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. By all accounts it was a success, and it finally aligned the Ace Attorney franchise’s releases inside and outside of Japan. 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. The sequel, released in 2011, follows suit, rehashing some areas but extending the thematic resonance of others. It is also the only one of the 11 Ace Attorney games that has not been officially localised.
Investigations 2 is playable in English thanks to a fan localisation that was released in 2015, four years after the game first came out. It’s a great localisation, and combined with the quality of the game itself, it’s very popular among those who have played it. But not many have. Its lack of official release in the West has put it in a strange position. Even as the series keeps growing in popularity and spinoffs like The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles get their deserved success, Investigations 2 remains in the shadows.
Even Capcom itself seems to treat the game like a forgotten child. In December 2021, it released an artwork for the series’ 20th anniversary, which was dominated by the classic characters of the original trilogy and the new (to Western audiences) characters from the Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. But every other game made its own appearance with at least one or two key characters. Every other game, that is, except Investigations 2. A few days later, Capcom apparently recognised its mistake and quietly re-released it, this time including Sebastian Debeste, a key AAI2 character, tucked away in the top left corner.
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. But they were suddenly very different. The fan localisers for The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles had seen their work superseded by an official release. The fan localisers for Investigations 2, on the other hand, were now an anomaly: the only group of people who had made a game in the series available to non-Japanese speaking fans, and had it stay the only way to play it in English.