, introduces his sidekick, who’s a guy called Ray Shields. It introduces this judge who’s hunting evil prosecutors and it introduces a rival prosecutor. And there are just scenes where there are like 10 characters on screen all arguing with each other. And it’s just, it feels really messy. Some people say ambitious. I think messy. Yeah. Interesting. So do you think this has been widely played then by the community around these games in the West because of that fan patch? Definitely. And I think it’s popularity. I think some of it is just sort of like, it feels kind of exciting. Because it’s like the one you’re not really meant to have and, you know, kudos to the team who translated it. I mean, amazing. I mean, absolutely amazing job. You’d think it was Capcom had done it. It doesn’t feel like budget or anything like that. It’s really, really well done. Like I’m so pleased I got to play this game. We’re very, very lucky that it hasn’t just vanished. But I do think that has translated into a slight kind of over enthusiasm for it as an entry. So what’s the best case from this one, Matthew? This is a case called the Imprisoned Turnabout, which is a murder in a prison. And again, as a setting, that’s quite fun because it gives you an idea of what happens to all these people after they’ve lost their cases, where they go, what is prison like in the Ace Attorney verse. One of the prisoners is the murderer from the very first case of Ace Attorney. That’s quite cool. There’s definitely some cool callbacks in this, which I really like. Also, and you’ll quite like this, this prison, the way it kind of tries to kind of keep aggression down is that every prisoner is paired with like a therapy animal. So it’s like half prison, half zoo. And there’s lots of stuff about like, there’s like dogs and pigs and stuff running around and the case kind of hinges on a guide dog for a blind prisoner. That’s quite daft. This idea of this sort of zoo prison. This game isn’t like a bus, it’s just, it’s just over complicated. There’s so much stuff in every case, there’s so many ideas, it just, it’s just a bit, it’s a bit much. Sounds like it’s worth tracking down though for fans, because I just can’t see Capcom ever revisiting. No, no, no, absolutely not. But it’s, you can, you know, if you look up the fan patch, you can, you can basically get the whole deal on how it works and how to get it working. And it’s, you know, it’s not too complicated. Okay, great stuff, Matthew. So what’s your number six? Six is Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney Justice for All, aka Ace Attorney 2. Yep, this is the one I know very well. And I think that this is the one that I said took me 11 years to finish. And I think it’s because I felt like, generally speaking, it took a few more, it took a bit more out of the, I think the Cyclox system they introduced in this game means that the case has become a bit naughtier, and it makes you work a bit harder to figure out what the game is thinking, as opposed to like letting you deduce what’s going on. I think, like you say, a lot of this traces back to the fact that first game really nails that the formula is, and you don’t really need to add anything on top of that. So every time this series adds something, adds a new system like that, it’s even the one that I think you’re going to say that you like in one of the later games, to get cited in reviews as like, oh, well, they added this and it seems unnecessary, it’s kind of fiddly and that is like a recurring criticism of this series. And the Cyclops thing to me felt like occasionally satisfying. I know why they added it to, you know, give it a bit more sort of like drama and more to do. But I just found it a bit grueling sometimes to figure out what the game was thinking. Am I being unfair there, Matthew? No, not at all. I mean, like weirdly, this was introduced to basically like improve the investigation sections, which, as I said before, are like my least favourite bit of Ace Attorney is the kind of the collecting all the clues and the exposition in between the cases. I want to get in there. They’ve proven in so many cases that they can set up the case in the courtroom quite efficiently. Like they do that in all the tutorial cases, you go straight into a trial and they’re like, here’s all the evidence. And you’re like, that’s fine. But that for the rest of the games, the rest of the cases, you then have to spend kind of several hours talking to witnesses and picking tapping backgrounds and stuff. And yeah, so they were like, well, we got to liven this up for two, let’s add these site clots. So you sort of basically do kind of cross examinations in out in the real world and you have to present evidence to kind of create people’s defenses. Apparently that’s the doing of Inaba, now of Platinum Games. Interesting. As in he said to Tsutakumi, like, you know, my only thing