Topic: The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles

@Ralizah I think the low (compared to install base) Sony game sales indicate that most people that buy Playstations don't even buy 1st party games. Some people hate "gatekeeping" but I think it's necessary to look at "core" and "casual" market and kind of segment each market. Nintendo of course has a massive casual audience, but it's core audience is toxicly fanatical. I'm getting the impression that despite the vocal minority the overwhelming majority of Playstation's fanbase is really just looking for a plastic box to play this years sports games, F2P games, popular shooters on and it doesn't really go much further than that. They don't buy the weird 3rd parties, they don't by Sony's own games... but we know they're buying those mass market annual titles in droves. I think PS is a distorted market, and I'm not sure publishers really started picking up on that until recently. The install base is mammoth, but the actual engagement with a deeper catalogue, or even the boutique catalog is pretty low across that install base.

I kind of see PS in the position Wii was in a decade or so ago. Sure, it sells like crazy, but the people it sells to aren't necessarily the target market for a lot of the games publishers might want to sell other than those big big big GaaS games. The deeper catalog is there, and the players are there, but there's only a segment of the total market that's actually engaged with that.

Both XB and Nintendo fans (in the West) seem to be much more into the "lets try everything" approach across more of the install base. Freaking Lawn Mowing Simulator has buzz on Xbox. Without even going on Game Pass. Unfortunately it still hasn't made inroads with fans of Japanese games. The demand is there, but it just can't quite link up with sales. I blame inertia, mostly.

True enough that in Japan, people buy Nintendo to play Nintendo, not because they want to play video games, though. Sadly, I'm not sure many in Japan really want to play video games at all, though if it's not on their phone....

@NEStalgia I believe you can also turn the text speed up faster in the options. Also if you just hold b it goes faster then mashing a

@VoidofLight At launch on 3DS they said it was because you needed too much knowledge of Japanese history and Westerners wouldn't be able to play it.

Translated from polite Japanese stuff that probably means it's the Holmes estate.

@CabbageHunter64 I searched the options and didn't see it. You can change the delay for how long it waits on auto-play, but I don't believe you can increase the actual text speed. And holding a or b doesn't seem to do anything. It DOES advance on the second crossexam, but the first time through, and all other dialogue it forces you to wait. That's technically not different from DD or SoJ, but somehow it FEELS more annoying this time.

@NEStalgia Stuff like Uncharted, God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Spider-Man, etc. all sell 10+ million copies pretty easily. That's way better than how a lot of Nintendo's own stuff sells. Even most Zelda games before BotW sold in the 3 - 8 million range. If it's a cinematic third-person action adventure game, chances are the audience is going to snap it up. Unless it's Japanese and called Gravity Rush, and then they pretend like it doesn't exist en masse.

Third party stuff in that vein tends to sell well on Playstation consoles also. Problem is that the Playstation base ONLY wants AAA now, aside from the occasional breakthrough hit like Persona 5. Indies and AA games are increasingly struggling because they're not massively-hyped billion-dollar blockbusters.

As to Ace Attorney, the games didn't always make it clear what evidence you should present, or what you should do in the field to progress. They're obviously not as bad as old computer adventure games in that regard, but this is the best AA game I've played so far when it comes to giving the player a good idea of what they need to do to progress trials/investigations. Not once did I have to savescum my way through a part of a trial by randomly presenting evidence until I guessed right.

As to text speed, if you turn on the text skip for unread dialogue option, you can press a button after the dialogue starts scrolling to quickly display the full message. It saves a LOT of time if you read quickly.

@Ralizah As a percentage of install base, it's collectively minor, though. Nintendo does MUCH better than that as a percentage of install base, particularly where the top franchises apply.

Sigh gravity rush. The best Sony games of the last 10 years... Ignored, not marketed.... So depressing. I really don't get the lack of interest in Japanese games on the modern west. I guess it's down to an age thing. To me, Japanese games are the normal games and western games are weird and unusual... Back in the day Japanese games were more or less the only games, after all, so that format is what I identify as what a game is supposed to be. (Not that western devs didn't have some great stuff... Toejam, starfox kinda, lost Vikings, lemmings, classics that were all western even back then.)

AA is the sweet spot to me. AAA sucks. Indies suck. AA is the real balanced games. Strangely PS5 is the easiest console for small devs to brute force a result but the console with the market least likely to play them....

Lol yeah the classic "present everything until one sticks"... Then again that always felt "in character" because Phoenix is usually bumbling his way through blindly lol

Ohhh! I have to find that setting! I feel like I'm waiting forever for text and I didn't think it let's you speed it!! That's going to make the game so much faster!

Edit:. I found it, that's so much better!!

I think its actually rebound in recent years, Sony just didn't notice. It's way better than it was a decade ago, that's for sure.

@kkslider5552000 It's ironic how Sony is an American company now, and that they're foregoing Japanese games, when a lot of people buy playstations to play stuff like Persona, or JRPG's. It's like they haven't been paying attention to anything that's not just their first party games.

@NEStalgia Primarily the top franchises. Nintendo has a LOT of 2 - 6 million sellers underneath the Mario Karts and Pokemons.

Which is fine. Even a million sales is a lot if your budget is under control. 10+ million is huge and probably puts those games in the top 100 best-selling video games of all time.

Of course, more people buy Playstation consoles for third party games, because Playstation consoles historically have far better third party support, so it's natural to expect that the top of the charts wouldn't be clogged with first-party stuff. Except several games are still sneaking up there anyway, which speaks to just how popular Sony's first party output is becoming.

