14 DAY TRIAL // While America might be the most popular medium for game development, Japan puts up a pretty good show when it comes to quality, as well as quantity. The thing is that, with a large cultural difference between Japan and the rest of the world, titles rarely make it to the West. The in-house market is more than enough to satisfy most of the country's publishers and developers, but sometimes games do make it past the border. Putting huge titles like Final Fantasy aside, there are some less famous games that also end up taking a vacation abroad.
Originally being a GBA game called Gyakuten Saiban and having been released in Japan in 2001, Phoenix Wright got its current name in 2006 and made Nintendo's DS a place to call home. The series grew since then in size, with sequels and spin-offs, but also with fans, as the franchise finally made its way to America. And while gamers were as surprised to see this as they were thrilled by it, the people on the other side of the business, the creators, were just as shocked.
Speaking to ONM, Shu Takumi, the director of Ace Attorney, said that he never expected for the title to make an appearance in the West. "The Ace Attorney franchise is a materialized form of my ideals of the mystery genre. I am also a big fan of courtroom drama so I knew the first Ace Attorney would be a good game but.... I wasn't expecting it to be this popular," Takumi said. "I didn't even dream of a day Phoenix Wright went abroad!"
But indeed he did, and things worked out pretty well for him. And, hopefully, his courtroom drama was impressive and touching enough to convince Capcom to at least continue to bring future development in the franchise to its Western fans, if not to test the waters with some other of its Japan exclusive games.