Why Isn't Capcom Localising the Dai Gyakuten Saiban Games?
Yet, Capcom outside of Japan has made no attempt to even acknowledge these games existence. Not even so much as a "hey, we're sorry but we aren't localising these games", which wouldn't be great but it'd be a lot better than silence. I still live in hope that I'll wake up one day to a surprise localisation announcement, but it's not looking likely.
Whilst the lack of any official statement is probably just down to Capcom's bad handling of its fans, there are likely a number of reasons stopping them from deciding to localise the games. The first of these is probably, well, money. Whilst the first game sold almost 140k units in its first week ⁽¹⁾, the second game only managed around half of that, just under 80k ⁽²⁾. To put that into perspective, Spirit of Justice sold almost 200k in its first week in Japan, and Dual Destinies sold over 250k. Dai Gyakuten Saiban's somewhat disappointing sales figures are likely the major reason why Capcom doesn't want to spend time and money bringing them over.
That said, copyright issues could be a problem too. Dai Gyakuten Saiban features Sherlock Holmes as a character, and whilst the character is technically public domain (meaning no copyright issues should occur), in 2014 the BBC programme Sherlock was faced with a lawsuit ⁽³⁾ because they used the character. There are other occurrences of this happening, too. Capcom likely doesn't want to spend the time or money battling a lawsuit if they tried releasing Dai Gyakuten Saiban in America or Europe.
It's also possible it was just a case of bad timing for Capcom's localisation team. Something similar happened in the past ⁽⁴⁾, explaining why we unfortunately didn't see a localisation of Gyakuten Kenji 2 (Ace Attorney Investigations 2). This time around, Capcom likely had to choose between localising Dai Gyakuten Saiban or Spirit of Justice, and they went with the latter. That said, now that Spirit of Justice has been and gone, what are the localisation team working on? In a perfect world, perhaps they'd already be underway localising DGS, but I won't hold my breath.
The final reason Capcom might not be localising Dai Gyakuten Saiban is they simply believe there's a lack of interest outside of Japan. Whilst they might be right, I personally think that's an issue to do with Capcom's poor marketing and promotion of the Ace Attorney series as a whole outside Japan. They did improve slightly with Spirit of Justice, but the lack of a big marketing push for the series and a lack of physical titles recently means the series sadly just isn't gaining popularity at a rate that could push Capcom to localise Dai Gyakuten Saiban.
Despite all this, the producer of the games, Motohide Eshiro told Gamespot at E3 2016 that they "absolutely do want to bring it to the West, but unfortunately due to these circumstances right now... I'm really really sorry!" ⁽⁵⁾. It was a disappointingly vague statement that didn't offer much hope, but at least they're aware of fan demand? It would've been nice to know what the circumstances referenced were, but it's been more than a year since that interview so I think it's safe to say those circumstances haven't changed.
Sadly it looks like we'll never get an official localisation of Dai Gyakuten Saiban, but fortunately Ace Attorney has some very passionate fans who are working on a fan translation as we speak. They recently completed work on the first episode ⁽⁶⁾.
So, there are quite a few reasons why Capcom isn't biting the bullet and localising Dai Gyakuten Saiban (or even giving a statement regarding it). They likely mean we'll never see it outside Japan, but hey, I'm not giving up hope just yet. You never know, perhaps this time next week a localisation will have been announced and this entire post will be irrelevant. ...Wishful thinking, perhaps.
Sources:
⁽¹⁾ Ace Attorney Wiki
⁽²⁾ Perfectly Nintendo
⁽³⁾ Express
⁽⁴⁾ Kotaku
⁽⁵⁾ Gamespot
⁽⁶⁾ Ace Attorney Fan Translation
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