for the second game is I want you to I want you to add something to the investigation sections to make them more exciting. Yeah, I could say, like I said, I understand why to try and give those a bit more flavor. But yeah, I agree. I think that it risks making those sequences feel like more languid because in the first one you’re just accumulating clues and then you can kind of shuttle straight through. But by placing obstacles that feel like the obstacles you get in the courtroom, but in the investigation sections. This is why it took me 11 years to finish basically. It slows those sections down even further when they weren’t amazing to begin with. Yeah, the logic on some of them is really messy. Even now when I replay them, I still get stuck and occasionally have to check a guide, because some of the stuff is so obscure and it’s definitely something from Ace Attorney 5 forwards they really fix. Ace Attorney 5 has got almost like a little in-game objective system notebook that tells you quite explicitly where to go next, which is kind of what I want. I want that bit to be as painless as possible. I think this is the weakest of the original three because the prosecutor, Francisco Von Karma, I really do not care for compared to Edgeworth. She just hits you with a whip and says fool a lot, which isn’t particularly great as a deep character. I find her really overwritten, like with her, you’re a foolish fool with your foolish foolish foolish evidence all this nonsense. She’s quite tiresome. Without spoiling it, they do do something about that in the last case. Weirdly, Shotokumi really rates the circus case in this one. Oh, I like the circus case a lot. I do like it, but he has it as like, I think that’s some of my best writing. Well, I think, oh god, can we talk about us not spoiling it? I think it’s because the killer in it doesn’t feel like, doesn’t have the energy of a lot of the other killers in this series. When you find out the culprit, it’s actually just sad rather than like… Yeah, yeah, that’s true. Yeah, it’s maybe a bit more sophisticated. I’m not saying it’s a dud case, but it’s not like, you know, there’s many other cases I’ve named before I got to that as like, oh yeah, that’s the standout. I would say for me, that is the standout of this game. Then again, I do like the… Well, I actually don’t want to step on your best case because it probably is this one. So yeah, but the minor centric case in this one is really good. Yeah. The other thing is it introduces like a very young character, Pearl Fey, who is… Maybe this is just me. I don’t really like Shootakumis, very childish characters. They don’t really fit that universe because everyone has to like behave around them. I have a similar problem when they have that young kid in Yakuza, like his little adopted daughter or whatever. She is pretty boring, that girl. Well, that’s it. And all of a sudden, like all these badass characters have to start being polite because there’s a child in the room and it’s a little bit like that with Pearl Fey as well. And she’s really important, the story of the Fey family runs through the first three games and the payoff is definitely worth it, but she herself is not my favourite character. There’s actually a character in Great Ace Attorney, the Watson-ish character is a little girl called Iris Wilson who’s got big Pearl Fey energy and I’m not too sure about her either. Can we be sure Matthew that they didn’t just add Pearl Fey to this game so the very horny character designers could have Mia Fey take over, appear in the game wearing her exact outfit stretched out over her adult body? Are we sure that wasn’t the reason that she was introduced? I mean, yeah, there is a bit of stuff with that. There is some sort of slight, some slight perviness around the edges of these games for sure. They’re actually like, they’re not too bad on that front, but that’s like the probably the most egregious example. It’s like, here’s your dead mentor reappearing in very tight clothing. Have fun, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So like, again, not a bad game, a really important part, like introduces lots of threads which are key to the whole series, to this whole trilogy really working. Yeah, as for my favourite case, it has to be the last case for me. I really like Farewell, my turnabout. It feels like this big epic thing that someone’s been kidnapped. The reason you’re defending someone is because you’re being threatened by a kidnapper. It feels big, exciting, it feels quite sort of cinematic, like it isn’t really attached as much to like the ongoing story, so it’s a bit more sort of standalone, like I think it’s quite impressive, the kind of drama and the kind of how sort of momentous it feels in the moment, given that it isn’t part of like the overall arc as much, you know, it doesn’t, you know, the last case of the third game, which