Hello, all.

It has recently come up for me that the Gyakuten Saiban Guidebooks and similar info books have been listing birth years. However, my sources for this claim have been decidedly dubious, and I was directed to this website only to fail to find anything resembling character profiles. The site may very well be just speculation, anyway...

So my questions are:

1. Are birth dates listed in official guides? If so, how detailed are they (e.g. to the day, to the month, or to the year)?

2. Should the official guides be taken as more canon than the games where they conflict? I don't want another situation like Chrono Cross / Final Fantasy VI Ultimania profiles...

3. What's up with that site, anyway? Is it official, is it a fansite, etc.?

I know nothing about the site, but I thought birth years were pretty much confirmed anyway. Just compare the characters age to the year the game takes place in.

E.g - PW:AA - JFA - Franziska von Karma - Age - 18.

PW:AA - JFA takes place in 2017 (at least her first appearance does), so she was born in 1999.

As for exact birth dates, the only one that comes to mind is Dustin Prince, being killed on his birthday (ouch! )

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1. I haven't seen any personally but I don't think the writers would bother to think up every characters birthday just for a guidebook

2. from a bit googling I can tell that Japanese wikipedia uses them (more precisely, the ones that can be bound here http://gyakusai.magical-art.com/information.php ) as references, mostly for name puns and other trivia stuff (the third one mostly)

3. obviously a fansite, but it doesn't look bad, that specific part linked is the event history, but there's also a description of all the organizations, a court records section (lol) which is under construction and some other notes(e.g. about the live-action movie)...

Birthdates haven't been revealed. It's sad

This may sound dumb, but I prefer imagining. Like, Franziska - August 11...

Years are easy to figure out. I think Croik tried to figure some dates out once, using info in the game, but it's impossible to get an actual date!

I think the only wrinkle in the years is the ages of the returning AA characters in AJ are off by one year. Like, I think Phoenix is supposed to be 34 in AJ (or 32?) rather than 33.

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You can use the dates of the trials to find a few weeks that the characters should be born in, but the thing is it causes a contradiction for some characters, so I wouldn't exactly call it reliable ^^'

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If that's true...

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Series timeline here:

http://www.court-records.net/timeline.htm
http://www.court-records.net/timeline4.htm
http://www.court-records.net/timelinegk.htm

Based on Phoenix being 21 in T&T case 1 (April 11, 2013) and 25 during JFA case 4 (ends March 23, 2018), Phoenix's birthday was narrowed down to "between March 24th and April 10."

It was determined that no matter what birthday you use for Edgeworth, you arrive at a contradiction. The game-makers list the ages in the Court Record by just adding one to the person's age in the previous game (or keeping it the same from T&T to the GK games and the AJ backstory case, or adding seven from T&T to get to AJ, or subtracting six from the T&T age to get to the Turnabout Beginnings age). The ages in the Court Record are not based on actual birthdates. This leads to the contradiction where Edgeworth is 20 in Turnabout Beginnings and listed in the Court Record as being 25 at the end of JFA, even though JFA ends 6.1 years after Turnabout Beginnings. Maybe Franziska told whoever was in charge of the Court Record for Turnabout Beginnings that Edgworth was 20 when he was really 19, in order to prevent his reputation as a prodigy from interfering with hers. In that case, he was born between March 24 and September 5 of 1992. The alternative is that he was 26 at the end of JFA and 27 during AAI.

The biggest non-birthday-related timeline dispute is whether to base the calendar year on the idea that Apollo Justice took place seven years after the beginning/middle of Trials and Tribulations, or seven years after the end of Trials and Tribulations. Capcom, despite policing the timeline and writing for obvious contradictions very carefully, screwed up here. Phoenix in AJ is supposed to be seven years older than in T&T, eight years older than in JFA, and nine years older than in T&T. But in order for AJ to take place seven years after its backstory case that took place 79 days after the end of T&T, it has to take place in 2026. In that case, AJ has to end more than ten years after PW:AA's first two cases and more than nine years after JFA's first two cases. In order to fix that problem, you can make AJ take place in 2025, thus making Phoenix's age difference between his trilogy and AJ make sense. However, if AJ takes place in 2025, that means that it begins less than six years after the AJ backstory case. So there's a contradiction no matter what.

All you really need to know is this. JFA takes place the following year after PW:AA. T&T's main timeframe takes place the following year after JFA. AAI's main timeframe spans a few days and takes place about month after the end of T&T. GK2's main timeframe also spans a short period of time starting about two weeks after AAI. AJ's backstory case takes place shortly after that. AJ's main timeframe takes place seven years after the eventful T&T-AAI-GK2-AJBackstory year. Most characters have no official birthdays.

Think of it this way. Every game in the series starts in either spring or summer (though the first case of T&T's main timeframe, the DeMasque case, is in September/October), and every game's main timeframe ends within a year of beginning. The first game takes place within the 12-month period that starts with April 2016, the second game takes place within the 12-month period that starts with April 2017, the third game and both of Edgeworth's games take place within the 12-month period that starts with April 2018 (with the AJ backstory case shortly thereafter), and Apollo Justice takes place within a 12-month period that starts with April 2026.

Last edited by Tifforo on Fri Nov 04, 2011 1:07 am, edited 1 time in total.

Miles is a Taurus? Oh my, that IS interesting news.... I never would of guessed at that one. He is not a very spiritual person at all, which is the norm for Taurus. Then again, he does have a fixation with the Steel Samurai... that could very well count. Hahahaha.