yotsuben

this user is riddled with disease

graphic designer, video editor, podcaster (the good kind, I swear), and lego-liker

 

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I saw a thread today on ResetEra saying "Ace Attorney has had 5 years of re-releases and compilations. When will Capcom finally grace us with a new entry? Did we send the wrong message?" This person is a bit confused or not clear in their point, so the thread as a whole isn't really important. But it was interesting to see a lot of commenters act like the series is on the rocks, or that we're unlikely to see an "Ace Attorney 7." My thoughts:

You don't re-release the entire series on modern platforms, spend time and money on localizing several of them for the west for the first time, and you especially don't re-draw large amounts of animations and backgrounds for a spinoff game... if the series is "dead" in the eyes of the IP holder.


Additionally, there is now a champion for the series within Capcom, Yasuyuki Makino, who joined the company over a desire to work on AA. His dev blogs for Great Ace Attorney Chronicles are both sweet and a little depressing.

"As I said, I had chosen to come to Capcom because of my love for Ace Attorney, and after a great many talks with the original dev members, I began to believe that perhaps it was my calling to try to re-introduce The Great Ace Attorney to Japanese players, and finally introduce it to the rest of the world. I’d worked on a few games by that point and gained some experience as a producer, so one day, at a meeting with my boss (the one who told me to write up all those reviews into a report), I boldly proposed, ‘Let me start a project to bring the two games together and port them to current gen platforms! I believe it will absolutely sell, so please give me the chance to show you!’ And…to my surprise, he simply answered, ‘I see… Well, I won’t say no just yet, so why don’t you try and come up with a plan first and we can go from there…’!!! In that moment, I could hear the doors to The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles project creak open."

Additionally-additionally, we saw several documents referring to an "Ace Attorney 7" in the big Capcom leak in 2020, but since then a) COVID happened, and b) Takeshi Yamazaki (who directed the AAI duology, then 5 and 6) left Capcom in July 2020. So clearly, if an AA7 still exists, it's been rebooted or retooled significantly after the director left.

To my knowledge Makino only worked on the GAA collection, but Shunsuke Nishida has produced the AJ Trilogy and AAI collections, and he recently said this to Inverse:

"This duology now means that every Ace Attorney game can be played on a single console. Is that fact important to the series at large? Why did you decide to release the Investigations collection now? Nishida: Yes, I definitely think it's important. Following the releases of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy and The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, the development team wanted to make all games in the Ace Attorney series playable on current gaming hardware in languages other than Japanese. Our goal was to release the remaining games as quickly as possible, so we launched Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy in January 2024. The fact that we're releasing Ace Attorney Investigations Collections in the same year was a pleasant surprise for the community."

Read between the lines as much as you wish, I guess! I suspect at this point, with everything now on modern platforms and fully localized, the time is ripe for a new game. Will Shu Takumi pick the series back up? Hard to say. They've trotted him out now in front of GAA and the Ghost Trick remaster, so they know people like to see him attached to things. The Capcom customer surveys they send out periodically have recently had questions ("Why did you buy this game?") with multiple choice options such as "I purchased this game because it is written by Shu Takumi."

We've seen in the past his desire to do something new, but if he can't break himself free of the series, perhaps a "hand off" game to a new crew would make some sense. I hope that either way Capcom gives him plenty of room to work, whether it's on Ace Attorney or an entirely new idea. It's been pretty quiet on the Shu Takumi front as a whole, so it'd be nice to see something from him soon.


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