we’ll get to in a bit, has a similar like big finale energy, but then it feels like the finale to like three games worth of stuff. This kind of does a similar thing, but without the lead in, which is quite impressive. Also I really like the character of Shelly Da Killer, who’s quite a strange kind of sort of assassin figure in the world of Ace Attorney, crops up a couple of times. Hmm, yeah, I was fond of that case. It definitely felt like quite ambitious and then had some big swing sort of twists as well. I like how they expand the Steel Samurai universe, you’ve got like the Jamming Ninja and the Nickel Samurai, you know, it kind of plays on that stuff. Yeah, I love that. I love that as a kind of theme in these games for sure. So what’s your number five, Matthew? So my five, I’m going to say it, like my five to two are actually slightly interchangeable. Like I’d say the top five of these, I would just recommend playing them all. Five is Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney Spirit of Justice. I thought you would have this higher actually, but just based on what you said about it previously. I don’t know, maybe it’s just because The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is kind of a bit more present in my mind, I don’t know. This is Ace Attorney 6. For me, this is just the one where they like Yanozaki and co finally nailed it. And I thought it was going to be a disaster because the sort of pitch of this one is that they go and visit this sort of foreign country of Korain which is attached to the Korain spirit channeling which is what the Fei family practice. On paper, the idea of like characters go to a foreign country is a little bit like movie special of a British sitcom. You think, oh god, is it just going to be kind of like, you know, a little bit like Inbetweeners and Ibiza or something. But it really refreshed it for me. I thought this was great. Like you go to this, you go to this sort of, yeah, this foreign country where they basically don’t have a defense attorneys, their court culture has evolved, that they don’t have a defense attorneys because in a delicious twist, if you do defend a guilty party, you suffer the same punishment as them. So if you don’t win, you get the death penalty too. So basically it stopped there being any defense attorneys. And it sounds really dumb, but it adds like a real charge to it. Like Phoenix Wright feels completely out of his depth. It introduces another gimmick to the series, but it is the gimmick I like, which is divination seances, which is where you get to see the moment of death through the eyes of the victim. So it basically, they use this spirit channeling to make that vision appear in a pool. And then you have to find the contradictions there. When you look at this vision, you can sort of see all the different senses, like what they can smell and hear and touch. And I don’t know, that extra texture just gave them like a few more things to play with in terms of like how they constructed some of the murders. And there’s a case that like really like where the seance is at the heart of the whole case and it’s brilliantly done. Like I really liked, I thought this is the one gimmick which actually really added something. Do you think that a big thing that changed between Dual Destinies and this is because by having the big change of setting, there’s less of a feeling like Phoenix Wright is playing the hits a bit? It’s sort of weird because you play as Phoenix Wright, Apollo Justice and Athena Cykes. So all of their gimmicks come in that they kind of get smaller cases that sort of fit their tone right. It feels more like a direct sequel to Apollo Justice 1. It’s kind of about Apollo Justice’s story. This game in a way that I felt Ace Attorney 5 didn’t really deliver on. For my money, it has the energy of the original Ace Attorney trilogy in that it’s kind of doing its own thing, but it brings all these strands through. I really like this foreign country element to it. Even like Athena Cykes, the realisation of that character is much stronger in this game. Some people have beef that there’s a fourth case in this, which is like super Japan specific, in that it’s all about Rakugo, which is this sort of form of storytelling where a performer does lots of voices. It’s kind of a very Japanese specific tradition that we obviously don’t have over here. And it’s one of those things that I think in the old days, they would have said that just wouldn’t work in the West, like we wouldn’t translate it. You know, we’re talking about a series that used to translate whatever noodles to hamburgers and things because they thought people wouldn’t understand that mayor ate other foods in Japan. But this case is kind of wild and it’s not hard to play, but it’s definitely harder to get your head around because it’s about this very specific Japanese storytelling technique. My