page_title: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney − Trials and Tribulations
section_title: Development
hierarchical_section_title: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney − Trials and Tribulations / Development
caption_attribution_description: Director Shu Takumi (巧 舟) at a Capcom event for his video game Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective.
context_page_description: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney − Trials and Tribulations is a visual novel adventure video game developed by Capcom Production Studio 4 and published by Capcom. It was originally released for the Game Boy Advance in 2004 in Japan, and has since been released for several platforms, including a Nintendo DS version that was released in 2007 in Japan and North America and in 2008 in Europe. It is the third game in the Ace Attorney series, following Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney and Justice for All.
  The story follows defense attorneys Phoenix Wright and Mia Fey, who defend their clients in five episodes. Among other characters are Phoenix's assistant and Mia's sister Maya, her cousin Pearl, and prosecutor Godot. The gameplay is split into courtroom sections, where the player cross-examines witnesses and tries to discover contradictions in their testimonies, and investigations, where they gather evidence and talk to witnesses.
  The game was directed and written by Shu Takumi as the last game in an Ace Attorney trilogy; he also wanted it to be the final entry in the series, as he felt he had explored Phoenix's character fully.
context_section_description: Trials and Tribulations was written and directed by Shu Takumi, with art by Tatsuro Iwamoto and music by Noriyuki Iwadare. After development of the original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney was finished, Takumi's boss, Shinji Mikami, told him that they should make an Ace Attorney trilogy, with a grand finale in the third game's last case. As Takumi wanted the three first Ace Attorney games to be parts of a larger work, he avoided making a lot of changes: art for main characters such as Phoenix, Maya and Edgeworth was reused from the first game, to avoid having the previous games look outdated in comparison to newer games in the series; and no new gameplay mechanics were added for Trials and Tribulations, as Takumi was happy with the gameplay after having added the psyche-lock mechanic for Justice for All. He wanted the series to end with Trials and Tribulations, as he had explored Phoenix's character fully and wanted to avoid the series becoming "a shadow of its former self", saying that he thinks it is important to know when to end a story.
  Because the dialogue-integrated tutorial in the first game had been well received, it was considered a major point for future games in the series. In the first game, Takumi had Phoenix being guided through his first trial by the judge and Mia, and for the second game, he had Phoenix suffer from amnesia; when writing the third game, Takumi did not know what to do, as it would not seem credible if Phoenix had amnesia a second time. Eventually he came up with the idea of using a flashback to a case where Mia had just become an attorney; he developed this idea further, and ended up using flashbacks as a major theme for the game's story. He decided that he wanted to include a case where Mia faces off against Edgeworth back when he was a rookie prosecutor, but encountered a problem: both characters had previously been established as never having lost a single case. Trying to come up with a way for a case in the past to work with neither of them winning or losing, he came up with the story for Terry Fawles, who dies during the trial. The game's main theme was "not everything is always what it seems on the surface".
  As Edgeworth had been a popular character ever since start of the series, Takumi found it difficult to come up with a way to bring him back without having him, a supposedly great prosecutor, always lose to Phoenix. While he was writing the story for the game's final case, he thought of the idea to have Edgeworth become a player character; he liked this idea so much that he immediately started to rewrite the case. In order to allow Edgeworth to be the player character, the first thing he did was to "get rid of" Phoenix by having him fall from a bridge into an icy river. He enjoyed writing from another character's perspective, who thought differently from Phoenix; he also used the case to explore the relationship between Edgeworth and Gumshoe. The third episode of the game, "Recipe for Turnabout", was originally intended as the fourth episode of Justice for All but had been cut due to memory limitations.
caption: The game was directed and written by Shu Takumi.
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