The Ace Attorney series has always had a bit of a interesting relationship with US localization. The first 3 games were for Gameboy Advance in Japan and it wouldn't be until years later that the US audience would get a change to play them when the we re-released and first localized for the US market. Even though the series really gained a fanbase in the US Capcom has also been a bit weird about how it chose to handle it. While the 3 remakes and 4th game for DS received praise the games spun off into the Ace Attorney Investigations, the second of which was never brought over. The series saw several remakes and then a continuation of the main line on 3DS with Ace Attorney 5 and 6. And then a subseries of prequels set in the 1890s "The Great Ace Attorney" 1 and 2 were subsequently dropped. As an Ace Attorney fan it's a bit maddening the logic of why they choose to do it or not.
Thankfully they've cleared up this omission with the Switch Remaster of both games. The general excuse given was "translation difficulties" and it's not really hard to see why. Previous titles decided to go the direction of being a bit more palatable to US audiences by setting the localized game in America. As things progressed the games started leaning harder and harder into Japanese themes making for strange American mountain villages filled with Shinto shrines. The whole ridiculousness of the corner the localization painted itself into is immortalized in the Awkward Zombie comic. The Great Ace Attorney goes all in on this. It not just tells a story of protagonist Pheonix Wright's ancestor who is unambiguously Japanese but also the games go heavy into Meiji restoration imagery and feelings that cannot be translated away.
This is actually quite interesting as follow-up to Famicom Detective Club. Not only is it a visual novel in the same murder mystery vein, but I remarked of the most striking things about Famicom Detective Club was the place it put itself. Not just Japan but a very specific time in Japan. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles does this as well although much more fictionalized. We get the sense of Meiji Era Japan and an Industrial Era Britain but what's interesting here is the reversal from the standard western perspective. As a Japanese game the player is given Japanese culture as the baseline and it plays with the feelings of the country modernizing to appear on the world stage. There's also a sort of romanticism of the British Empire which is portrayed as the most modern and best country in the world. It's certainly not something easily localized. I enjoy the bits where our protagonists are called "silly foreigners" or characters hit them with orientalist comments. These are rarely a perspective you see unless we're talking about a serious drama and the work is trying to make a central point of it. Here we have a pretty lighthearted game that just deals with it in the background and contextualizes it in the setting. At the same time one wonders what work the localizers did to either elevate or downplay certain elements. In chapter 4 there is a lengthy scene that turns into fat jokes, but characters are a bit apologetic about it. I could easily see that being played more straight in Japanese.
Gameplay-wise, Ace Attorney Chronicles is very much an Ace Attorney game. Talk to characters, move between scenes, pixel hunt which has improved over the years with very clear indicators of what is interactable and whether or not you've interacted with it. The main course of courtroom action finding contradictions and presenting evidence is a gripping as ever. The new parts come in 3 mechanics. The deduction special in which the detective Herlock Sholmes tries to figure out what happened at the scene of the crime. He presents some silly conclusions and you have to help correct them. This part is really easy as you just have to adjust the camera to see what the real clue is. I will say it's definitely more interesting that the classic pixel-hunt behavior of previous games though and doesn't de-rail progress the same way. They can also be quite amusing to watch. The other mechanics happen in the courtroom. Multiple witnesses can take the stand and occasionally when you press one the other might react allowing you to talk to them instead. This really doesn't change anything though as the reaction is marked with sound and icon queues, you literally cannot miss it. I'm guessing this was a change made later in development because people weren't noticing the tells which is a bit of a shame. So instead of observing the witnesses it's just an extra place the developer could put a branching path in the testimony phase. The last and best change is the jury. At least once per trial the jury will find the defendant guilty and they will each give a reason why. By talking to them you might often find how absolutely corrupted the system is because some have connections to the case and might give you valuable evidence. What you need to do to pass is find two jurors with contradictory statements and "pit" them against each other. Doing so will change their opinion and once 4 jurors are flipped you can proceed. The jurors and multiple witnesses simply give them more room to have weird characters so it's definitely an improvement as the draw really is the zany characters.
Overall the game maintains fairly reasonable puzzles. There were only a few spots where I really didn't see what they were trying to go for or where alternate explanations were possible. The game is quite forgiving too. Even if you run out of penalties you can resume from the last scene so you never lose more than 5 minutes. This is great because a full segment between saves can take 2+ hours.
Overall I thought it was a fantastic package as a Phoenix Wright fan. There's a lot of content here and I'm really glad that it's wrapped up in a package. The second game is basically season 2 of the same story, it doesn't make sense to play it without the other as characters and overarching plot knowledge pick up right where the first leaves off. In fact, the second game doesn't do anything new at all either. It's just more of the same engine and mechanics but a new set of 5 cases. By the time you hit the final act there's a lot going on and it wraps up pretty nicely I must say. An entirely worthwhile journey that takes about as a long as a JRPG when it's all said and done.
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