Ryunosuke rises from the ashes.
The last time we saw Phoenix Wright and friends, the stars of the Ace Attorney franchise, they were in a made-up country called Khura’in. Spirit of Justice came out for 3DS in 2016, and was relatively divisive — a lot of critics ranked it highly, but others found issue with its “wishy-washy” mechanics and its heavy reliance on made-up mysticism. It also marked a fairly big change in the Ace Attorney games: though they’ve always been quite coy about where they’re set, they’ve never really left the United States (or Japan, if you’re a purist) — at least, until Spirit of Justice, where significant chunks of the story are set in a fictional country.
The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, as many fans will already know, is set in Meiji-era Japan and Victorian England, making it it almost the exact opposite of Spirit of Justice: instead of being made-up, it’s firmly rooted in historical fact and steeped in the vernacular of the time. It can be quite jarring to go from the often light-hearted, goofy fictional world of Phoenix Wright (the man who adopted a daughter out of nowhere, and has a sidekick who can read emotions with a magical bracelet) to the weirdly real world of Wright’s ancestor, Ryunosuke Naruhodo — not least because the latter is also very, very Japanese.
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