So I don't think there is any case to be made that Playstation gamers aren't buying first-party games.

Also, I disagree that there's a lack of interest in Japanese games in the West. Sales of even niche Japanese properties have been surging lately. Traditionally niche properties like Fire Emblem, Persona, Yakuza, etc. are becoming more ubiquitous than ever before.

Of course, most Japanese console games aren't selling like billion-dollar AAA Western blockbusters, but like I alluded to earlier, they don't need to. Japanese games tend to do more on smaller budgets, even at the high end, whereas Western AAAs are caught in a death cycle where their perpetually inflated budgets, it is argued, necessitate ever-skeevier approaches to monetization, and even higher MSRPs on top of that. As more and more money becomes involved, fewer risks are taken on the design front, which is why so many modern AAA games seem almost interchangable. With that much at risk, companies are opting to funnel their game through molds that make them as safe as possible based on available sales analytics.

But yeah, I'm with you. While there are certainly Western properties I enjoy, Japanese gaming IS video gaming to me. 90% of my gaming diet is composed of Japanese video games, almost as far back as I can remember. You can probably imagine why I nearly fell out of the hobby entirely during the seventh console generation, when Japanese console game development was at an all-time low.

And yeah, that setting makes all the difference in a game like this that's almost nothing but reading. I wouldn't mind the slow crawl of text if I was listening to dialogue, but since these games are still stuck with primitive bleeps and bloops, I don't want to be at the mercy of the default text speed setting.

I think for me its partially the simple fact that a lot of the western games I like tend to not come back in my experience. Either they become bad or they vanish.

I'm already biased towards Japanese games but throwing away the bigger western games I like makes it even easier to have a bias. (to be fair, the Xbox 360 and PS3 generation was arguably about Japanese game companies doing the same, hence why they were in decline)

@Snaplocket OBJECTION! It's kind of self fulfilling. As long as companies choose to raise prices on the big budget titles and then charge the same price for the AA titles, the AAs seem like poor values. It's self defeating. This game is 2 games for $40! I pre-ordered this thing as soon as I could, but have yet to buy ntwewy which is a series I adore equally much. The price is just high for what it is. And even though I'll pay it eventually it wasn't an instabuy, "I'm shoving twenties into the screen and nothing's happening!" Moment this was. Something like returnal is probably a cool little experience. But charging GoW money for it is insane. Honestly same for Dread but I'm a gullible fool and Nintendo knows it. Plus I may not buy Prime 4 as a result because Metroid is 2D to me and I honestly dgaf about Prime... But that's me.

If more mid tier series would do the $40 even $50 price points they could sell so much faster.

Games are all about enjoyment for me. I'd much rather pay $60 for Metroid Dread, a game I know I'll enjoy, than some bloated Sony epic. Those I hold out for until they're $10 or free on PS+. Worked for Days Gone and SotC remake so far. Still hoping for Uncharted TLL and Spider-Man before my sub expires.

I only really buy games I'm interested in, regardless of status.

@Snaplocket You didn’t even get past the first few hours of xenoblade 1 because “bad graphics”

When Van Zieks put his boot on the bench... 🤣 Though this game seems more serious than previous entries, it still has its silly moments.

I see what some were saying about case 2 being too similar to that old case. It's really deja Vu.... Slightly disappointing in that regard, though well done.

Kind of funny that Susatos animations seem to basically just be Trucy with a slightly different skin. And her writing is basically a flavor of Maya... Without all the snark.

@Ralizah I will still never accept the idea of personal perceived value equals value in mass market goods. It's madness.

I like when I get a clear deal, but I also do appreciate when the price of the game just feels reasonable and consistent. Best example right now is the new Advance Wars remakes, where Switch worthy remakes of two 30 dollar GBA games combine to be a 60 dollar game. That's about as consistent and logical as pricing gets. Great Ace Attorney is very similar in that regard.

@Snaplocket If you didn't like it, then why did you get Definitive Edition?

@Snaplocket I wasn't gaga over XC1 either. Hoping I'll feel more kindly when I get around to playing my copy of the Definitive Edition.

@NEStalgia Personal perceived value is all that matters in entertainment. It seems insane to me to pay more for a game because it had a bigger development budget. Imagine if that logic applied to ticket prices in a theater, or DVD prices for new releases.

@Ralizah theater prices are a bad example, only mega budget product ever lands in theaters except for artsy farts hipster theaters in the mega metros showing pretentious Cannes junk.

And DVDs don't really have set prices. Even direct to dvd Disney stuff doesn't sell at full price. While even blockbusters can launch so discounts. I'd say perception isn't driving prices in either of those markets. Gamers are just gullible schmucks, easily trainable, and the publishers know it. It's echoing designer label fashion more than the rest of entertainment. It's gross.

@NEStalgia Mainstream theaters I go to showcase billion dollar Marvel blockbusters alongside foreign films, indie flicks, and mid-budget comedies/romances. I don't know what terrible theaters you go to that only show big budget stuff.

And while DVD prices might be variable, to my knowledge, it's never been that bigger budget films generally cost more. Updated re-releases of old movies generally cost similar prices to new releases.

Ditto with print books. Reprints of old books don't generally cost less than new books.

The attitude that new big budget products should cost more is mostly unique to the gaming community, and as long as gamers act like they're pay pigs who should shoulder the bill for overinflated budgets, nothing will change about the way Western AAA development is handled.