October 12, 2001: I Am The Law
by Diamond Feit
The older I get, the more I recognize the degree to which my father shaped my personality. His love of tabletop war simulations informed my interest in gaming, although I felt more drawn towards the newer, electronic variants. He introduced me to Star Trek, Star Wars, and movies in general. I love baseball because he loved baseball, specifically the New York Yankees as he grew up in The Bronx.
Beyond passing pop culture onto me, my dad's choice of vocation also had a gigantic impact on my upbringing. He worked as a lawyer for decades, primarily in the city of New York. We would visit him in his office from time to time inside a famous building downtown that offered choice views of the Statue of Liberty, a perk we took full advantage of on Lady Liberty's centennial in 1986. These trips to and from Manhattan forged a connection between me and the city that has not diminished no matter the distance between us.\u00a0
My father's caseload often involved automobile safety, granting him access to crash test footage. Always an advocate for buckling up, I suspect he showed us those videos of dummies flying through windshields to demonstrate the perils of not wearing seatbelts. I'll never forget his hearty laugh at The Simpsons' \"Mr. Plow\" episode when Lisa investigated Fourth Reich Motors\u2014a joke he happily explained once he caught his breath.
Dad's status as a lawyer made him an expert companion when watching any fictional depiction of courtrooms. We spent hours viewing L.A. Law together and he wouldn't hesitate to tell me when the television version of his job strayed too far from reality. He never wandered into Neil deGrasse Tyson pedantry but his healthy skepticism rubbed off on me.
Dad dropped out of video games post-Atari so I wonder what he might have thought 25 years ago this week when Capcom took a chance on turning the law into pop entertainment via a quiet Game Boy Advance release. It took a few sequels and a substantial localization to hit the big time but Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney made his case for superstardom right from his debut.
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney takes place in a near-future where judicial quagmire has necessitated radical reform. Unlike the present day where trials can take years to start\u2014let alone conclude\u2014in this world brevity rules supreme. The prosecution and the defense have a maximum of three days to present evidence and testimony to a judge who determines their merit and hands down a verdict. No juries means no lengthy deliberations, and no presumption of innocence places a burden of proof on both sides.
The game starts with protagonist Phoenix Wright appearing in court for the first time since becoming a lawyer. This offers a convenient excuse for the judge to question Phoenix's familiarity with procedure, a de facto tutorial for the player and the player character. Looking at the evidence, checking Phoenix's inventory, and reviewing statements made on the record are essential to success.
Phoenix's debut carries extra baggage as the defendant happens to be an old friend of his and the charge is murder. Thanks to an opening cutscene, the player already knows that the real culprit aims to frame Phoenix's pal Larry. Considering how often legal dramas leave actual guilt or innocence unclear until the finale, I like this early reveal as it lets players trust that Phoenix and his entourage are in the right.
Ace Attorney ups the tension of the proceedings when the prosecution calls the killer to the stand as an eyewitness. He insists that he saw Larry flee the victim's apartment with her corpse on the floor. Players know he's lying but no amount of yelling at the software will prove that. Instead, they must carefully consider the witness's choice of words and look for a discrepancy.
When Phoenix cross-examines a witness, he can Press them for more details about a statement that seems suspicious. A particularly sweaty liar might stammer and edit their statement on the spot, but usually it takes a contradiction to make them crack. That's when Phoenix can select evidence or other materials to counter their testimony, advancing the story and opening up the witness to further questioning or even a full confession.
Originally released as Gyakuten Saiban (\"Reversal Trial\" in Japanese), Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney dispenses shocking twist after shocking twist before the final credits roll. Players must do their part to ensure the facts come out, but the game's outrageous lineup of characters and absurd affairs are what makes this series so memorable.
Phoenix Wright starts his career clearing his best friend's name but the stakes only increase with each new chapter. When his mentor dies of unnatural causes her younger sister becomes the primary suspect. Phoenix gets her off the hook but then has to defend himself from those same charges before unmasking the true killer. The prosecutor in those proceedings, Miles Edgeworth, is later arrested for homicide and only Phoenix Wright comes to his defense.
