The end of the Great Ace Attorney Chronicles undoes its criticism of Britain

The Ace Attorney series has always been about the definition of justice. For the past 20 years, the Games’ lawyers have defended wrongly accused clients and tried to combat the corruption and injustice of an ultimately broken legal system. They have questioned and examined what a fair outcome looks like within these constraints and the moral responsibility of a person who works with them.

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, recently localized as an exclusive Japanese title after five years, is a spin-off set in England and Japan during the Victorian and Meiji eras. (Although it is packaged as one game, it contains two games, The Great Ace Attorney: Adventure and The Great Ace Attorney 2: Determination.) The protagonist Ryunosuke Naruhodo is canonically an ancestor of the main series protagonist Phoenix Wright, but that’s not really necessary to tie the games together. They already share enough of the same functional and thematic DNA.

It asks the usual questions about truth and justice. But its new environment, heavily influenced by the British and Japanese empires, throws these questions in a new light. The game finds it difficult to answer them convincingly and throws up its own messages.

[Warning: The rest of this article contains full spoilers for the ending of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles.]

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles immediately criticized the relationship between Great Britain and Japan. Ryunosuke’s partner, Kazuma Asogi, is the main mouthpiece against the unequal treaties signed between the two countries, once saying that “our weak government is afraid to upset England’s policymakers”.

When Ryunosuke is accused of murder in the first case, an English woman named Jezaille Brett takes a stand. The culprits in the opening Ace lawyer Cases are always pretty obvious and give the player an opportunity to learn the basics, however The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles plays with this expectation. Jezailles performance is more than a tutorial – it’s a thesis about what the game is trying to say about the injustice of the empire.

Jezaille is instantly and violently racist. She claims that the Japanese are untrustworthy and unintelligent, and she is particularly critical of the “vulgarity” of their language. Even so, the judge and prosecutor flatter her and England in general. When Ryunosuke starts making allegations, they criticize him for potentially damaging the fragile treaty between the two countries.

Ryunosuke is acquitted, but there is strong evidence that Jezaille will get away with the murder. Although Ryunosuke may not accept the fall, he is frustrated by how imperialist diplomacy has hampered the judiciary and ultimately prevented the full truth from being revealed.

Appreciating the truth about everything is an essential arch that connects everyone Ace lawyer Protagonists. In the second game, Justice for all Phoenix Wright gets the bad ending if the player continues to plead for a not guilty verdict for his guilty client. In Double destinies, Apollo Justice leaves the team for a while, asking if the truth is the same for everyone. Miles Edgeworth’s Arc of Salvation begins with asking the judge to continue a process he wanted to win for not believing the real story came out, and his focus on that question continues through most of the series, also in his own spin-off. (This is my official request to everyone to play both Ace attorney’s investigation Games.)

What makes Ryunosuke unique is that his biggest obstacle in revealing the truth is not a single case or person, but the entire British Empire and its relationship with the growing Japanese. That barrier is everywhere: On his trip to the UK, Ryunosuke experiences both incidental and deliberate racism. Like Jezaille, several characters make claims about the unreliability of the Japanese or cruelly comment on their appearance. His main rival in the game, prosecutor Barok van Zieks, uses insults and openly admits that he doesn’t like all Japanese. This racial distrust has been shown to influence the judges’ decisions, although given the conceit of the game it can only go so far as Ryunosuke always has to win in order for the player to move on.

Ryunosuke’s problems continue as he realizes that winning doesn’t necessarily mean finding the truth. Shortly after arriving in the UK, he is handed a case by the Lord Chief Justice defending a local Irish millionaire named Magnus McGilded. During the trial, it is never clear to Ryunosuke or the player whether or not McGilded actually committed the crime. When Ryunosuke McGilded is found innocent, he, like Phoenix and Edgeworth before him, pleads for a continuation of the process to find out what really happened. Due to McGilded’s wealth and influence, Ryunosuke’s request is denied.

in the Ace lawyer Series is justice synonymous with the full story of a specific event that comes out in a courtroom. Giving the protagonists the drive to unravel all the secrets comes in handy when the player is working on it anyway. The games do not shy away from targeting the culpable overarching power structures, however The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles struggles to apply this framework to something on the scale of an inherently unjust empire.

The British Empire is heavily criticized in certain aspects by the game, most notably legal corruption (as in the case of Jezaille Brett) and anti-Japanese racism. But it does not look beyond these to the wider crimes of its empires. Although the Japanese characters experience racism and grapple with unequal diplomatic treaties, people from Africa, India or Korea are never mentioned, who could show the full extent of colonization. Oddly enough, the only character to come from an actually colonized country is McGilded, who, despite being Irish, is used as the face of British greed and corruption. The game mainly deals with Britain’s behavior at home, for example using poor white Londoners to bring in some class commentary. The brave orphan thief Gina Lestrade, in particular, is repeatedly exploited by the city’s richest residents, and her story is an exciting look at the problems faced by the poor in the capital. For a game that turns the Empire into an enemy and whose characters strive to investigate the whole story, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles does not go all the way to pursue the same full truth.

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is, of course, a lawyer game, so it is not necessarily surprising that it focuses solely on how the law becomes an instrument of corruption and repression. But the ending really shows the limits if one does not explore the full range of injustices of the Empire. Corruption escalates throughout the duology, with Ryunosuke battling increasingly powerful characters. In the latter case, he tries to remove the Lord Chief Justice, Mael Stronghart. There’s a lot going back and forth, but Stronghart eventually argues that London would plunge into violent chaos if he wasn’t allowed to fully manipulate the courts. His speech brings on his side the majority of the judiciary prosecuting the trial, and it seems like Ryunosuke is stuck and unable to dismantle the power structure itself.

Until Herlock Sholmes shows up and says he has the Queen at stake and that she heard it all and will get rid of Stronghart.

To emphasize how far that ending is out of the left box, consider that Sholmes appears as a hologram after apparently just inventing something like this, although the rest of the game often depends on the characters being constrained by Victorian technology . While the rest of the game has been slowly built to show that corruption goes all the way to the top, there is no point in using the Queen as a heroine on the side of justice. The game argues that the entire system is a cascading failure with no chance of reform – except that its imperial figurehead is as just and moral as it gets, and will single-handedly correct any flaws in the legal system.

The ends of Ace lawyer Cases, especially the last one in each game, are often goofy and wild, but their deus ex machinas follow a certain pattern. Ultimately, they argue that an individual trying to do good in a system of injustice needs two things: perseverance and a good group of allies. Friendship and a found family cannot break down systems of oppression, but they make a difference in the lives of individual people.

So if at the last minute a former rival, or even a channeled ghost, storms into the courtroom with vital evidence, that makes perfect sense within this subject. It’s cheesy, but it’s always been the bright heart of Ace Attorney games. It happens several times Chronicles. But at the very end of the game, it’s suddenly replaced by Queen Victoria’s girl-boss moment. The ending stays on the theme of having good allies, which makes the Games serious and hopeful, but in doing so it misses the fundamental injustice it is meant to address.

It’s a shame because The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is a good ace lawyer Game. It’s fun and heartwarming and full of character in the right way. By drawing attention to the themes of the series through the setting, I appreciated the way those themes exist in the other games. But by not addressing empire and injustice holistically, it creates a discrepancy in focus and an ending that ultimately undermines its narrative.