Capcom discusses the many technical challenges of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy
Capcom is on the case
You might think that bringing some decade-old games over to modern-day hardware wouldn’t be a problem, as horsepower could alleviate any issues. While it’s true that platforms like the Switch have more than enough under the hood to handle games from years ago, that doesn’t mean there aren’t hurdles to overcome during the process.
4Gamer had the chance to talk with Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy producer Kenichi Hashimoto about the process of bringing these classic titles over to Switch, and it seems that the dev team faced a number of bumps along the way. It wasn’t anything their team couldn’t overcome, but it might be more work than many would expect.
The re-release is played on a screen larger than the originals, and the Nintendo DS touch screen controls had to be adapted for the gamepad. It was also difficult to make it feel good to play. Furthermore, when it came to brushing up the graphics, simply putting them onto a larger screen was not going to work. For example, the compressed text on the screen at that time couldn’t simply be made bigger, as text must also be legible. We could not finish the job simply by using a tool to enlarge the characters, and instead the mass of pixels making the characters had to be worked on.
For Dual Destinies we cut a little off the top and bottom of the backgrounds, which had the effect of zooming in slightly, but since it was in 3D there was still some flexibility. The difficult part was the backgrounds in Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, where we had to ask 2D designers to draw new parts for the left and right of the screen. Furthermore, it was the first time our company had used the RE Engine for an adventure game so we didn’t yet have all the tools available – it was pretty tough.
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