Ace Attorney straddles the line between visual novel and point-and-click adventure game. Players will read page after page of dialogue as Phoenix meets his clients, interviews potential witnesses, and confronts potential adversaries. Yet Phoenix also has to scour crime scenes for clues that might exonerate the accused. The game won't let you enter the courtroom without the evidence you need, but players still have to put the pieces together to win.
American audiences hadn't seen many visual novels when Ace Attorney debuted in 2001 which surely influenced Capcom's decision to not release the game outside Japan. It sold well enough to merit a sequel and then a third entry, by which point the Nintendo DS looked like the handheld platform of the future. As is their wont, Capcom tested the waters by remaking the original game for Nintendo's dual-screen console in 2005, this time translating it for a global audience.\u00a0
Localizer Alexander O. Smith spoke to USGamer.net in 2015 about his work introducing Phoenix Wright to the world. First up, the young lawyer needed a new name as his Japanese moniker of Ry\u016bichi Naruhod\u014d wouldn't fly overseas. \"Wright, I felt, had to be his last name, because of the pun in Japanese,\" Smith said. \"Naruhodo was used so many times in the text as a joke. Also, it's just self-deprecating humor, where the one guy whose name is 'I get it!' just doesn't get it.\"
Another change made early in the process led to some strained situations later on, as Phoenix's first case involves a clock set to the wrong time zone. Smith admits he chose America's Pacific coast \"without really thinking that much about it,\" a choice that only makes less sense as later games further embraced Ry\u016bichi Naruhod\u014d's native culture.
It took several years for news of Phoenix Wright's antics to reach me, by which point I had already moved to Japan where Capcom did not sell the English editions of his games. I saw the memes, met staffers who worked on the series, but never felt moved to track down a cartridge and play it for myself. I remember trying a demo at TGS one year which I managed to parse in Japanese but struggled to complete in a timely fashion.
As smartphones exploded in popularity and slowed handheld console sales, many traditional game publishers looked to their back catalog to see what software they could potentially reformat for a touchscreen device. Capcom saw Ace Attorney's text-based gameplay as the perfect candidate, releasing the original three games as a bundle for iOS and Android. A trial version offered access to the first two cases of the first game at no cost.
As a proud recent owner of an iPad, I viewed Ace Attorney Trilogy as my personal invitation to serve justice from the safety of my living room. Unfortunately, the port proved rather clunky, featuring poor frame rates and text that crawled onto the screen at a painfully slow pace. I read pretty fast and object to any game that lacks message speed options, or at the very least a fast-forward button. Ace Attorney Trilogy had nothing of the sort so I held it in contempt.
Yet Phoenix Wright's legend only grew with crossover games featuring Professor Layton and Herlock Sholmes, an animated series, a live-action film adaptation, and multiple musicals performed by the all-female Takarazuka Revue. It's as if Capcom and their partners were badgering me for not giving Phoenix Wright his day in my own personal courtroom.
Eventually technology and fate caught up to me as an all-new compilation brought Phoenix Wright's initial outings to consoles and Steam in 2019. Again I balked as the iOS version remained a fresh wound, but then Xbox added it to Game Pass in 2023. It took over 20 years and multiple changes of venue, but I had officially run out of excuses. I downloaded the Trilogy for zero dollars and zero cents, completed Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, and arrived at a verdict.
It's fine.
Apologies for the anti-climax, but that's my honest take. The writing is smart, the characters memorable, but the actual gameplay doesn't wow me. We're living in a golden age of deductive/investigative adventure games, particularly on Steam where anyone with a clever hook can invite me to solve a mystery. As Phoenix Wright, I never achieve that all-important Eureka moment; instead it's more about pitting my sensibilities against the game as I try to figure out when the script says I'm allowed to assert the truth.