favourite case is the last case, Turnabout Revolution. I won’t say what it does, but it has this juicy bit of fan service. You get to do something which you don’t get to do in any other Ace Attorney game, which I really enjoyed. And it’s got an absolute doozy of a twist, which is the only time I’ve played an Ace Attorney game which it genuinely got me and I was like, oh shit, okay, fair play to you. That’s why it’s such a shame that Yamazaki’s left because he just nailed it in this one. Reading the behind the scenes of these games, so a couple of things I noted from the Dual Destinies behind the scenes was that they had announced that they were making this fifth entry at a 10th anniversary event for the series in 2011. The fan response was massive and so they were suddenly incredibly nervous about delivering. What I found interesting as well is they felt like Phoenix was the hardest character to nail down in terms of writing because he’s less wacky, he’s a bit more the straight guy in these situations. It’s a bit harder to capture his voice, which I wonder if maybe ties in with your criticism of that first game, Matthew. Do you feel like they nailed the Phoenix character a bit better in this one? Yeah, definitely, and I think it’s because they put him… he’s suddenly out of his depth again. The problem with him by the time you get to Ace Attorney 5 is that he is super accomplished. He’s like the mental figure to Apollo Justice. And then all of a sudden he’s in this place where he’s back to like… he’s dealing with this weird spiritual magic which doesn’t really make any sense to him. He’s going to die if he loses. And it actually kind of puts him on the back foot, which is where that character is at his best because he’s grimacing and he’s sweating and he’s panicking and he does do a bit of that in Five but they can’t really justify him being like a bad lawyer in Five and they do a much better job of it in Six. Okay, great stuff. So what’s your number four, Matthew? My number four? I’ve slotted in Great Ace Attorney Chronicles here, which I’ve obviously talked about at great length. I mean, maybe I haven’t had time to digest it properly and it might slip below Spirit of Justice. I don’t know. I’m sort of umming and ah-ing about that a bit. But yeah, you know, a glorious return for Tutokumi, a really fun historical setting. I love the interplay with the Sherlock Holmes character. Really good music as well. Yeah, I had a great time with this. But you know this because you’ve been listening to this podcast. Absolutely. So what’s your favorite case for this one, Matthew? Or do you think it’s too soon to say? There’s a case called The Adventure of the Runaway Room. And I won’t say how it works, but it very cleverly brings the investigation portion into the courtroom. So it’s like a trial investigation at the same time. It’s pretty neat. God damn, I want to play this game now, but there’s so many hours to set aside. So okay, so what’s your number three, Matthew? Professor Layton versus Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney. Wow, okay. Well, I mean, I felt like this was a significant game for you career-wise. Obviously, you did that cover, and it meant a lot to you. But yeah, obviously, this combines two sort of like DS staple series. They were kind of like, I think Hino, the level five guy, saw them as like contemporaries, but in a way that maybe Takumi didn’t. And then finally, they kind of combine in this quite elaborate 3DS game. So why don’t you like explain a bit more about what this one actually is? Because on paper, it does look a bit weird that these two games were kind of collided. Yeah, this is a mashup of Professor Layton and Ace Attorney. Professor Layton being a series of logic puzzle games on DS that did really well. I would imagine Professor Layton’s series has sold a lot better than Ace Attorney. I mean, Professor Layton was massive on the DS. They’re like mystery games, but they weren’t detective games. Like, mechanically, they weren’t about solving a crime, you know, they were stories that unfolded and you solve kind of logic puzzles as you go along to push the story along. What they kind of do by bringing these characters together is they keep sort of Phoenix Wright in the courtroom and Professor Layton almost kind of takes care of the investigation period. That’s why I put this up quite highly because as I’ve said, the investigation sections of Ace Attorney games are my least favourite bit of them. And here, it just became a Professor Layton game, which I quite liked, you know, you’re walking around solving puzzles. They’re just a bit more interesting to me, I think. And then Phoenix Wright was just in his element in a courtroom. The kind of set up of this is that Professor Layton meets this mysterious girl who claims to be from a city of witches where and she’s being pursued by magic. After some various