I still vividly remember being 16 years old and playing Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth for the first time – I’d bought it at Gamestation (RIP) during my lunch break at Sixth Form and ditched my last lesson of the day to play it in the common room. Ace Attorney was a big deal for young Ryan, and I can recall being crouched over my Nintendo DS while giving excited explanations of what made the legal comedy-drama visual novels so appealing to friends who only wanted to shoot each other. Investigations was a triumph, adding new elements to the series and giving more screen time to a fan favourite prosecutor.
I feel that same brand of giddiness now; Ace Attorney is a big deal for old Ryan, too. With the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection, the second game of the duology is finally available (officially) in English, something fans have been hoping for over the last decade or so. It promises a bunch of useful mechanical improvements and delivers in spades, and the gallery of art pieces and music players that we’ve seen in the mainline Ace Attorney collections is preserved here, too.
Following on from the Apollo Justice trilogy, we now have a true visual novel mode that removes the puzzles, and the ability to flip between the gorgeous new art and retro sprite work is a stroke of genius – the new art is lush, but the sprites fit so well into the world of Ace Attorney they’d be a crying shame to leave behind.
For the uninitiated, Investigations is a true spin-off of the main Ace Attorney games. Much of the gameplay loop is preserved – examining crime scenes and interrogating people in cross-examinations (this time, out of court) – but additions such as making logical connections between clues and mind chess that have you treating debates like a strategic battle make Investigations feel like a separate entity.
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Controls feel finicky to begin with. With this port, there’s an attempt to add some point-and-click mechanics when playing with a mouse and keyboard, but this leads to rather unfortunate issues where Edgeworth is often not facing the objects and people you need him to interact with. Fortunately, you can trade pointing for dragging in the options menu, handily recreating the control scheme the game was meant to be played with back in the DS days.
Retaining the same level of difficulty, for better or for worse, it’s easy to feel equal parts genius when figuring things out, frustrated when your brain is quicker than the case’s narrative, and furious when the very specific connections you have to make are obscured by the leaps of logic required. But this is just Ace Attorney through and through, and for what it’s worth, the second game feels lighter on these annoying moments, perhaps due to the translation being far more recent and by a team that likely knows the extra scrutiny it would receive.
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In many ways, Investigations feels like a love letter to Ace Attorney as a whole, which is odd considering it also manages to tell compelling, self-contained stories about smuggling and international relations. The cases are dripping with references to please avid AA fans – in the first three cases alone you’ll encounter Maggey Byrde, Franziska von Karma, Officer Meekins, and spot a well-hidden Phoenix Wright himself in a background. From the first hours of the game, you feel at home.
I’ve played through the fan translation in the past, but experiencing the second game in an official capacity is a brilliant experience. The writing is more fluid, the characterisation more consistent, and the names? Look, we all mourn ‘Sebastian Debeste’, but we’re living in Eustace Winner’s world now, and we must be thankful. At the end of the day, simply having an official translation of Prosecutor’s Gambit makes the collection worth the price of entry, and after playing the first cases of each game, I’m convinced this is the most impressive remaster from the Ace Attorney series so far.