Series creator Shu Takumi acknowledged that Ace Attorney isn't a traditional whodunit in a 2012 interview with Hayakawa's Mystery Magazine translated by Gyakuten Saiban Library. \"The goal is not to find the true culprit: it\u2019s a game about cornering the culprit,\" Takumi said. \"That was new for the time, so to make that clear, the early episodes take on an inverted story style. This was of course influenced by Columbo.\"
According to a 2014 Capcom blogpost, Shu Takumi envisioned Ace Attorney as \"easy enough for even his non-gamer mother to pick up and play.\" It makes me wonder how my father might have reacted if I introduced him to Phoenix Wright. Verisimilitude has never been a priority in these games\u2014the first outing sees Phoenix call a parrot to the witness stand\u2014but perhaps Dad might have found the premise charming enough to engage with. I don't know that he ever handled a murder case so Ace Attorney might have afforded him a bit of wish fulfillment, like when I play a Yakuza game and fancy myself fluent in Japanese.
Personally, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney doesn't click with me, but I must admire the speed at which a rookie lawyer went from video game leading man to cross-media superstar. Within a decade of his debut, Phoenix stood toe to toe against Earth's mightiest heroes in Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3. Yet unlike the rest of the roster, only Phoenix has the Power of Attorney to represent Galactus in court immediately after preventing him from consuming our planet.
Recognizing everyone's right to a defense? That's something my father and Phoenix Wright absolutely had in common.
Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit has written professionally since 2009 and contributed to Retronauts since 2018. Look up feitclub on social media or visit Diamond's lofi website.
", "contentSnippet": "October 12, 2001: I Am The Law\nby Diamond Feit\nThe older I get, the more I recognize the degree to which my father shaped my personality. His love of tabletop war simulations informed my interest in gaming, although I felt more drawn towards the newer, electronic variants. He introduced me to Star Trek, Star Wars, and movies in general. I love baseball because he loved baseball, specifically the New York Yankees as he grew up in The Bronx.\nBeyond passing pop culture onto me, my dad's choice of vocation also had a gigantic impact on my upbringing. He worked as a lawyer for decades, primarily in the city of New York. We would visit him in his office from time to time inside a famous building downtown that offered choice views of the Statue of Liberty, a perk we took full advantage of on Lady Liberty's centennial in 1986. These trips to and from Manhattan forged a connection between me and the city that has not diminished no matter the distance between us.\u00a0\nMy father's caseload often involved automobile safety, granting him access to crash test footage. Always an advocate for buckling up, I suspect he showed us those videos of dummies flying through windshields to demonstrate the perils of not wearing seatbelts. I'll never forget his hearty laugh at The Simpsons' \"Mr. Plow\" episode when Lisa investigated Fourth Reich Motors\u2014a joke he happily explained once he caught his breath.\nDad's status as a lawyer made him an expert companion when watching any fictional depiction of courtrooms. We spent hours viewing L.A. Law together and he wouldn't hesitate to tell me when the television version of his job strayed too far from reality. He never wandered into Neil deGrasse Tyson pedantry but his healthy skepticism rubbed off on me.\nDad dropped out of video games post-Atari so I wonder what he might have thought 25 years ago this week when Capcom took a chance on turning the law into pop entertainment via a quiet Game Boy Advance release. It took a few sequels and a substantial localization to hit the big time but Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney made his case for superstardom right from his debut.\nPhoenix Wright: Ace Attorney takes place in a near-future where judicial quagmire has necessitated radical reform. Unlike the present day where trials can take years to start\u2014let alone conclude\u2014in this world brevity rules supreme. The prosecution and the defense have a maximum of three days to present evidence and testimony to a judge who determines their merit and hands down a verdict. No juries means no lengthy deliberations, and no presumption of innocence places a burden of proof on both sides.