Hands On: 'Ace Attorney Investigations Collection' Devs Discuss California Rolls, Chibi Sprites & Puns

Can you believe it, Ace Attorney fans? We're almost at the end of the incredible journey that has been the AA Switch remakes, and honestly, we never thought we'd see the day – let alone so soon. The Ace Attorney Investigations Collection, comprising the first and second games in the Edgeworth-focused spin-off, is coming out in September, the same year as the Apollo Justice Trilogy – and we've got a tasty little preview-slash-Q&A to whet your appetite.

We've been playing the games for around a month now, and we're about halfway through each one. We've played Investigations before, when it came out on the DS in 2010, but this is the first time that Investigations 2, now known as Prosecutor's Gambit, has been translated officially for a release outside of Japan.

Investigations 2 has had a fan translation for a while, and that translation is somewhat beloved within the community, to the point where many of the fan-translated character names are well-known and deeply embedded. Many of those fans – us included – were nervous about the official translation not meeting their expectations, or changing things in significant ways. But we're delighted to let you know that the official translation absolutely rules. The trademark Ace Attorney attention to detail, puns, and personality shines through in the localisation, and even though the names are different (which is, admittedly, weird if you're used to the fan translation), we ended up liking many of them just as much, if not more.

The aesthetic upgrade is excellent, too. We didn't love the HD remakes of the original Ace Attorney games when they first came out, but over time, the art has been vastly improved, and Investigations is looking really nice. We weren't 100% happy with the pixel sprite option, because it looked a bit too jagged for our liking and it makes all the backgrounds look blurry, but the new chibi sprites are just darling, so we stuck with those anyway.

Ace Attorney fans should expect Investigations to play a little differently to what they're used to, though. For a start, Edgeworth rarely steps foot inside a court, acting as more of a detective who solves cases on the day by inspecting the crime scene and talking to people. There are short testimonies, like in the other Ace Attorney games, and they work the same – but there's no judge, no defence attorney, and no prosecutor trying to trip you up.

Edgey-poo's also got an arsenal of gimmicks, because of course he does. Phoenix Wright is a pretty straightforward lawyer, but Edgeworth takes a lot more inspiration from the books and behaviour of Sherlock Holmes. He can learn facts as he investigates, which go into his "Logic" inventory – basically a mind palace – and can be combined to discover new facts and clues. Another mechanic that we won't spoil too much allows you to re-enact crimes to determine paradoxes and logical flaws. It's all very fun, and handily distracts you from missing the thrill of the courtroom too much.

Later on, in the second game, a new mechanic gets introduced. Where Phoenix Wright has his psyche-locks, Edgeworth has Mind Chess. It's as goofy as it sounds – a sort of hybrid of the series' testimonies, Athena Sykes' Widget, and Wright's psyche-locks that challenges Edgeworth to use interrogation psychology to reveal people's secrets. It's a bit tricky and feels like a conversation tree maze that you have to exhaust at times, but we love getting insight into Edgeworth's weird little brain.

Here's our closing argument for this preview: the Investigations games might be a little bit different from the rest of the Ace Attorney oeuvre, but they're a fantastic time for fans of the series, and it's a real delight to have Investigations 2 in our hands at last. We don't always follow Edgeworth's leaps of logic, but we'll still follow him to the end. Of the game, we mean.

Ace Attorney Investigations Collection: An Interview

We also had the opportunity to talk to three members of the team: Shunsuke Nishida, producer on the Investigations Collection, Kenichi Hashimoto, producer on the Collection and the overall series, and Janet Hsu, localisation director for the games, who's been working on Ace Attorney for a long time and is the driving force behind many of the puns you know and love.

Nintendo Life: How long have you (and the team) been working on this game?

Shunsuke Nishida (producer, he/him): Development for Ace Attorney Investigations Collection began in 2022. We spent three whole months conducting tests to determine how to improve the character sprites' graphical quality and convert them to high resolution.

How hard was it to keep this remake a secret when so many AA fans were hoping for an Investigations 2 release in the West?

SN: We received a large number of requests from the community for Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor's Gambit's overseas release, so I was eager and excited to announce that Ace Attorney Investigations Collection would be releasing in just a few months. I bet fans didn't expect it to be available the same year as Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy. We'd wanted the news to be a surprise, so you can imagine how tough it was for us to keep everything a secret.

Are there people on the team that worked on the original game? If so, have they been able to provide useful insights?

I bet fans didn't expect it to be available the same year as Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy.

SN: Yes, the development team includes members who worked on the original Ace Attorney Investigations games. Tatsuro Iwamoto, who worked on both original releases, is responsible for designing the updated chibi character sprites. He reminisced about working on both games and shared various reference materials with us. The Localisation Director for the original games [Janet Hsu] is also part of the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection development team. In addition, there are a number of staff from the original games who still work at Capcom, so we sought them out for their opinions and advice.

What were the main challenges in bringing Ace Attorney Investigations 2 over to the West, and what made it take such a long time?

SN: The development team has been working to make all games in the Ace Attorney series playable on current hardware in languages other than Japanese. Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy was next on the docket, and once development wrapped for that collection, we began work on Ace Attorney Investigations Collection.

More specifically, what were the main challenges in localising this game?

Janet Hsu (localisation director, they/them): Trying to replicate the feel of the original trilogy and of the first Investigations game were a big challenge for me. There were also some very complicated mysteries this time around. One of the episodes has so many threads and bits of foreshadowing to keep straight, we needed to create event timelines for our own reference.

What lessons from the remakes of Ace Attorney Chronicles, and the Phoenix Wright and Apollo Justice Trilogies did you take with you when remaking AA Investigations?

SN: The process of animating the classic pixel character sprites is extremely challenging (from the perspectives of time, cost, and content volume). That said, the development team agrees that we wouldn't be able to create high-quality products that fans will appreciate without putting in a significant amount of effort.

