Gamer Diary: The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles

Capcom has something of a love-hate relationship with its Ace Attorney fans. Admittedly, it’s a very weird franchise. A series of visual novels where absurdly named attorneys battle over equally absurd trials that throw all semblance of legal procedure out the window. But it works, dammit, and the fans of the series crave each new game that comes out. Which is where that toxic relationship comes in. Capcom is not all that fond of actually localizing the franchise, and is very uneven about releasing the games. For a long time roughly half the franchise was never localized at all, and many of the games don’t get physical releases. Even rereleases can be hit or miss. The PS4 got a physical release of the original trilogy, while the Switch didn’t. And I haven’t heard word one on whether or not the addition three games are slotted for a new release or any additional titles in the franchise total.

Which is why it’s so odd-yet-awesome that Capcom decided to localized and release The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, a sort of prequel series starring Phoenix’ ancestor, Ryunosuke. The original releases of the games never came stateside, so having an opportunity to get a physical release of the HD remake was something I couldn’t pass up.

Set in the late 1800s, Ryunosuke, the progenitor of the Wright line, and his best friend Kazuma are two university students who go to London, England so that Kazuma can train to be an attorney, a relatively new concept in Japan with the country only just having opened up to the outside world. As the story twists and turns, Ryusuke teams up with legal assistant Susato, the famous detective Herlock Sholmes and his assistant Iris Wilson. The games follow the same basic Ace Attorney formula where an accused criminal must be defended by tearing apart testimony and presenting appropriate evidence when the opportunity arises. Some additional features for the Great Ace Attorney include a new feature called Deduction, and the fact that witnesses often testify in groups rather than one at a time. There is also a jury that you must convince more than the judge on the case.

The game looks great with the higher quality visuals of the Switch, and includes fully voiced animated cut scenes though the trials themselves are still with dialog that needs to be read. The cases are mostly as interesting as previous entries, with flashy, over the top character designs and hokey, pun based names. While the detective is called Herlock Sholmes because of copyright issues with the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle, to be fair that goofy name is pretty on brand for the franchise. The prosecutor, Barok van Zeiks is an intriguing opponent and Ryunosuke is a pretty amusing protagonist, and is pretty similar to Phoenix while being different enough to be his own character.

Like the other Ace Attorney games, beneath the veneer of silliness the stories can actually get pretty dark as the cases interlock with one and other, characters and defendants building up to a conspiracy in the background. It’s pretty clear from the first game that it was always intended to have a sequel, and the good news is the Chronicles collection has both games together, because I have no idea what I would do if I had to wait until the second half of the story came out. There are a lot of unresolved story lines from the first game, as it turns out there is a pretty mysterious reason why Kazuma was sent to England that the Japanese government doesn’t want people to know.

The second half is way, WAY darker than the first. Usually in Ace Attorney games the victims of the crimes are either characters you don’t know at all, or ones you only know briefly. That’s not the case at all as a pretty major character from the first and second game is a victim in the final case, and stunningly emotional as the characters rally together to find the real murderer and save the innocently accused from the gallows.

I found the stories shared a lot of beats from the first Ace Attorney trilogy with Ryunosuke and Barok having a lot of parallels between Phoenix and Miles. Not so much that it feels like Ace Attorney Chronicles rips off Phoenix Wright…but the plots do sure rhyme quite a bit. A prosecutor with an agenda, surrogate father figures, fighting on a path to honor lost friends and secrets decades in the making.

The games also have a few of the problems of the earlier games. Sometimes the clues aren’t terribly obvious and it takes a lot of guess work until you get the right evidence presented. Also, the final case is LONG, it has some of the pacing problems some of the other games had, particularly the first Miles Edgeworth Investigations game where there were a lot of but wait there’s more! Plot twists that kept pulling the story forward. I will say in this case it wasn’t so much that the twists were out of left field, but more a sense of both the prosecution and defense trying to keep things going to flush out the bad guy. And trust me, he’s pretty bad as the reoccurring themes of both games are about ends justifying the means, and the price of law and order versus justice, an always relevant subject.

So if you don’t like the earlier Ace Attorney games, these games will not change your mind about the franchise, but if you can’t get enough, this entry is a good addition to the canon. I really liked all the additional features the Switch collection has and I hope Capcom will start bringing the rest of the series in physical collections. I still want a physical release of the 5^th and 6^th Ace Attorney games and the 2^nd Edgeworth Investigations game to come stateside. Maybe these games are a sign of that.