\nThe game starts with protagonist Phoenix Wright appearing in court for the first time since becoming a lawyer. This offers a convenient excuse for the judge to question Phoenix's familiarity with procedure, a de facto tutorial for the player and the player character. Looking at the evidence, checking Phoenix's inventory, and reviewing statements made on the record are essential to success.\nPhoenix's debut carries extra baggage as the defendant happens to be an old friend of his and the charge is murder. Thanks to an opening cutscene, the player already knows that the real culprit aims to frame Phoenix's pal Larry. Considering how often legal dramas leave actual guilt or innocence unclear until the finale, I like this early reveal as it lets players trust that Phoenix and his entourage are in the right.\nAce Attorney ups the tension of the proceedings when the prosecution calls the killer to the stand as an eyewitness. He insists that he saw Larry flee the victim's apartment with her corpse on the floor. Players know he's lying but no amount of yelling at the software will prove that. Instead, they must carefully consider the witness's choice of words and look for a discrepancy.\nWhen Phoenix cross-examines a witness, he can Press them for more details about a statement that seems suspicious. A particularly sweaty liar might stammer and edit their statement on the spot, but usually it takes a contradiction to make them crack. That's when Phoenix can select evidence or other materials to counter their testimony, advancing the story and opening up the witness to further questioning or even a full confession.\nOriginally released as Gyakuten Saiban (\"Reversal Trial\" in Japanese), Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney dispenses shocking twist after shocking twist before the final credits roll. Players must do their part to ensure the facts come out, but the game's outrageous lineup of characters and absurd affairs are what makes this series so memorable.\nPhoenix Wright starts his career clearing his best friend's name but the stakes only increase with each new chapter. When his mentor dies of unnatural causes her younger sister becomes the primary suspect. Phoenix gets her off the hook but then has to defend himself from those same charges before unmasking the true killer. The prosecutor in those proceedings, Miles Edgeworth, is later arrested for homicide and only Phoenix Wright comes to his defense.\nAce Attorney straddles the line between visual novel and point-and-click adventure game. Players will read page after page of dialogue as Phoenix meets his clients, interviews potential witnesses, and confronts potential adversaries. Yet Phoenix also has to scour crime scenes for clues that might exonerate the accused. The game won't let you enter the courtroom without the evidence you need, but players still have to put the pieces together to win.\nAmerican audiences hadn't seen many visual novels when Ace Attorney debuted in 2001 which surely influenced Capcom's decision to not release the game outside Japan. It sold well enough to merit a sequel and then a third entry, by which point the Nintendo DS looked like the handheld platform of the future. As is their wont, Capcom tested the waters by remaking the original game for Nintendo's dual-screen console in 2005, this time translating it for a global audience.\u00a0\nLocalizer Alexander O. Smith spoke to USGamer.net in 2015 about his work introducing Phoenix Wright to the world. First up, the young lawyer needed a new name as his Japanese moniker of Ry\u016bichi Naruhod\u014d wouldn't fly overseas. \"Wright, I felt, had to be his last name, because of the pun in Japanese,\" Smith said. \"Naruhodo was used so many times in the text as a joke. Also, it's just self-deprecating humor, where the one guy whose name is 'I get it!' just doesn't get it.\"\nAnother change made early in the process led to some strained situations later on, as Phoenix's first case involves a clock set to the wrong time zone. Smith admits he chose America's Pacific coast \"without really thinking that much about it,\" a choice that only makes less sense as later games further embraced Ry\u016bichi Naruhod\u014d's native culture.\nIt took several years for news of Phoenix Wright's antics to reach me, by which point I had already moved to Japan where Capcom did not sell the English editions of his games. I saw the memes, met staffers who worked on the series, but never felt moved to track down a cartridge and play it for myself. I remember trying a demo at TGS one year which I managed to parse in Japanese but struggled to complete in a timely fashion.