Never mind the recently announced expansion to the Street Fighter roster. What if, I asked some Capcom developers last week, the company put its video game lawyers into a fighting game? Who would enter, and what would their moves be?
I was speaking two the two top men behind Ace Attorney Investigations in their last interview at the Tokyo Game Show. We talked about their game, which stars fan favorite attorney Miles Edgeworth (pictured, dashingly, above), and I'll have more on that later this week.
But today's all about fighting games, so I wanted to share this part of the conversation. The translator working with me gave them my question:
If Frank West from Dead Rising can be in a Capcom fighting game, then why not the lawyers of the Phoenix Wright series? Who should go in and what would their moves be?
They cracked up.
"They're not sure any of the characters suit the fighting game world, so they've never actually thought about it," a Capcom translator told me as Ace Attorney Investigations' producer and director, Motohide Eshiro and Takeshi Yamazaki, laughed and started pantomiming attacks.
Eshiro was the first to get specific: "Wel,l I guess if we were going to do one, we could put in Agent [Shi-Long] Lang, because Agent Lang, in the story, he has a specific martial art he knows. Sometimes you see him do poses from it. If we were to expand that, his martial arts could fit into a game somehow."
"Well, if you want to talk about weapons, Franziska von Karma has weapons: Her whip," Yamazaki said. "So it would probably be pretty easy to fit her and her whipping into a game."
He added, joking, "We could put in Phoenix or Edgeworth and they could yell 'Objection!' and a little bubble would come out of their mouth and it would be like —' Objection!' — like a projectile.
"Or they could throw evidence at the opposition and yell 'Take That!' as they throw their evidence." He was pretending to throw evidence at me while he said this.
I suggested that the series' judge could be a good fighting character. He'd use his gavel to hammer his opponents.
"It's awesome," Yamazaki laughed. He started shaking his hand up and down vigorously, as if demanding some order in the court. "It would be a really strong attack."
But that was all speculative brainstorming. As of this writing Capcom has put none of their legal heroes into the deep rosters of their many fighting games.