By: Skylar Teddington
On Sept. 5, Ace Attorney Investigations Collection released on multiple platforms to give series veterans and recent fans a new way to enjoy the Investigations series.
The collection includes 2 fully remastered games–Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth and Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor’s Gambit. They were originally released for the Nintendo DS system as point-and-click adventure games with visual novel elements, in 2009 and 2011 respectively, being some of the only Ace Attorney games allowing player-controlled characters.
Both games follow Miles Edgeworth, the “king” of prosecutors in the Ace Attorney universe, undertaking multiple cases using investigative skills based on facts, leads and logic. The goal is to solve cases by discovering who committed each crime; differing from other Ace Attorney games now that you’re on the other side of the glass as a prosecutor and the focus has shifted from the courtroom to the investigation.
The remaster seems to target the graphics, with the new high definition chibi sprites being the most notable changes. The new sprites allow players to see each character’s facial expressions and animations with ease, and they look a lot smoother than the original pixel sprites. That doesn’t mean the originals don’t have their own charm though, and players who prefer the retro look can choose the originals still. Both games’ soundtracks are also among the best in the series.
Gameplay can be a little rough at times, and it reads less naturally than other Ace Attorney games, though I didn’t mind. In the first game, I frequently found myself clicking on objects in a very specific way since something would be next to them, but this is less prevalent in the second game.
What’s most interesting about this collection is that it opens a whole new world to non-Japanese players with the localization of Ace Attorney 2: Prosecutor’s Gambit. While it was possible to play the game in English before the release of the collection, the translations were not official, until now.
Translator Janet Hsu spoke about how this collection differed from translating the original DS games.
“Well, for one thing, the added horizontal space allowed less compact languages like English to use longer words,” Hsu said. “In the era of the original Nintendo DS version, we still used the ‘number of characters’ by ‘number of lines’ method of calculating how much text could fit in each text box.”
So, why wasn’t it localized before? According to Christian Svensson, formerly with Capcom, the costs were higher than the estimated returns. However, Motohide Eshiro, who’s known for his work on the Ace Attorney series, alleged scheduling and staff changes as the reason for the lack of localization.
It’s a highly interactive series and you need to be attentive and draw your own conclusions. The collection is definitely not for newcomers to the series either, since you’ll need background information from other Ace Attorney games to get a full scope of each plot.
This may be for you if you enjoy story driven games with great characters and exciting twists. Overall, I’d give Ace Attorney Investigations Collection a solid 8/10 plus an extra point for having a defense attorney named Eddie Fender.