Many, many people have stories about how video games have impacted them. It’s rarer for a series to be a continuous, changing influence on half of your life. And yet somehow Ace Attorney, a comedy game about lawyers, became bizarrely foundational to my teenage years – and then jarringly alien in my 20s. So when the original trilogy was remastered earlier this year, it felt like so much more than the chance to revisit a classic. It seemed an invitation to reflect on an influence lasting more than a decade, kicked off by a video game, that ended up nowhere near where I expected it to.
The first time I ever saw Ace Attorney being played, I was 12. The first game was already five years old, having made the transition from the Game Boy Advance to the Nintendo DS by the time I glimpsed it over a friend’s shoulder. She was playing one of the tense courtroom battles and, for reasons long lost to time, I was immediately hooked by the concept.
The investigative sequences were less interesting to me, but this was a blessing in disguise. My friend soon got fed up of calling me over when she was back to arguing her case in front of a judge, and I wasn’t understanding the story properly from those fragments anyway, so I picked up my own copy and tore through it, falling in love with the characters and story.
As invested as I was from the start, I could hardly imagine the impact these games would have on me. One of my dearest friends to this day is someone that I became close to after overhearing them mention the game at school. Both of our closets are full of clothes that might be called “wine” or “maroon” but which we exclusively refer to as “Edgeworth red” after the recurring prosecutor we both adore and his distinctively dyed suit.
But the biggest influence is how much I wanted to be a lawyer. In this, it wasn’t Phoenix but his mentor Mia Fey that drove me. Compassionate, dedicated, and hyper-competent to the point of getting her own murderer to confess in court (it’s a long story), she was everything that I wanted to be.