Hands-on: Ace Attorney Investigations Collection finally lets fans complete the series in English

It’s fair to say the visual novel genre is more niche in the west than it is in the east, but the Ace Attorney series is one of the few to build a sizable following around these parts.

Originally released on the GBA, DS and 3DS, the series has been revitalised with a selection of remaster compilations which have been released on modern consoles in recent years, to the extent that eight of the 11 main Ace Attorney games are now available on today’s digital stores.

The six main titles are covered by Ace Attorney Trilogy (which includes games 1-3) and Apollo Justice Trilogy (which features games 4-6). This is then supported with The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, which features two Japan-only spin-offs released in the west for the first time.

That count will soon rise to 10 out of 11 with the release of the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection in September. With this new release, Capcom has not only added remasters of two more spin-offs, but also ensured that the entire Ace Attorney series has now finally been localised in English.

(Incidentally, the 11th game is the 3DS crossover title Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright, a co-production by Capcom and Level-5 which did get an English release at the time. A remaster of this may be trickier because two companies were involved.)

The collection contains two games – 2010’s DS game Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth, and its 2011 DS sequel Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor’s Gambit. The latter was only ever released in Japan, meaning this remaster marks its first ever English language version.

Both games star Miles Edgeworth, the burgundy-suited prosecutor who was initially presented as Phoenix Wright’s rival in the first Ace Attorney before lightening up a bit and becoming a good guy (if a little uppity).

Whereas other Ace Attorney games are usually played from a first-person perspective as you move from area to area, the Investigations titles are instead played mainly from a third-person perspective, with the player moving Edgeworth around each location almost like a point-and-click adventure.

As in other titles in the series, the general aim is to explore crime scenes, interview witnesses and gather information which can then be used to figure out who’s guilty. One of the twists here, however, is the Logic tool, in which Edgeworth saves thoughts to his head as he encounters various items of interest. The player can then enter the Logic screen and try joining these thoughts together to form theories.

A clever gizmo called the Little Thief can also be used at times to project a hologram of the crime using the information available. This lets Edgeworth test out these theories, study the scene for new clues and update it with new details as the investigation proceeds.

For the remaster, Capcom has decided to let players decide just how ‘remastered’ they want the game to be. While the close-up character art which appears in cutscenes and during conversations has been redrawn for HD and 4K displays, other elements give the players the choice between modern or retro.

By default, the character sprites in the third-person exploration sections are newly created, high-res ‘chibi sprites’ made by the Investigations games’ original character designer Tatsuro Iwamoto. There are more than 100 characters over the course of both games and they’ve all been given this treatment.

If you don’t like it, however – for some the addition of extra detail isn’t as good as the detail they imagined in their head when playing on DS – you can switch back to the original sprites in the game’s Options.

The same goes for the soundtrack, which by default features a new Arranged version with orchestral music but can be changed to the original DS soundtrack should you prefer.

For most fans, however, the big draw will obviously be the ability to finally play Ace Attorney Investigations 2, the only remaining Ace Attorney game to never get an official English language release. We’re early into the game just now so we haven’t properly sunk our teeth into its five cases yet, but we’re looking forward to it.

We’ll have a review of Ace Attorney Investigations Collection nearer to its September 5 release, but it probably goes without saying that Ace Attorney fans will want to snap it up, especially if they have the other three remaster collections and want to complete the set.