The Ace Attorney series is back with yet another remastered collection releasing in September – and this time, it’s Miles Edgeworth who gets his time in the spotlight. This is the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection, a series of two games originally released for the Nintendo DS – including one that was never released outside of Japan. That means that this is the first chance many fans in the west have the opportunity to play through what many consider to be one of the greatest games in the Ace Attorney series.
For those unfamiliar with Ace Attorney, it’s a series of visual novel puzzle games that all revolve around the courtroom in some way. In the original game, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, you play as an up-and-coming lawyer who finds himself tangled in a series of more and more complicated legal cases. The cases always seem separate at first, but build towards a larger mystery that you must resolve at the end of the game. In Ace Attorney Investigations, you take up the other side of the mantle, playing as prosecutor Miles Edgeworth. While there’s returning characters, inside jokes and references for days that will make die-hard fans jump for joy, you don’t need to have played any previous games to understand what’s going on here.
As the title suggests, these games don’t find you in the courtroom – instead, you find yourself in the middle of the action. You’ll investigate crime scenes, interview witnesses, and try to figure out what really happened. Is that even close to the role of a prosecutor in real life? Absolutely not. Thankfully, the Ace Attorney series isn’t concerned in the slightest with what courtrooms and the justice system are really like. You can throw any doubts you had about these games being technical or boring straight out the window. These games are all about constructing intricate mysteries, and slowly revealing information to you. It’s your job as the player to make the leaps in logic required to connect all the dots and figure out whodunit. It’s all got an endearing level of campness to it, but I find it’s impossible not to get sucked in to the world and it’s unwavering belief in justice.
This remastered collection features new chibi style graphics and remastered art for the entire game. You can choose to switch back to the original pixel art style characters in the settings, but it doesn’t swap back the rest of the graphics. The end result is that the pixel art just looks a bit messy against the remastered backgrounds, so I opted to stick with the new chibi style. The collection has all the trappings of these modern remasters, including a configurable Autoplay mode, easy save states, and even a Story Mode that essentially plays the game for you if you don’t want to do any of the puzzle solving yourself. It’s great to see accessibility features like that being added to older (and at times, notoriously difficult) games, unlocking them for an even wider player base.
“It’s Sherlock Holmes meets Columbo meets private school boy, in the most delightful way.”
If you search around for people’s opinions on the best Ace Attorney games, AAI2 consistently ranks among the top of people’s lists, often even taking the top spot. Until this release, non-Japanese speaking fans have had to rely on unofficial fan translations to play through this adventure, and now it’s available for all. This preview didn’t include any of the later cases in AAI2, so I can’t comment yet on whether the reverence for this game is fully justified – but based on what I’ve seen so far, I am extremely excited. It features a very fun new mechanic called Mind Chess, which provides a thrilling push-and-pull as you decide how to keep a conversation going with a witness – and is one of the most unique mechanics in these games.
Miles Edgeworth is (in my humble opinion) one of the greatest characters from the entire Ace Attorney series. Always cool, calm and collected, he gathers the facts and disperses justice with logic and deduction. He wears a truly ridiculous cravat with his wine red suit, and enjoys the finer things in life, like chess and flying on airplanes that apparently have an entire lounge floor. Even when he’s caught off guard, he maintains an air of sophistication and command that makes you want to root for him. It’s Sherlock Holmes meets Columbo meets private school boy, in the most delightful way.
And let me tell you – the charm of these games hasn’t aged a day. I grew up playing Ace Attorney on my DS, and I have been a diehard mega-fan of the series ever since I stumbled across it. Ace Attorney Investigations somehow slipped past me, and so much like with 2021’s The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, it is an absolute gift to be able to play through mysteries in the series I’ve never seen before. (Which is good, because the last actual new game, Spirit of Justice, came out in 2016! It’s been almost TEN YEARS!) Perhaps it’s nostalgia, perhaps it’s a deep love for the characters, but I still get the same thrill every time Edgeworth yells “OBJECTION!” and wags his finger knowingly.
So for fans who are looking forward to Ace Attorney Investigations Collection, the initial signs are very, very good. I cannot wait to get stuck in and finish these two games, and finally understand all of the hype for the much-beloved AAI2. If all of this sounds appealing to you but you’ve never tried out the series, there has never been a better time than now to be an Ace Attorney fan – practically every game in the series is available remastered on the Switch and other platforms (except for the Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney crossover game, which, by the way, is also fantastic). Playing through the original Phoenix Wright trilogy will give you a much deeper understanding and appreciation of the characters, especially Edgeworth himself.
But even if you go in blind, Ace Attorney Investigations Collection has all the makings of an adventure you’ll never forget – and it just might get you hooked.
Ace Attorney Investigations Collection is releasing September 6 on Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PS4 and PC. Stay tuned for our full review closer to launch!
About the Author
Douglas Rintoul
he/him
Douglas is a writer, comedian, performer, and software developer who enjoys procrastinating any and all responsibilities by playing and replaying games. You can find him performing at the arts festivals around Australia, both solo and with his sketch comedy group Bits Akimbo.
