Ace Attorney

People make fun of Phoenix for getting punched out by a nine-year-old Pearl, but Pearl also ran a distance that normally takes two hours to cover by train, so she’s apparently the fucking Terminator.

I didn't know that Phoenix wrote a law book

ace attorney is a serious game about murder:

you can just show your stupid fucking attorney’s badge to everyone like an idiot, just because
a guy who is very obviously NOT phoenix walks into court and pretends to be him, and nobody actually realizes that it’s not him because the guy has spiky hair, a blue suit, and an attorney’s badge (which is made out of cardboard????)
edgeworth makes an objection and when the judge asks him what’s the matter he just says “i was hoping to come up with a question while i was objecting”
“Mr. Wellington loves large bananas!”
your very serious prosecutor rival is actually really into children’s cartoons
cranky old man with birdseed won’t talk to you until your friend’s dead sister possesses her body and gives her huge tits
there’s a guy who literally speaks in leetspeek and references shitty memes from 2001
wolfman thinks of all of his subordinates as “number one” so when they take roll call, instead of counting off properly, every single one of them just shouts out “1!”
on the topic of the number one, 60+ year old prosecutor tells everyone that his atm number is 0001 “because i’m number one”
60+ YEAR OLD PROSECUTOR LITERALLY KILLS A MAN AND RAISES HIS SON AS HIS OWN BECAUSE THE MAN GOT HIM A PENALTY DURING A TRIAL
DEFENSE ATTORNEY DESTROYS PHOENIX’S ENTIRE CAREER AND EVENTUALLY KILLS TWO PEOPLE BECAUSE PHOENIX WAS BETTER THAN HIM IN POKER
trucy keeps trying to show people her magic panties
there’s a witness testimony section called “the dissin’ of phoenix wright” and the entire thing is given in the form of rap
there’s a prosecutor who wears all black and carries around a katana and addresses everybody as “-dono”, which may have been fine in the original game but in the localized version he’s literally just goth ken-sama
literally everything to do with stepladders

i love the implication that this has happened before

Every Phoenix Wright Case

Witness: He walked in and shot the guy.
What actually happened:

edgeworth: what kind of tea is this?
phoenix and maya: oh, we boiled some gatorade.

the stepladder thing is great but there are a lot of other great running jokes in ace attorney:

phoenix not knowing the names of any plants aside from tulips and sunflowers
maya/trucy trying to steal things and bring them back to the office
edgeworth being unable to get his witnesses to state their name
multiple people, on different occasions, failing to miss critical evidence because they didn’t look at the other side of a piece of paper
“Anyone could wear that ______! Even me!”
edgeworth glaring at things
phoenix/apollo’s obsession with their hair
in the third game, phoenix cleaning the toilet
in the first game, gumshoe never remembering phoenix’s name
edgeworth being a steel samurai super fan
yelling ‘objection!’ in everyday, non-courtroom situations
franziska referring to everyone by their full name, all the time
phoenix being super into gossip and tabloid magazines

I don’t believe that man’s ever been to law school.
-- everyone about Phoenix Wright (which, to be fair, he was an art major first)

Meta

“When I took over the series’ localization direction starting with the second game, one of the first things I had to deal with was what to do with Maya’s hometown and all the mysticism surrounding the Fey clan. It was then that I created a little headcanon for myself (which I suppose is actually real canon now for the localized version): while Gyakuten Saiban takes place in Japan, the Los Angeles that Ace Attorney takes place in is an alternate universe where anti-Japanese sentiments and anti-immigrant laws were not enacted, and Japanese culture was allowed to flourish and blend into the local culture in the same manner as other immigrant cultures.

Not counting budget and time restraints, this little headcanon has pretty much dictated what I would keep as Japanese and what to completely localize. For example, anything related to Maya’s clan and the Kurain Channeling Technique is pretty much guaranteed to stay Japanese because that’s her heritage while Japanese foods that are not commonly known in the West will probably be localized in the interest of keeping the game from needing a 50-page explanatory booklet.

By the way, random facts: I adore the fandom name “Japanifornia”, and imagine my surprise when I first saw the “Big Hero 6” movie trailer! No matter what anyone says, Japanifornia will always be the original San Fransokyo to me. *grin*”

-- Janet Hsu, one of the localizers for the games

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