events, both Professor Layton and his sidekick, Luke, and Phoenix Wright and Maeba find themselves in this magic city called Labyrinthia. And between them, they have to basically solve the mystery of what the deal is with this place. And that’s Professor Layton walking around sort of sniffing out clues, trying to kind of break everything down logically. And it’s Phoenix Wright trying to sort of try cases in a kind of medieval court. It’s like a medieval society where they’re more like witch trials. So he’s up against like multiple witnesses at once, and they’re all kind of arguing with each other. It’s quite kind of chaotic. It feels like a precursor to Great Ace Attorney. Like I just get the impression, it’s more of an impression, he has said this, that, you know, in making this game, he saw that like Ace Attorney could work outside of its modern setting. But actually, what’s important to an Ace Attorney game is that the rules are really clear of the universe, you know, as long as the rules are clear, you can look for contradictions no matter how different the universe is. So here it’s, it’s how do you solve cases in a world where magic is possible? And he just very cleverly lays out the rules of magic in this world very clearly early on, and it’s about trying to find the contradictions within that rule system. Which is really no different to what he does in Ace Attorney, which is he lays out the rules of what, you know, Victorian society was like, what tech was available, and you have to play within that knowledge set. So you can see the through line there. This was just, I mean, amazing fan service to see these two universes mashed up. The stuff they do with music in this game is incredible because they just take all the classic Ace Attorney themes, and they play them on like, Professor Layton instruments. So it’s all like, fiddles and accordions and stuff. And it’s so good. I mean, this game is like, I gave it like a 90 I think in O&M. Like, I would have just given that for the soundtrack alone. It cheers me up no end. I still listen to it on Spotify or YouTube or whatever. Like, it finds middle ground between these two series. That’s what’s interesting about Iwataras is they are different games, they’re quite different places, and the challenges of like bringing them together without one trampling over the other and finding like compromises and art styles and things like that. And they do all that, but they also play on their differences. You know, the sort of Phoenix Wright is the kind of chancer who scrapes through Professor Layton’s very sort of meticulous and thinks everything through logically. And the kind of interplay there is just is really, really well done. I will say, like, your mileage will vary on this one, depending on how you feel about Professor Layton. If you fucking hate Professor Layton, like put this down in the rankings, like three, three or four spots. But if you are into him, it’s such a fun, like study of those two characters. Do you think that putting Phoenix Wright in a different sort of like fictional universe essentially makes the weight of the cases sort of? Does it change the weight of the cases at all? Do you still get the same big swing reveals and twists and stuff? Yeah, the pacing of them, like they’re clearly written by the same person. You know, Shutokumi, like that’s the other important thing. This is Shutokumi’s return to the Ace Attorney universe. You know, he hasn’t done one since Apollo Justice comes back. You know, it feels like one last job. It’s, yeah, I would say so, like the drama of the case, you know, what’s going on in the case, you know, breaking people down, getting that break moment in on the witness stand is still very prevalent. If anything, it’s so sort of unreal, this sort of town with magic in it. Like he’s, he’s pretty out of his depth, you know, more than ever before. And that really works. That character, the Phoenix Wright character just becomes better and better, like the more panicked and screwed he is, because it’s all about that resilience when he kind of punches back through. Also, Shuji Kumi wrote like the overarching story of the whole thing as well. He really delivers like a classic Professor Layton bullshit ending as well, which I really, really appreciate. Great stuff. So what’s your favorite case from this one, Matthew? It’s called the Golden Court. It’s kind of hard to talk about it without spoiling it, but a person has been turned into a gold statue, and you have to work out the rules about this sort of alchemy that has occurred around this character and who the guilty party would be. I mean, it’s quite hard to break down without spoiling it, so you just have to play it for yourself. Although I will say, good luck with that, because this game is basically a nightmare to buy a physical copy of, and so it’s basically like a 40 quid full whack 3DS download