It's all six, unless the CR timeline is FUBAR, everything that happened seven years ago really happened six years ago, what gives?

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Mistranslation?

The ages of all the characters match up though...

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Once he pulled the Master Sword... wait, wrong 7 years.

Yeah, the CR timeline is wrong. Apollo Justice should take place in 2026.

The years for State vs. Fawles 2 and State vs. Wright 1 are off too, they should both be a year later.

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Ugh, that causes a lot of other things (like birthyears and such) to be off by the same year.

Alright, I just needed to clear that up for myself, because I couldn't get why they were always saying seven when the math didn't work out.

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??

*checks this out* Oh, damn that in-game New Year!

To clarify for people still confused:

The only time the year is explicitly revealed in Ace Attorney is during 1-4, when the DL-6 incident is revealed to have taken place in 2001, meaning that 1-4 takes place right at the end of 2016.

The events of JFA take place one year later, in 2017, except for 2-4 which takes place in early 2018.

The events of T&T take place in late 2018. A new year starts shortly before 3-3, Maggie Byrde's appeal, meaning that the rest of the game's events take place in 2019.

This means that Apollo Justice takes place in 2026. Good call.

An interesting side-effect of this is that by the end of AJ, Pearl would be 17, not 16 as commonly thought. It may be that many of the other characters have similar age quirks as well. Perhaps we should double-check the character ages as of the end of AJ out of interest.

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Hmm~ Let's see...

Maya: Born in 1999 (lol she's younger than me >8D)
By the end of 3-5 she's 19.
So about seven years later she would be around 26-27. Same for Franny, who was also born in 1999.

Pearl: Born in 2009 (one year before Trucy)
By the end of 3-5 she's 9.
Seven years later she would be 16-17.

No one really has a definite on birthdays I'm afraid, so you can only really predict. Unless it's stated in the game (like September 6th, 1987- Dustin Prince. It was stated that he was murdered on his birthday D8!)

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I'll quote from CR:



The Edgeworth problem can be solved with a simple retcon. By the end of AJ, Pearl would be 17 and Trucy is still 15, so she'd be born in 2011. The timeline needs correcting, and quickly. :)

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I don't think you guys understand how the Ace Attorney timeline really works... :B Which is to say, it doesn't really work at all, actually.

When you look at the dates that are given for the cases, the ages, and the way time is explained in the game, it becomes very obvious very fast that the writers did not put a whole lot of thought into it, I'm sorry to say. The birthdays clash and dates are often fudged. Even though most of the games take place stradling the new year, each game is still treated as if it only takes place in one year. PW:AA was 2016. In JFA, everything is considered "one year old" even though technically the start of JFA takes place in the same year as the end of PW:AA. Everything in T&T is considered to be one year older than JFA, in the same way.

AJ treats it the same way. Looking at the ages will show you as much. Because all of T&T is considered to have happened in 2018, AJ takes place seven years after *that*, making it 2025. It doesn't take into account the fact that T&T actually ended in 2019. Since that's how they've always treated the dates, I decided not to over-correct when adding the AJ events.

I think this is why the games never use year dates, except for DL-6. Because they're all screwed up!

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*facepalm* Why should a timeline be THIS difficult to conceive? What were they thinking?

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In which case the simple explanation is that the ages in the Court Record are only estimates made by the person writing the record. Neither Phoenix nor Apollo are going to have access to everyone's birthdates, so they're going to make reasonable guesses.

(Doesn't help that the year the game's set in is never actually stated explicitly, either.)

Even with this said, AJ has to be set in 2026 because otherwise the one concrete fact in the timeline - the issue of the rights to the Gramarye magic act, which are transferred to Valant after exactly seven years, is impossible. Either that or Phoenix gets disbarred before T&T starts, and that's even more problematic. Regardless of all the other problems, that alone means that AJ is set in 2026 and CR's version of the timeline needs a good fixing.

I've created an updated version of the timeline with the amendments to estimated birth years and birth dates. The in-game inaccuracies are still not out by that much, to be fair. I think the only thing that could resolve this problem is a record of official character birthdays. :/

In case anyone's wondering, this also means that Phoenix is actually 34 during AJ. Apollo never actually confirms Phoenix's age, he just guesses it. We know Apollo has read all of Phoenix's old case files thoroughly and worked out dates and ages from there, but as the Court Records are riddled with age inaccuracies, so are Apollo's assumptions. Reminds me of that saying:

"To assume is to make an ass out of u and me."

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-never mind, didn't look at previous posts-

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