Things have been great for fans of the Ace Attorney series, recently. Aside from the updated re-release of Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney Trilogy for PC, Xbox One, PS4, and Switch, a big fan translation of the Great Ace Attorney has also come out.

The Great Ace Attorney, or Dai Gyakuten Saiban: Naruhodō Ryūnosuke no Bōken, is an Ace Attorney spin-off where you play as the implied ancestor of Phoenix Wright, Ryūnosuke Naruhodō, in Victorian England. The game released on the 3DS in 2015, but despite getting iOS and Android ports in 2017 and a sequel in the same year, the game has not been officially localized.

However, a translation group called Scarlet Study have stepped up and successfully put out a fan translation. The group had steadily released translated episodes over the past few years, but the group finally put out a full game translation for the 3DS and Android versions of the game on March 30th and April 4th, respectively. Unfortunately, as a translation on iOS would require jailbreaking and lead to security risks, a translation for the iOS version is currently unfeasible.

The localization aimed to be a faithful localization, rather than a straight one. Some jokes are changed to make sense for English players, for instance. Providing a faithful localization, however, also means showing restraint in areas to keep the context intact. Japanese text is left untouched in contexts where changing it to English would not make sense, which helps preserve the Japanese/English cultural conflict present in the game.

Merely translating the game to English isn’t enough, as Scarlet Study also aims to provide a fan dub at a later date, on top of opening the way for translations to other languages, when the translation is deemed stable. Scarlet Study has also put out a translated demo for the 3DS version of the sequel, alluding to future plans of translating the sequel.

The Great Ace Attorney is not the only Ace Attorney spin-off game without an official localization. Ace Attorney Investigations 2, a spin-off starring Miles Edgeworth released in 2011, had also gone without a translation until a fan translation came out in 2015.

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