or bust. Yeah, I got a physical copy, and I think I got just a cartridge, and that cost me a pretty penny just to get that, and that was like a few years ago too. Down the line, I think this is going to be worth a lot. It’s super, super hard to come by. Can you not play this on anything else either, Matthew? It’s not on phones or anything. Just 3DS, because it’s like Nintendo published it, so this is the one which isn’t on Android. Well, there you go. That will never re-emerge, I’m sure. So, let’s go to your number two, Matthew. What’s made the cut here? Let’s go all the way back to the beginning, Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney. Great stuff. Original and best. Well, not best, second best. Literally not the best. That’s the point of the list. Well, there you go. You found the contradiction in my testimony. That’s it. The whole crowd cheers, you know. Yeah, woo, the music kicks in. Matt Castle is put to death. I can’t believe you’re executing me over some semantics. Should I give you a break from this one, Matthew, and talk a bit about it? Yeah, please do. Yeah, I’d love to hear your thoughts. The game sets up this premise of, you know, you are this like rookie Ace Attorney, sorry, rookie attorney, and then you are being mentored by Mia Fei, a sort of more experienced sort of like attorney, and then essentially you are kind of going through the paces of your first case, and then she is killed off in the second case, which is something that he’s talked about as like a kind of, almost a decision he almost like walked into because he originally intended for the mental case to come first, and then obviously because it flips, you kind of like get what you think is a status quo, and then Mia is removed from the game. She still reappears as like a kind of ghostly presence, but then you get the more familiar setup of Phoenix and Maya, and how that kind of essentially shapes what the rest of the series would be. And I thought that was, I thought it was a bummer that they killed off Mia so quick, because I thought she was a great character, and I did really like their dynamic. So yeah, I really, I was really just kind of blown away by the fact that this game sets up these very compelling mysteries, and then it seemed perfectly suited to the DS, even though it was obviously a Game Boy Advance game, just the way you could use the bottom screen to kind of scroll through your evidence in order to find contradictions and stuff. I think like when they were sort of figuring out the shape of what the cases look like and how to keep it exciting, there was originally a like, you would hear the entire testimony of, you know, someone and then point out the contradictions at the end and they realized that wasn’t satisfying, but it’s much more dramatically satisfying to have to go through it line by line and point out, well, here’s a contradiction here and here’s a contradiction here and then to slowly pick the case apart. And I think, yeah, that pacing stops it from being kind of like a languid. And I think the cases in this game are just incredibly strong. I don’t think there are any weak links other than maybe the DS game exclusive one they added at the end is a little bit, it does feel a bit more bolted on. Yeah. I mean, it’s unfortunate because, you know, you have the beginning of this, you know, wider sort of series arc or, you know, the relationship between Wright and Edgeworth kind of underpins this game. And then, yeah, then you get this fifth case where it feels less so, you know, it is kind of kind of crammed in. I still think it’s a sort of solid enough case though. And I like the introduction of, like, Emma Sky, the sort of the forensics character. She goes on to be in some of the later games as well. And how do you feel about DS Mini games? I quite like the fingerprint thing and like blowing into it. To be honest, this was the only game where I ever used the microphone to do the objection stuff because I really… Oh, really? Well, yeah. I mean, I was like, you know, 18 and very excited about this silly gimmick. And so the fact that you could say take that or objection, I was doing it every single time, which must be incredibly annoying for my parents. But yeah, I just really dug it. I think because as a player, I felt like interacting in that way sort of increased my investment in the drama, even though it was fundamentally quite silly. In later games, I would just tap the button. But yeah, I really liked that. I thought that the way this introduces the different supporting characters is very effective, like characters who would pop up again and again, like Larry Butz and Will Powers. It just, like you say, very confidently builds out this universe. You do see all these different corners of it. And yeah, I just think it kind of nailed it from the off. That’s very much my vibe on it as well. I mean, I rate this so