Gyakuten Saiban (GBA)
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- This page is for the Game Boy Advance version of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. For other games in the series, see Ace Attorney.
Gyakuten Saiban (Turnabout Trial in English) is a visual novel released for the Game Boy Advance in 2001. While later ports would be released outside of Japan (as Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney), the original version would never leave its home country.
The game consists of four episodes, each of which represents a single case. (While most of these are fairly episodic, a number of plot threads connect them together.) The player takes the role of Ryuuichi Naruhodou (Phoenix Wright), a newly-graduated defense attorney who seeks to prove his clients' innocence -- no matter how daunting the task may seem. His job forces him to deal with all manner of colorful characters on all sides -- in particular, the steely prosecutor Reiji Mitsurugi (Miles Edgeworth), who frequently goes up against him in court.
Gameplay is split into two primary phases: investigation and trials. During the former, the player must visit various locations, talk to people, and search for evidence relevant to the ongoing case. In the latter, the player must cross-examine the prosecution's witnesses, using the aforementioned evidence to point out inconsistencies in their testimonies. There is only so much room for error here, however -- making 5 mistakes will result in the judge declaring your client guilty.
Screenshots
Music
Gyakuten Saiban's development team was very small, and only two of its seven members worked on the game's sound. Masukazu Sugimori composed the entirety of the soundtrack, while Atsushi Mori (who came from the Resident Evil team to help the project later on) handled the sound effects and voices. However, Mori also contributed to the game in other ways: he was the one who decided to use pulse code modulation in addition to the GBA's PSG, which was a massive boon for Sugimori, while director & writer Shu Takumi credits him as the reason why the game has a continuous story that flows throughout all four cases.
Interviews and other accounts of the game's creation consistently describe it as hectic and fraught with difficulties, and the music was no exception. In a series of tweets in 2021 (translated here), he began composing music without a reliable way to hear how it would sound in-game: Capcom only had motherboards with insufficiently-loud speakers, leading to anger from his co-workers. This did not let up when they got actual hardware, around the time he composed his third song -- now the issue was that the music was clipping badly. He also struggled while trying to compose music solely using the handheld's PSG -- when Mori told him he could start using PCM, he took full advantage of it but ended up getting complaints from the programmer about how much space his music took up.
According to a 2006 interview with Takumi, he frequently discussed the musical style with Sugimori before the latter wrote his music, with a later panel in 2019 further stating that Takumi wanted a diverse soundtrack that would not distract the player when they needed to think. To that end, after discarding his initial plans to make fusion music for the game, Sugimori utilized elements of the genre but combined them with techno rhythms. As a result, much of the music lacks a strong melody in favor of a bass line. (One exception is "The Steel Samurai: Warrior of Neo Olde Tokyo," which incidentally was the only song the game's producer explicitly said he liked during development.) While many of the game's songs are either sedate and calm or thrilling and high-energy (the latter inspired by then-popular dance songs), Takumi requested tense-sounding music as well. Sugimori initially only used "proper" mystery chords in two songs (including "Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Opening"), so he added more music that fit the bill: "Suspense" and "Heart of the Investigation 2001."
Recording
Aside from "Unused," all track names come from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Original Soundtrack, which is currently the only official English-language soundtrack release for any version of the game.
Credits
- Ripper: CaitSith2
- Recorder: GatoVerde95
- Game Credits:
- 音楽 (Music): Masakazu Sugimori credited as 杉森 雅和
- 効果音 (Sound Effects): Atsushi Mori credited as 森 敦史
(Sources: Credits; entry #12 on the official site's development blog - Japanese, unofficial English translation; tweets by Sugimori, unofficially translated into English)
The credits are displayed after the game is beaten. Various other sources (including Masakazu Sugimori himself) have also identified the two men responsible for the game's sound.
While no sources explicitly say Sugimori arranged his own music, his descriptions of his own work in the Twitter thread translated here suggest he did - he discusses how his music originally exclusively used the GBA's PSG alone before Atsushi Mori recommended using pulse code modulation as well. Other sources are consistent in stating that Mori's own work on the game was solely focused on sound effects (including implementing voice clips).
Albums
Game Rip
Releases
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Links
- mobygames.com/game/gameboy-advance/gyakuten-saiban - MobyGames.
- gamefaqs.gamespot.com/gba/562698-gyakuten-saiban - GameFAQs.
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Wright:_Ace_Attorney - Wikipedia (shared with all later ports).
- capcom.co.jp/newproducts/consumer/gbasaiban/index.html - Official Japanese site (archived via Wayback Machine).
| Ace Attorney | |
| Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney |  •  •  •  • 
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| Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Justice for All | • • •
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| Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Trials and Tribulations | • • •
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| Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney | • •  • 
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| Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth | • •
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| Gyakuten Kenji 2 | • •
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| Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney |
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| Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies | • •
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| Dai Gyakuten Saiban: Naruhodou Ryuunosuke no Bouken | • •
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| Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice | • •
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| Dai Gyakuten Saiban: Naruhodou Ryuunosuke no Kakugo | • •
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