Art by Tryphena

“What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence… The question is what can you make people believe you have done.” ― Sherlock Holmes

It’s been almost 9 months since we released our last episode, much longer than we planned. But we have quite a lot to show for the time we spent, and the double release is only the beginning: as some of you may already know, you can now play The Great Ace Attorney on your Android phone or tablet! This is mostly thanks to our new member, an-error, who worked like a machine to get this ready in a remarkably short time while also allowing us to improve our 3DS version with his findings. Of course, he was not the only one hard at work…

Through a joint effort, nearly all of the graphics and art already touched by our translation have been revisited and polished up to a whole new level of professionalism. Most notably, we can’t thank the Fan Translators International team enough for their reverse engineering efforts – because of them, we were able to design a wonderful typeface that blends readability with a touch of 20th-century classicism.

The title of Episode 4 might confuse you. Kokoro is the Japanese word for mind, heart or spirit – so why did we not translate it as that? Kokoro is also the title of one of the works of Souseki Natsume, the very first actual person to appear in an Ace Attorney game. Souseki is often considered one of the greatest writers of Japanese modern history, famously being featured on the ¥1.000 note. Since the word means more than just heart and was also untranslated for the English adaptation of the novel, we felt it best to keep it the way it was for our translation.

A briefly considered title change

This release also marks our change to UK English. Not only did we move to BE spelling rules, we also tried to use UK proverbs, figures of speech and even gave some characters distinctive accents. Our British members made sure that we didn’t botch this limeyfication, so we wouldn’t bring shame to Queen and country.

Some of you might be disappointed that we don’t support the iOS version of DGS for iPhone/iPad. We would love to do that, and to be honest – this was the first version an-error got to work as a proof of concept (though it was never polished or finished). The problem was: how would we release it? End-users would need to jailbreak their phone just to dump the unencrypted binary and install the modified game. This is a big security risk and hassle most users will not take nowadays. The tight security model of iOS is just too inconvenient for a fan translation.

Art by Tryphena

To make things easy for our new Android users, we made an app called IrisMobile. After you’ve bought the game from the Japanese PlayStore (tutorial here), you only have to download and install IrisMobile and it will download the patch and install it for you automatically. For your convenience it will also display our translation notes. We had to remove the Play Games cloud saving feature from DGS because it stops working once the binary is patched. To remedy this, the savegames are now redirected to the internal SD card, in the ScarletStudy folder, so you can back them up yourself.

Despite all the work going into the Android port, we certainly didn’t forget our 3DS users – you’ll be happy to know that we have streamlined the 3DS installation process to be just as easy as our Android releases. As always, you can find the updated translation notes in the E-Manual for your convenience.

You can download the new release here on our Download page – please do not rehost or publish pre-patched versions.

At the very least, it’s a sure bet that we won’t need another 9 months to release Episode 5 – the case may be extra-long, but our new translators have already put in an exceptional amount of work! Enjoy the preview for it while you wait… and watch out for more surprises!