\nAs smartphones exploded in popularity and slowed handheld console sales, many traditional game publishers looked to their back catalog to see what software they could potentially reformat for a touchscreen device. Capcom saw Ace Attorney's text-based gameplay as the perfect candidate, releasing the original three games as a bundle for iOS and Android. A trial version offered access to the first two cases of the first game at no cost.\nAs a proud recent owner of an iPad, I viewed Ace Attorney Trilogy as my personal invitation to serve justice from the safety of my living room. Unfortunately, the port proved rather clunky, featuring poor frame rates and text that crawled onto the screen at a painfully slow pace. I read pretty fast and object to any game that lacks message speed options, or at the very least a fast-forward button. Ace Attorney Trilogy had nothing of the sort so I held it in contempt.\nYet Phoenix Wright's legend only grew with crossover games featuring Professor Layton and Herlock Sholmes, an animated series, a live-action film adaptation, and multiple musicals performed by the all-female Takarazuka Revue. It's as if Capcom and their partners were badgering me for not giving Phoenix Wright his day in my own personal courtroom.\nEventually technology and fate caught up to me as an all-new compilation brought Phoenix Wright's initial outings to consoles and Steam in 2019. Again I balked as the iOS version remained a fresh wound, but then Xbox added it to Game Pass in 2023. It took over 20 years and multiple changes of venue, but I had officially run out of excuses. I downloaded the Trilogy for zero dollars and zero cents, completed Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, and arrived at a verdict.\nIt's fine.\nApologies for the anti-climax, but that's my honest take. The writing is smart, the characters memorable, but the actual gameplay doesn't wow me. We're living in a golden age of deductive/investigative adventure games, particularly on Steam where anyone with a clever hook can invite me to solve a mystery. As Phoenix Wright, I never achieve that all-important Eureka moment; instead it's more about pitting my sensibilities against the game as I try to figure out when the script says I'm allowed to assert the truth.\nSeries creator Shu Takumi acknowledged that Ace Attorney isn't a traditional whodunit in a 2012 interview with Hayakawa's Mystery Magazine translated by Gyakuten Saiban Library. \"The goal is not to find the true culprit: it\u2019s a game about cornering the culprit,\" Takumi said. \"That was new for the time, so to make that clear, the early episodes take on an inverted story style. This was of course influenced by Columbo.\"\nAccording to a 2014 Capcom blogpost, Shu Takumi envisioned Ace Attorney as \"easy enough for even his non-gamer mother to pick up and play.\" It makes me wonder how my father might have reacted if I introduced him to Phoenix Wright. Verisimilitude has never been a priority in these games\u2014the first outing sees Phoenix call a parrot to the witness stand\u2014but perhaps Dad might have found the premise charming enough to engage with. I don't know that he ever handled a murder case so Ace Attorney might have afforded him a bit of wish fulfillment, like when I play a Yakuza game and fancy myself fluent in Japanese.\nPersonally, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney doesn't click with me, but I must admire the speed at which a rookie lawyer went from video game leading man to cross-media superstar. Within a decade of his debut, Phoenix stood toe to toe against Earth's mightiest heroes in Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3. Yet unlike the rest of the roster, only Phoenix has the Power of Attorney to represent Galactus in court immediately after preventing him from consuming our planet.\nRecognizing everyone's right to a defense? That's something my father and Phoenix Wright absolutely had in common.\nWriter/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit has written professionally since 2009 and contributed to Retronauts since 2018. Look up feitclub on social media or visit Diamond's lofi website.", "guid": "172682849", "isoDate": "2026-10-18T11:00:17.000Z", "itunes": { "duration": "1037", "image": "https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/172682849/d521fdc42fc04fc9996a4ade952ad4f7/eyJkIjo3MiwiaCI6MzAwMCwic3RyaXBfYWxwaGEiOjEsInciOjMwMDAsIndlYnAiOjB9/1.jpg?token-hash=J5S-qMHLToZ2DIUsf9F984gplayOefk6Bng0n-oiHZ4%3D" }, "itunes_duration": "0:17:16" }