Monday, July 18, 2016

Gyakuten Saiban Blog Entry 1: Greetings (2001)

Title: Greetings / 「ごあいさつ」
Source: Gyakuten Saiban official site (down)

Summary: While it has become a tradition for the official websites of Gyakuten Saiban (Ace Attorney) to feature a developer's blog, this tradition obviously started somewhere: this was the first blog post (or column) Takumi ever wrote for the official website of the original Game Boy Advance release of Gyakuten Saiban (Ace Attorney GBA). He tells a little bit about how he came up with the idea for the game.

Greetings

Hello. I’m Takumi Shū of the Gyakuten Saiban team. It sounds like a shady name, but I am definitely Japanese. For this game, I work as the director, planner and the scenario writer.

“Someday, I want to make a new detective game, like nobody has ever played before.

This has been my dream for six years, ever since I joined the company. And my chance came one year ago. In August of 2000. I had waited for six years, so I couldn’t come up with something lame. What makes mystery fiction fun? And what is the best method of portraying that in a game? I poured a lot of thought in that.

At first, I had a story about a private detective who was good at seeing through lies. But one day, I started to think: “Even if I'm going to make a “detective game”, there’s no reason why I should stick with a “detective”. At that very moment, a certain image suddenly flashed through my mind.

The setting: a courtroom. A jumpy witness who tries keep his lies up. And with a finger raised to that very poor man, a lawyer yells: “Objection! You’re a big liar!” The cornered witness tries to cover their lies up with more unbelievable lies, and the story develops in an unexpected direction…

The trial: In the world of mystery fiction, the courtroom mystery has become its own genre. So why aren’t there games about that thrilling world? It all started with that single flash of insight that one day.

Anyway. How did this idea turn into Gyakuten Saiban? I’ll be telling you about that later. Please stick around.

No comments:

Post a Comment