Capcom talks Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy challenges, made with RE Engine

Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy was developed with the RE Engine, the game’s producer has revealed.

Kenichi Hashimoto was speaking about challenges of the re-release in an interview with 4Gamer. RE Engine is Capcom’s proprietary engine, but the games were originally built with other technology. Capcom also hasn’t done much with the RE Engine when it comes to adventure games.

Here’s what was discussed regarding development challenges and RE Engine usage for Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy:

When it came to the Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy re-release, which parts were particularly difficult?

Hashimoto: The re-release is played on a screen larger than the originals, and the Nintendo DS touch screen controls had to be adapted for the gamepad. It was also difficult to make it feel good to play. Furthermore, when it came to brushing up the graphics, simply putting them onto a larger screen was not going to work. For example, the compressed text on the screen at that time couldn’t simply be made bigger, as text must also be legible. We could not finish the job simply by using a tool to enlarge the characters, and instead the mass of pixels making the characters had to be worked on.

So it wasn’t simply a case of transplanting the game, some parts had to be made anew, right?

Hashimoto: For Dual Destinies we cut a little off the top and bottom of the backgrounds, which had the effect of zooming in slightly, but since it was in 3D there was still some flexibility. The difficult part was the backgrounds in Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, where we had to ask 2D designers to draw new parts for the left and right of the screen. Furthermore, it was the first time our company had used the RE Engine for an adventure game so we didn’t yet have all the tools available – it was pretty tough.

Recently if we think of the RE Engine, we think of series like Resident Evil and Devil May Cry, and games like Street Fighter 6, which gives it an image of being a game engine for action games.

Hashimoto: Yes you’re right. So we really knew nothing about using it for an adventure game. So we started at the point of ‘How do you handle lighting an adventure game?’ and from there the programmers really worked hard.

Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy launches for Switch on January 25, 2024.

Translation provided by Simon Griffin, Philip Proctor, and SatsumaFS on behalf of Nintendo Everything.