Capcom talks Ace Attorney localization challenges, still no word on The Great Ace Attorney

A portion of a GameSpot interview with Motohide Eshiro...

GS: The localizations of the Phoenix Wright games take place in a vague "Japanamerica," and many cases are steeped in Japanese culture. Some of these themes may not translate well for some players. What are the challenges of localizing this series?

Eshiro: First of all, the game is made in Japan, so we make it in Japanese and the staff doesn't think about the localization at all. Once you start thinking about it, then you have to consider so many things, and you start locking yourself into a little space, right? To keep it so that they can make as creative of a product as possible, as creative of a story as possible, we don't think about the localization, we just make it as interesting as we can. When localization happens, I will sit down with [the team] and say, okay, this part should probably be localized because I'm not sure a lot of people outside of Japan would understand it. And he might say, "Well, let's keep it because it's important to the story or this character." Through this back and forth we decide the bigger picture of what to keep and what not to keep Japanese in that sense.

I based some of my decisions on the times. For example, nowadays people [in the West] know what ramen is but 10 years ago people didn't know what ramen was in the same way. I do go through and adjust, fine-tune what needs localizing and what doesn't based on what people know at that time.

GS: Will we ever get a localized version of Daigyakuten Saiban?

Janet Hsu (Translator): Unfortunately there's a number of circumstances... We absolutely do want to bring it to the West, but unfortunately due to these circumstances right now... I'm really really sorry! Nowadays on the Internet lots of fans are directly asking us, "Where's Daigyakuten Saiban?" On livestreams, even in the Japanese ones, people from the West will write in and ask where it is. Every time we say, we're sorry! Certain circumstances are kind of getting in the way.