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Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy dev blog - Shu Takumi's Trials and Tribulations
Shu Takumi, director of the Ace Attorney Trilogy, is back with another special dev blog. Check out a snippet from that blog below, then click over for the full piece.
Hello, again. This is Shu Takumi, the original planner, scenario writer, and director of the first three Ace Attorney games. This week, I’d like to talk a little about the challenges and difficulties I had while writing the trilogy.
To be perfectly honest, I didn’t have a lot of video game story writing experience when I initially came up with the first game’s design document in the summer of 2000. So, you could say that everything was difficult and a challenge for me back then. I’m often asked if I had the entire narrative for the trilogy mapped out in my head from the very beginning, but it was nothing of the sort. In fact, we weren’t even planning to make a sequel at the time, so I’d spent all of my energy focused on creating a single, self-contained story for the first game.
I used to read nothing but mysteries when I was young, and once I grew up, I decided to join Capcom because I wanted to make a mystery adventure game. So basically, I am what you’d call a “big mystery nerd”. When the Ace Attorney project started to take off, I assumed it would be my one and only shot at making my dream come true, so I took all of the mystery story ideas I’d ever had and enthusiastically poured them into the game. By contrast, the game’s dramatic elements were centered on relatively straightforward themes like “true friends and rivals,” “messy pasts,” and “defeat the big bad for a happy ending.” I suppose this is because, in addition to the mystery novels I loved so much, I was greatly influenced by the Japanese shōnen manga that were all around me when I was young.