highly, you know, I really like Miles Edgeworth as a prosecutor. I think he’s a really, really important part of the Phoenix Wright universe. Yeah, I just didn’t really know what to expect with this one. When I first played it, you know, obviously I had the broad strokes of it, which is why I bought it. But to see how it had this like big anime energy to it, but also quite kind of heartfelt characters, it feels really coherent as a universe. Like there isn’t a character that kind of takes you out of it. Everyone, they all believably exist in this place. And you get this idea that there could be a world beyond it. And it’s very kind of, everything there is very, very true to it. I guess that is just because it all comes from Shutokumi, you know, he kind of, he kind of for all the kind of chaos of how he actually structures it and builds it out, it comes from sort of some innate personality of his, which, you know, it just runs through everything. Yeah, I just love how complete, complete it is really. You know, this one’s up so high, it may be down lower at other times, just because I, you know, replayed it recently and, yeah, it was just struck again with just how awesome all those characters are. I mean, this game obviously introduces all the musical themes, again, I keep talking about the music, but the kind of iconic themes of this and the way that different kind of composers play on them, you know, it’s all because they nail this set here in the earliest games. It’s such affection for them, like, whenever I hear those tunes, I’m just instantly back into the different mindsets of the different parts. It’s really, really energising. My favourite case, though, is probably case four, so the original end of the game. Maybe a bit of a cliched one, just because it’s, I don’t know, is it spoilers to talk about it now? I don’t know. I feel like this is probably the safest one to discuss. It’s like so widely played, so go for it. Yeah, yeah, this is like, you know, after sort of facing off against Edgeworth for the game. This is Edgeworth on trial, classic bit of sort of character role flipping there. You’re up against Edgeworth’s mentor, Manfred von Karma, who, you know, has big end game boss energy, which is like a very Capcom thing, that there is a bigger prosecutor behind the other prosecutor, which is kind of just a funny idea in itself. It has a truly preposterous moment where you cross examine a parrot. It’s so silly, but it also the fact that it does that without like derailing it completely. You were like, oh, they can do so much in this world and they really do. You know, it’s so kind of confident in itself. Maybe some of my affection for this is just because I’ve read so much around it. And I love that there is so much, so many stories behind every tiny decision. I love that he is able to pinpoint his creative process so accurately with it. And it makes the whole thing very like endearing and kind of grounded to me. I love that he, you know, not just the structure of the cases, but like the order they come in, or why certain characters do what, or the fact that the characters come back because of the technical limitations. I just think this is a game which is, you know, like Phoenix Wright itself, I guess, kind of, you know, made sort of against the odds, but kind of does it does its best with everything and just comes out as this really sort of endearing kind of humane thing. Like, it’s very, very easy to love this world. Very, very easy to love this character, these characters. Yeah, I think that the tonal sort of range of these games is a big part of their appeal, because like you say, it gets incredibly silly. But when it gets serious and dark, it is very effective and it is dramatically satisfying. And that’s quite a hard thing to sort of pull off, let alone in a game that’s got like limited animations and is mostly using text. I suppose as well, this for so many people, this would have been their first introduction to the, to like visual novels, an idea. And he, Shutakumi himself is inspired by some like Yuzhi Horii kind of detective games, right? I mean, I think that came up in the, maybe that was just something Iwata put to him. But yeah, I think the Portopia serial murder case and things like that. Yeah, there is this, yeah, there is like a, a healthy tradition of detective visual novels. Definitely in Japan. It’s great that they inspired him, but I also like where he does kind of, you know, that is another reason he gives for the lawyer thing. He says that, you know, there’s been too many detective games. We have to do something different. Okay, great stuff. Then the only last, last question about this one then Matthew is what’s the best way to play it in your opinion? For a long time, I’ve always said I, I love the, you know, the DS originals just because of the art. I don’t really like the, that they do this HD sort