Famitsu posted an interview between the producer and director of Project X Zone 2 and Ace Attorney producer Eshiro about Ace Attorney's role in the game. It's pretty long, so I'm not doing a word-by-word translation:

- Because Ace Attorney is a series that has (mainly) been developed for Nintendo systems, the PXZ team had always thought the series was a perfect fit for PXZ. In fact, they had considered adding Ace Attorney in the first game, but because it overlapped with the release of Professor Layton VS Ace Attorney, they gave up on that.

- At first they had considered using characters like Larry and Oldbag too, but it was difficult having typical Ace Attorney characters like them appear in the battles. That’s why they decided to use Phoenix & Maya’s appearance in Ultimate Marvel VS Capcom 3 as the base, adding typical Ace Attorney elements like the Steel Samurai, the Pink Princess and the Psyche Lock.

- Because it was decided early on they’d go with UMvC3 as a base, Eshiro’s work (Producer Ace Attorney) mostly consisted of supervising the script of the Ace Attorney characters. Animation work was left to the PXZ2 team, and the meetings on that went like “What do you think about this?”, with Eshiro simply going “Sure, looks great.” Because of Capcom and Ace Attorney’s history, Eshiro and basically all of Capcom obviously have fond memories of sprite art.

- The story and the dialogue is made by the PXZ2 team, with the producers of all the respective series/companies checking just to make sure the characters of each franchise are talking and acting like they should. None of the companies/producers made things really difficult for the PXZ2 team.

- PXZ2’s timely release between Dai Gyakuten Saiban and Gyakuten Saiban 6 is just a coincidence.

- For the PXZ2 team, ‘their’ story with Phoenix and Maya is set after Ace Attorney 2. In the PXZ2 world, Phoenix is a much sought-after attorney (hence him having being hired by Tekken's Heihachi now and Yakuza's Majima in the past). He’s also a rare ‘normal’ person in a rather crazy crossover cast, which makes him a good tsukkomi part (compare to Ryu and Ken, who’d just go ‘oh, a strange new world’ and then fight).

- Phoenix & Maya are one Solo Unit together. They’d have to come up with too many moves for them to work as a Pair Unit (movesets which would still need to fit with their own games, so that’s difficult). They had also first considered using Phoenix alone as a Solo Unit, with Maya only appearing for the attacks like in UMvC3, but it was easier to really show off the AA world with them together reacting to each other on the screen.

- As shown in the demo, Phoenix & Maya are able to fight because Morrigan infused her powers in Maya’s magatama, giving her the power to materialize the characters she thinks of when in trouble (= the Steel Samurai and Pink Princess).

- Development (the work between Capcom and PXZ2) went a lot faster in the second half of the cycle, because by then they had a good idea of what they were doing and most things were approved as they were.

- Eshiro had not seen the actual game moving until the interview. He compares the sprite art to Ace Attorney Investigations, which also featured full sprites of the characters (instead of the upper bodies of the main series).

- Eshiro says he would like to do another game with sprite art. It took a long time before they decided to go with polygons for Ace Attorney 5.

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Last edited by Ash on Sun Nov 08, 2015 12:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Man shiny white lawyer Phoenix Weight taking jobs from the Yakuza and the Zaibatsu Corporation? No wonder the dark age of the law came about.

Also I suppose Maya is kind of a summoner anyway so her summoning dudes to fight is an acceptable thing.

Still rather have her channel the muscular Jack Hammer and go Hulk on the enemies with a beatstick tho

What does the "one solo unit" bit mean though? I don't know the specifics of the last game to know what that means.

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Thanks Ash! I saw the interview earlier but hadn't had a chance to read it yet.



Huh. I'm very much extrapolating out of nothing with this, but I wonder if this means they'd consider going back to sprites for a hypothetical AAI3.

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Thanks Ash!

I wanted to play the first one, but my friends said it was boring so I didn't bother. But I'll be giving this one a try for sure... mostly because Lucina and Chrom are in it XD

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Or perhaps he wants to reintroduce sprites in the main series. I mean, GK series is pretty much over, I think.

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DON'T YOU DARE SAY THAT

Ahh... the days of my youth... when they released AAI/AAI2... like the scent of fresh lemon, you see.

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Ooh, it would be such a treat if they did... also for the main series to be honest. We've yet to see what a truly high-res sprite-art Ace Attorney looks like.

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They feature heavily in the PXZ2 demo by the way, which I summarized here


In PXZ, there are Pair Units and Solo Units. Pair Units are the actual units you control during battle and consist of two characters, often from the same series, sometimes of different series. They have a wide variety of attacks etc Solo Units on the other hand are principle one character who function as summons for the Pair Units: every fight you can use the Solo Unit once for one set attack set.

Phoenix and Maya are two characters, but they function as one Solo Unit, like for example Ryo from Shenmue.


I was reading it as: "of course I'm going to praise sprite art now because I too am responsible for this game and even if I were to think that polygons are waaaaaaay better, no way am I going to say that one week before the game's release".

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Interesting that Eshiro was targeted for the input. Makes me wonder if Phoenix and Maya's dialogue in PXZ2 will be a preview of how she'll be handled if she comes back in AA6.

As for PXZ, I really enjoyed the first game (despite how repetitive and long fights got at times) so I'll be picking this up in a heartbeat.

Edit: Fun fact, I actually remember buying PXZ to tide me over during the wait for AA5. little did I know that it'd tide me over for that AND like three game releases later ha.

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Well, he is the producer of the series at the moment, so it's not strange he's the contact person here. The dialogue itself is written by the PXZ2 team (with just 'corrections' from Capcom), so I doubt it will serve as a preview on anything about a possible AA6 appearance (especially as the PXZ2 team said they themselves wrote the dialogue for the characters having the post-AA2/pre-AA3 Phoenix & Maya in their mind).

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I'm just gonna go out on a limb and say I don't think Eshiro would be a good candidate for supervising characterization. He's a producer and he also seems to be the one who wanted those cameo shoehorns into DD and AAI.

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That's a fairly sturdy limb, to be perfectly honest.

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Perhaps but I doubt Phoenix and Maya will have grand speaking roles in this at all. There's going to be very little for him to mess up.

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