Takumi on The Great Ace Attorney – origins, started with Sherlock Holmes, motion capture, more
A discussion with Shu Takumi was recently published as part of the “Capcom Legends” interview series. Takumi had much to say about his latest game, The Great Ace Attorney.
Takumi touched on a number of topics in the interview. This includes the project’s origins, how it started with Sherlock Holmes, pressure he faced, motion capture, and more.
We’ve posted a number of excerpts from the interview below. You can check out the complete translation here.
On how the game got started…
It started when they asked me early 2013 if I wanted to make a Gyakuten Saiban separate of the numbered series. I proposed a game with Sherlock Holmes and that how it got rolling.
On whether Sherlock Holmes was there from the start…
I had considered other ideas. For example, I also looked at civil trials as a hook. But I realized the game would be about rather ugly topics, like “Mediation between family members fighting over an inheritance” or “Settling Things Out of Court In A Case of Being Falsely Accused of Molesting”, cases with no clear-cut conclusions.
Originally, I came up with the idea of Gyakuten Saiban because I wanted something else than just choosing options. I thought about a way to have the player input their own deductions themselves directly, and the answer I came up with was the system where you point out contradictions between testimony and evidence.
And so I came up with a laywer as a detective, and the setting of the courtroom, instead of the crime scene. But another answer I came up with at the time was: Maybe I could make a mystery game where a great detective made the wrong deductions, and where you needed to correct and lead him to the truth. That idea was “Sherlock Holmes (temp title)”
On when he thought of the “Joint Reasoning” system…
Around 2000, somewhere around the first and the third GS game.
I had been wanting to do a Holmes game for a long time, so with the opportunity presented, I schemed to make it happen one way or another! So yes, DGS started with Sherlock Holmes. But there’s a lot of reasons for Holmes appearing in the game. For the game mechanics of course, but to set this project apart from the numbered series, it was the easiest to set this game in a different time period, which also opened up new opportunities for the mystery plot. It was perfect for the game. So I thought about how Japan looked like when Holmes lived, which is how I came up with the in-game universe.
On what was most difficult about directing this game…
It’s been a while since I wrote a GS scenario, so there was the pressure to write something that in terms of quality, wouldn’t lose from GS1 to GS3.
On wanting something that could compete with the regular Ace Attorney games…
Yes. So with that pressure, I just started writing without thinking about pacing or anything. And for various reasons, the story structure changed several times and I had trouble keeping the scenario in check. You might think that a scenario should be written from start to finish after you’ve decided on everything, but in reality it doesn’t go like that. As you write, you suddenly see things in a way you had never considered before, as if driven by a mysterious energy. Could it be Holmes’ energy? Mystery fiction is about surprises, but I even was sometimes shocked by what I had come up with, something more surprising than the surprises I myself had planned, so you can expect the unexpected from the story. I’ve been making games for 20 years now, so by now you’d think I’d be better at controlling this process though (laugh).
On how motion capture was used for the title…
We used motion capture for DGS. In the original stories, Holmes could deduce the most incredible things from a man’s tiniest movements or the movements of the eyes and to reenact those scenes in DGS, we used mo-cap. This time we can control the movements of the eyes of the characters and to show that off at the start of the game, I came up with… restless-eyes-Ryuunosuke.
That’s the thing we wanted to mention the most today! (laugh). We can now control the eyes of all the major characters, but that takes a lot of time and by the end, our eyes too hurt. But it looks very good on the screen, so it was worth it. We didn’t just use mo-cap to get realistic movements, but we also came up with “GS”-esque uses for it, so please look forward to it.
