They will have to find another heart to break
Time for some more pointless trivia about Ace Attorney to celebrate the release of the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection.
Edgeworth never said "You are not a clown. You are the entire circus." at any point in the series. The quote came from an unrelated tweet, which someone edited onto a screencap of Edgeworth because they thought it sounded like something he would say. It doesn't help that one case in the second game does revolve around a circus, and one of the witnesses is indeed a clown, but Edgeworth isn't the prosecutor in that case, Franziska von Karma is.
One phrase people often associate with the series is "You're lying, goddammit, and I can prove it!" when in fact this phrase is only ever said once, in the second game, and it's just "dammit", not "goddammit". The line became a meme after appearing in the trailer for the first game, but never appearing in the actual game. It was included in the second game as a nod to the meme.
Also, people often write the various shouts from the games in all caps, like "OBJECTION!" and "HOLD IT!" when in the actual games they're capitalised normally, like "Objection!" and "Hold it!"
Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth was originally planned to feature Ema Skye as the protagonist, doing investigations alongside Phoenix and Apollo, and would have essentially been a retelling of the main series games from Ema's point of view.
The concept for Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth originated as an April Fool's joke. In the week leading up to April Fool's Day, Capcom posted screenshots on their website of a supposed upcoming game that showed Phoenix Wright freely walking through crime scenes to investigate, as opposed to the usual point-and-click-style gameplay. Due to the overwhelming positive response, Capcom decided to make the game for real, but eventually changed the protagonist to Miles Edgeworth.
Frank Sahwit never says "Toupee in your face!". His breakdown just has him throwing his toupee at whoever he's mad at.
Phoenix accusing an animal of murder is something that gets brought up a lot when people parody or make fun of the series. In truth, however, Phoenix has never done this. He has had to cross-examine animals on more than one occasion, but he never actually accused any of them of murder. The canon DLC case of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice does feature the police believing an orca killed its owner, but, just as in reality, they consider it "accidental death due to oversight while taking care of an animal" rather than murder, and in fact Phoenix has to go out of his way to prove there is a human murderer involved in this case in order to get it tried as a criminal case rather than a civil one. Funnily enough, one lawyer does actually accuse an animal of murder at one point - Edgeworth, who initially believes that an assassin's trained dog murdered his client in one case in Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor's Gambit.
Most of the references made in the games were added by the localisation team, or changed from more Japan-centric references in the original. However, all references to Sherlock Holmes or Perry Mason were in fact present in the Japanese version too, as those serials are very popular in Japan.
It's well known now, but the games were set in Japan originally, with the localisation changing them to be set in America. This change worked early on, but later games started introducing more and more elements based on Japanese culture and mythology, making the "American" setting harder and harder to believe. The localisers have attempted to justify this by explaining that the games are set in an alternate universe version of California where Japanese culture was allowed to thrive and flourish. This has led to the nickname "Japanifornia" to describe the series' setting. Among some of the changes made as a result of this:
- In the original, Maya's favourite food is ramen. The localisation changed it to burgers. This caused problems when the owner of Maya's favourite ramen stand became a client in a case in one of the games, causing Maya to suddenly develop a love for ramen out of nowhere in the localisation (though given that Maya is already a big eater, it wasn't that hard to believe). Games after that have her explicitly loving burgers and ramen.
- In the first case of the first game, a point is made about a clock supposedly being three hours slow, only for it to be revealed it's actually nine hours fast, as the owner of said clock had previously travelled from Los Angeles to Paris and forgotten to set her clock back to LA time upon returning (the time difference between LA and Paris being nine hours). In the original, she travelled from Japan to New York, which has a time difference of ten hours, causing the clock to appear two hours slow instead.
- Franziska von Karma is said to have studied law abroad in Germany before returning to America. In the original, she studied in America before returning to Japan.
- Edgeworth's earthquake phobia makes a lot more sense in the original - earthquakes in Japan are a very common occurrence. Los Angeles does get quite a lot of earthquakes too, but a lot of people playing the localisation are confused as to why Edgeworth doesn't just move somewhere with less earthquakes if he's that scared of them, something which would most likely never occur to a Japanese player.
- The games occasionally make a point of it being difficult for a civilian to have access to a firearm, with only members of law enforcement being allowed easy access to guns. This is true for Japan, which has strict gun control laws, but America's gun control laws are infamously much more lax due to the Second Amendment. Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth attempts to explain this by having one character mention something called the Federal Firearms Restriction Act.
- The entire series is meant to be a parody/satire of Japanese courts. While a lot of it is explained in-game with the courts being given a major overhaul in terms of how they handle cases, and there's a lot of the tropes Hollywood Law and Rule of Fun in effect too, the court system in the games is much closer to the real-life Japanese court system than the American one. For instance, while American courts tend to operate on an "innocent until proven guilty" basis, Japanese courts tend to be the opposite, normally considering the defendant guilty until proven innocent.
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