While the upcoming release of the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection might not seem like the biggest thing around, it’s an important entry for those of the beloved franchise. The reason for that is this two-part collection is the final entry of the saga to be brought into the modern gaming age. Plus, one of those titles has never been localized in the West, meaning it will be a “first-time ever” experience for many gamers. The two titles have been updated since their original DS days, and the team talked with the crew at Nintendo Life about making the remasters for the modern set of consoles.
For example, Producer Shunsuke Nishida revealed how long the team had been working on the collection:
“Development for Ace Attorney Investigations Collection began in 2022. We spent three whole months conducting tests to determine how to improve the character sprites’ graphical quality and convert them to high resolution.”
That’s an important thing to note, as the original game on the DS looked fine for its period, but the sprites were truly rough. With them being able to use the power of the Nintendo Switch and other platforms to get more “bang for their buck” with the sprites, they were wise to work hard on the visual upgrades.
The producer further noted that he knew that fans had been wanting this revamped collection, especially with the second title never being brought to the West, so he was “excited” to tell them about it while also surprising them with its release date:
“I bet fans didn’t expect it to be available the same year as Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy. We’d wanted the news to be a surprise, so you can imagine how tough it was for us to keep everything a secret.”
The team also admitted that there were challenges with upgrading and translating the game to modern consoles, including maintaining the storylines with the various interweaving mysteries. The localization director, Janet Tsu, noted that one case in particular was so challenging to translate they had to keep things “in order” via a special method:
“One of the episodes has so many threads and bits of foreshadowing to keep straight, we needed to create event timelines for our own reference.”
While the game has many overhauled elements, the team did take the time to fix “errors and typos” in the original titles. They couldn’t adjust everything they wanted, but the “glaring ones” were fixed so that the games would be in great shape by the September 6th release.
