Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy Dev Column 2: The Art of the Turnabout

Once we latched onto the idea of a baby chick, we couldn’t see the yellow character as anything else. It’s even a bit naughty with its feet up on its desk. We made the window, books, and chair a bit more colorful and amped up its “Book for Beginners” feel!

And finally, for those of you who are interested in playing the game in Japanese, let’s take a look at the Boat Rental shop from the first Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. In the older background, there were 4 indistinguishable black blobs on the right-hand side of the sign, but we couldn’t just leave them like that when we made everything HD. Once again, we went to the original drawings and the characters’ dialogue in search of clues, but… nothing! There just wasn’t anything, anywhere, which could tell us what it was supposed to say. All we could do was make something up.

What could the four letters be? The dev team thought about it and we came up with アリマス (arimasu, lit: “we have”), but was that the right thing to do…? We weren’t wrong to make the sign say “We Have Boats for Rent”, were we…?

Due to the circumstances, we weren’t able to redraw every single graphic, but we tried our best to make everything as easy on the eyes as possible. Remaking everything in HD was quite the task, and all I could do was cheer everyone on from the sidelines… but talk is easy, and the staff working on it were the ones hard at work staring at their monitors. You can see the fruits of their effort for yourself with Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy, out now on PS4, XB1, Switch, and Steam! Hope to see you there!