The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles — The Resolve of a Grand Adventure

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is a game which should, by all rights, not exist.

At least, not in its present form, anyway. To say this game had the deck stacked against it would be a severe understatement; rather, it had several decks stacked against it with all that it had to go through, and the fact that it made it to our shores at all is a miracle in no uncertain terms. In order to earn a second shot at life outside of Japan, TGAAC had to overcome poor sales, niche appeal, and perhaps most pressingly, a notoriously litigious estate willing to squeeze archaic copyright laws for all they’re worth. Yet, despite all of these hurdles in its way, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles not only released worldwide, but also turned out to be my absolute favorite game of 2021– one which I think is owed more discussion and admiration than it received during this busy end-of-year awards season.

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is a spin-off of the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney series of legal-themed adventure games. It compiles the previously-Japan-exclusive The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures and its sequel, The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve into one convenient duology. The two titles follow Japanese university student Ryunosuke Naruhodo, a nebbish yet good-hearted man who, after enduring a procession of tragedy, winds up fighting for truth and justice as a defense attorney in turn-of-the-century Victorian London. Upon their original releases in Japan in 2015 and 2017, the two GAA titles were met with critical acclaim yet abysmal sales, even by the franchise’s semi-niche standards–with the sequel moving fewer than half as many copies as its predecessor in its first week.

This is part of what makes the duology’s resurrection so surprising, at least to me. The sequel to Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth is the only other game in the franchise with similar sales figures, and it’s no coincidence that it’s also the only game to remain unlocalized as of 2021. For nearly half a decade, hopes for a Great Ace Attorney revival were kept afloat by YouTube Let’s Plays of the 3DS originals, community discussion on forums and social media, and an incomplete fan translation patch which was plagued by delays and controversy. Capcom gambled on a worldwide release, but thankfully it seems to have paid off this time if the rumored 300k+ sales numbers for Chronicles are to be believed.

The Great Ace Attorney tells a much more serialized story than any prior set of games in the series. Rather than telling two distinct, self-contained stories, the duology instead weaves a single continuous tale full of mystery and intrigue. While I think this gives both the sprawling plot and lovable characters more time to breathe, it’s easy to see how this approach could have contributed to its initial underperformance: fans going into Adventures back in 2015 expecting another one-and-done narrative were likely confused and disappointed at how few overarching plot threads get tied off by the time the credits roll, and subsequently lost interest in the two years leading up to the sequel’s release. Bundling them both into one package from the drop was a smart move, as it allows the first game’s more deliberate pacing to unfurl gradually while keeping the promise of a second game containing all of the answers dangling in front of players’ noses.

A lot of the praise for The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles’ existence, let alone its success, lies at the feet of Ace Attorney’s longtime localization director, Janet Hsu, and the talented team of writers and researchers who worked with her to bring the game’s incredible narrative to life. Chronicles’ localized script balances on the razor’s edge of maintaining the trademark Ace Attorney charm and wit, while also reading much like an era-appropriate novel would. While its dialogue and prose has a more flowery, ornate feel to it than its predecessors, this lends itself wonderfully to the overall tone of the duology. The Great Ace Attorney is no stranger to darkness, but the fact that it’s able to make you laugh and cry in equal measure is a testament to how hard Hsu and co. labored to keep that dichotomy intact.

Undoubtedly one of the greatest challenges the localization team was faced with was Chronicles’ reliance on the Sherlock Holmes mythos throughout its narrative. Players of the previous titles could hear Phoenix jokingly call himself “Sherlock Holmes II, baby!” but it was more than cheeky nods and references they had to worry about. Not only is every chapter across both GAA games named after either one of the Holmesian stories or collected editions, but a kooky, incredibly memorable rendition of The Great Detective himself is a major character! Not something you can easily scrub from the game with a mere name change or handwave, especially with the Doyle estate breathing down Capcom’s neck.

The Father of Sherlock’s estate is notoriously litigious, taking advantage of the character’s complicated copyright situation to bully the creators of various works for daring to portray Holmes with such traits as “being respectful to women” or “having a sense of humor.” Basically, the majority of the Holmes stories are in the public domain worldwide, but a few which are considered to be the defining portrayals of his character as we know it are still under copyright in certain regions, which is what allows them to attempt to stake this claim. Hsu and the team’s solution to this conundrum was actually quite clever: rather than risking a lawsuit or waiting for the copyright to expire, they instead swapped all of the Holmsian names and concepts still under legal protection with a well-known parody which is in the public domain: Herlock Sholmes, the ultimate “original character do not steal” invented by French author Maurice Leblanc so that his great thief Auguste Lupin could match wits with Holmes without needing Daddy Doyle’s permission.

Thus, The Great Ace Attorney features The Great Detective “Herlock Sholmes” and his intrepid assistant, “Dr. Wilson.” It’s a brilliant modern day solution to a modern day problem, and actually adds a layer of cheesy charm to the already likable detective which cemented Sholmes as one of my favorite characters of the year.

That’s not to say that I agree with every single choice made by Hsu’s team.The localized names on a handful of the duology’s Japanese characters strike me as insensitive at best, and the hopefully-ignorant-rather-than-malicious use of an anti-Semetic slur in the first game’s third case hit me like a sledgehammer to the knees. That stuff absolutely sucks and there’s no defense for it. I’m glad that it’s only a few isolated moments across nearly eighty hours of top-tier narrative content.

The game as a whole is top-tier, honestly! Chronicles excels in every area– from the micro narrative of something as inconsequential as an item description can contain some of the funniest dialogue you’ll ever see in a game, to the “mind-blowing” macro narrative that doesn’t even begin to describe the endgame plot twists, to the music and the sound design, to the characters who have burrowed so deeply into my heart that I doubt I’ll ever stop yearning for just one more chapter in which to spend time with them. It’s a truly one-of-a-kind experience, but I think in order to fully-appreciate how incredible this game is, one must also appreciate the titanic journey it underwent just GETTING here. Sometimes, the metanarrative of how a game comes to be, the trials and tribulations it must face to stand on even footing with its peers, can be just as thrilling as any courtroom drama.

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles was my favourite game of 2021, and the fact that it seems to have lost its place in the discourse amidst a deluge of triple-A holiday releases and games with MUCH worse narratives which nevertheless get elevated higher due to “Hollywood prestige” (looking at you, Twelve Minutes!) makes me unfathomably sad. So, if you’re reading this now, please do yourself a favour and place your faith in Ryunosuke and friends. I promise you, it’s an experience you won’t soon forget.