of remaster for iOS, which has just become the kind of the art they now use for like subsequent re-releases. I have been replaying this on 3DS. I’ve been playing that it was released as a trilogy quite like the trilogy they released on Switch more recently, but there is a version on DS. It has got the iOS artwork, which some of the characters look a little goofy or they lose a bit of their sharp charms from not having the original sprites. But as a kind of collection they’re all there. I quite like the 3D effect of just the sprite is ever so slightly raised above the background and so they look a bit sharper because of that. If you can, track down DS copies of the originals. Do that. You can import them. The Japanese releases had the English localisation on them too. So any version of this on DS you can play in English. Otherwise yeah, that 3DS download is pretty neat. Getting the original DS version will set you back about 25 to 30 quid so it’s not too bad if you want to track that one down. But yes, Matthew then, let’s go to your number one. Probably zero surprises here. It’s often top of most people’s charts. Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney Trials and Tribulations, aka Ace Attorney 3, the grand conclusion to the original Ace Attorney art, sort of delivers what I think a great TV series delivers in that it’s established its characters well enough that it can sort of subvert them, have fun with them. It has this sort of weight of history behind it which, you know, is played on in lots of cases. It’s quite experimental with like flashbacks and callbacks. There’s two substantial cases in this, two of the five, where you play as Mia Fey, rather than Phoenix Wright. One, you’re defending him as a student against a murder charge. A second one, it’s kind of more spoilery territory, but it’s like an even earlier case where, which kind of formed Mia’s character. So, you know, this game as a sort of investigation of like her as well is quite interesting. Like you learn a lot more about her, she obviously gets bumped off pretty early in Ace Attorney 1. Yeah, and it just sort of snowballs into this this final case, which for me is the kind of peak of the series and bringing together all these strands in this just really satisfying moment of victory. Has this absolutely amazing musical callback to the first game. Like, if you’ve just played through it all and you’re invested in these characters, I just think this game like it lands in such a big way, because of the overarching story. I don’t know if the individual cases are like any better or worse than one or two is really, but it just has that extra layer which I think it really delivers. It does require you to have played the other games and that’s something in games that doesn’t happen as often. You know, there’s not many people who make a game be that dependent on having played other things. It doesn’t happen as often in sort of sequel work and you know, it’s what I liked in Great Ace Attorney as well, like the interplay between one and two was really neat. Yeah, here just because it’s three games, he’s got like a lot more to play with and for someone who doesn’t like forward plan, it’s a pretty amazing bit of like seat of your pants plot construction. Okay, great stuff. Well then, I think we’ve basically knocked off the entire series there Matthew, any closing thoughts? Oh, that’s it. That’s all those games. I hope that was interesting because I know they’re all like, sort of the same. I think if anyone’s like me where they’ve played a bunch of them, but maybe not all of them, that’s like a particularly useful list, I think, in terms of how to think about them. Yeah, I mean, it really does seem like a series that hinges on like, on writing and ideas more than anything else. Like, that’s part of its magic. It’s like a writer’s game. Shootakumi is like, like the writer’s game dev. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so, fingers crossed we see new games in that series pop up. But yes, thank you very much for listening. Matthew, thank you so much for, you know, taking us through another series where you’re the, you know, a genuine expert. Yeah, we won’t be doing this again for a while, I don’t think. Your vocal cords need a rest, I think. Yeah, my cords are still. We’ll do top 10 Mario games in 2023. Give Matthew a little break. Oh yeah, let’s let… Okay, great. Thank you very much for listening. If you’d like to follow us on Twitter, it’s BackpagePod on Twitter. If you’d like to email us a question to read out on this podcast, we’re BackpageGames at gmail.com. And yeah, please do drop us an email. If you like this podcast and you’re on Apple Podcast, please do leave us a review. That always helps in terms of us finding a new audience and growing a little bit. And we’ll be back next week with a podcast about the games we’ve been playing in 2021 so far.