After six years, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles got an official localisation in 2021.
It was well received Eurogamer gave it a recommended- and went on to sell half a million copies.
Except for one game.
Ace Attorney Investigations 2 is a bizarre quirk in an already bizarre series.
The original Investigations game is a spinoff featuring Miles Edgeworth, a fan favourite from the original trilogy.
It puts his emotional arc at its centre, ending up much more character-focused than the mainline games.
It is also the only one of the 11 Ace Attorney games that has not been officially localised.
But not many have.
Its lack of official release in the West has put it in a strange position.
Even Capcom itself seems to treat the game like a forgotten child.
But every other game made its own appearance with at least one or two key characters.
Every other game, that is, except Investigations 2.
When The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles was about to come out, I was excited.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about Investigations 2.
The two entries had once been in the same position, available only via fan localisation.
I wanted to speak to them about it.
But the localisation was released seven years ago, a lifetime on the internet.
Everyone seemed to have moved on.
The first was a link.
The second was an email address.
Almost no one was.
Most had last logged into the forum months or years before.
Would you be interested in answering some questions?"
Auryn didn’t reply.
The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles came out.
The media cycle moved on.
In some ways, so did I.
(I wrote about other things; I moved across the country.)
In other ways, I did not.
Then, in February 2022, Auryn messaged me back.
“Well, it’s been a while since the translation but sure…go on.”
We slowly chatted back and forth across four months.
Almost 50, he says he doesn’t remember how he got into working on localisations.
“Did I come across a fan translation and [get] curious about how they did it?
Or was I trying to look at how games were programmed?”
He quickly learned that not everything is so easy, however.
But, at least from Auryn’s perspective, the project was struggling.
“And maybe I was a bit stubborn.”
But they were missing something pretty crucial.
“[There was] nobody to really translate the Japanese text,” says Auryn.
And not just translate, but localise.
See, for instance, the cocky Sebastian Debeste, whose Japanese name is Yumihiko Ichiyanagi.
After three years, the team released a partial patch.
This had the dual effect of proving that they really were making progress, and to stir up attention.
The latter brought more people on board, particularly those who could punch up the text.
The final patch was released in February 2015.
Auryn could account for about 80,000 downloads, though there will be more from rehosted links.
It doesn’t seem likely that Investigations 2 will ever get an official release outside of Japan.
This is not, by itself, a big loss.
But without that layer of legitimisation, Investigations 2 will probably remain the least played game in the franchise.
A community specific cult-classic.
The team that worked on Investigations 2 scattered, leaving almost everyone uncontactable.
Auryn doesn’t work on localisations anymore.
“But I don’t have the patience anymore.”
Finally, I ask him the question that had sent me down this rabbit hole almost a year ago.
“I will shock you here,” he says.
Auryn didn’t know that was the case.
He hadn’t kept up with Ace Attorney at all.
He never even played Investigations 2 all the way through.