Which characters in Investigations ended up changing the most throughout development of the re-release?

JH: We generally don't have the time to rewrite whole characters, so we work out in advance how we want characters to sound. And because we also have the Japanese to work off of, the big overarching decisions were easy to make. The smaller details such as catchphrases or speaking patterns were a bit harder, so those were the ones that were likely to change as we localised.

Who's your favourite character in Investigations, and why?

JH: Kay's enthusiasm is infectious and no matter how crazy of a day I'm having, writing Kay's lines always cheered me right up! She gets a little more depth in the second game since she was only introduced in the first, and working on Prosecutor's Gambit has made me like her even more.

Did you play the fan translation of Investigations 2, or did you avoid it so that it didn't color your translation at all?

JH: We did not play the fan translation precisely because we wanted to create our own original localisation without outside influence. We also have a lot of internal processes we have to follow when we create a localisation, so it was easier to start from scratch.

What was the biggest translation puzzle to solve in this remake, and how did you end up solving it?

JH: There were a few big ones that needed extra care. These mostly revolved around Japanese grammar and how it can be exploited to hide a speaker's identity or the number of items at play.

For example, there is one testimony where you assume one speaker in one context, but in another context, it becomes clear who the testimony is actually about. This is because in Japanese, pronouns are optional after a subject has been established. Therefore, based on context, you should know who a particular line is talking about. However, with a change in context, the grammatical subject will change, and yet, the original sentence still makes complete sense. This is because the sentence didn't specify a pronoun to begin with and you (the listener) had filled the gap in on your own.

I like there to be a sense of cohesion with the names so that it doesn't feel like the names were randomly drawn out of a hat.

These sorts of lines are difficult because you, the writer, have to know which character knows the true speaker or the true number of item X, and you can't have the character say something that makes it sound like they made a mistake in hindsight. Nor can you write it so that the character gives something away they weren't supposed to.

There were also a few culturally difficult ones to localise, including the French version and the whole new lore we had to create just to accommodate one of the tricks and the Paris home base setting. There was another one where the cultural joke would be lost on Western audiences if we didn't switch the graphic out with something else in the international versions. Let's just say that California rolls aren't considered "Japanese cuisine" to Japanese people since they were first created in North America and are hardly sold in Japan.

In the original Japanese, one of the characters presents food that should be considered Japanese to the other Japanese characters, but none of them see it as Japanese. In the English version, we tried to replicate that with a particular food item that should be very American, but clearly didn't originate in America. So now, the fact that this character is well-travelled has been conveyed correctly in both language versions, though I suppose the effect has been somewhat diminished over time since many regional foods are now available all around the world. Still, I think the food I chose is still something you would have to make and isn't something widely available in stores — just like California rolls in Japan.

Which particular translation (names, jokes, puns, etc.) are you most proud of in this remake?

JH: If I have to pick one, I think the California roll thumbnail is probably it. I had known going in that if I wanted to accurately translate the joke, I would have to do something about the sushi graphic, so it was something of a challenge to find a food that would work. I know people like to say that all sushi is Japanese, but knowing that California rolls are still considered non-Japanese in Japan, I felt we had to try to replicate the Japanese version's intentions as this graphic does also serve to convey information about a character's background.

There have been many changes in the remakes, including fixing continuity errors and typos, and adding improved translations – did you get the chance to fix anything glaring in Investigations?

JH: Unfortunately, we only had time to focus on AAI2: PG's localisation, so we couldn't go back to the first Investigations game except to fix the big glaring typos and any other critical must-fixes. Of course, on the occasion when I found a text bug while I was looking something up, I would fix it then as well.

Can you tell us about the challenges of taking a game that was made for a dual-screen console with a stylus and touchscreen, and bringing it to a console with very different requirements?

SN: Ace Attorney Investigations Collection is based on the mobile versions of the original games. Since these games had already been adapted for single-screen devices, the UI had to be completely redesigned to account for larger screens. The team added on to background visuals and other illustrations as necessary to extend them horizontally, and we made sure that text remained legible even after increases in size and resolution. All on-screen text was localised into multiple languages as well.

Since Phoenix and Apollo both got a trilogy, can we expect third games for Edgeworth and Ryunosuke in the future...?

Kenichi Hashimoto (producer, he/him): Sincere apologies, but there is nothing we can tell you at this time. We appreciate the community's excitement for the future of the Ace Attorney series.

What is the process for translating the plethora of puns that the Ace Attorney series is known for?

JH: I hate to say this, but puns just kind of come to me. I've worked on a lot of translations where others have struggled to replicate a Japanese pun and I hit on an equivalent English pun either right away or within the day. I fear I may have dad jokes syndrome...

How do you decide on names for the characters?

JH: We first take a look at the Japanese names and see what they were going for. Is the name a pun or is it not a pun but one with a deeper meaning? After we evaluate the Japanese names, we then brainstorm a bunch of English names along a few different lines of thinking (puns, character traits, character roles in the story, etc.) and try to whittle the list down until we get names that best fit each character, such as a calm or dignified name for a calm or dignified character. I also then do a final balance check and see if there are any names that stick out or feel out of line with the rest of the names. Generally, for each title, I like there to be a sense of cohesion with the names so that it doesn't feel like the names were randomly drawn out of a hat.

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We also asked a couple of questions about coming to the end of the Ace Attorney journey and the potential for a Layton vs. Wright remake, though the team declined to comment at this time — take from that what you will!

Many thanks to Shunsuke Nishida, Kenichi Hashimoto, and Janet Hsu for taking the time to answer our questions. Ace Attorney Investigations Collection launches on Switch on 6th September. Keep an eye out for our review nearer the time.