… and then, it was launch day. 'Ooh, looks like everyone is really loving it! This is great!' I thought over that first weekend, and by Monday, there was a sea of online stores reviews. Players brought up all sorts of things, but the one that kept coming up was, 'This game is the worst of the worst because it's incomplete.' Even though I wasn't directly involved in the game's development, the storm of terrible reviews was heart-breaking. My boss at the time told me to document all the reviews I could. So, with tears in my eyes for a game that I loved and a dev team I respected, I read each review one by one and collected them into a report. It was so hard, and I was so miserable that it really brought me down. After that, I began my work on a different title, so I wasn't able to help with the 3DS version of the second game, which came out two years later.
Even though I wasn't directly involved with Resolve itself, stories of how the dev team was burning the candle at both ends to complete a ghastly amount of work reached my ears. After the game's release, I had the chance to better know some of the dev team members and work with them a little. It was then that I learned even more of their tale. To a dev team member, I'm kind of like an outsider looking in, but I think I just might be the most knowledgeable outsider there is about what the team was really going through at the time. ...
As I said, I had chosen to come to Capcom because of my love for Ace Attorney, and after a great many talks with the original dev members, I began to believe that perhaps it was my calling to try to re-introduce The Great Ace Attorney to Japanese players, and finally introduce it to the rest of the world. I'd worked on a few games by that point and gained some experience as a producer, so one day, at a meeting with my boss (the one who told me to write up all those reviews into a report), I boldly proposed, 'Let me start a project to bring the two games together and port them to current gen platforms! I believe it will absolutely sell, so please give me the chance to show you!' And…to my surprise, he simply answered, 'I see… Well, I won't say no just yet, so why don't you try and come up with a plan first and we can go from there…'!!! In that moment, I could hear the doors to The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles project creak open.
www.gematsu.com
