Sandbox / Characters Ace Attorney Minor Characters Phoenix Wright

Ace Attorney | Main Character Sheet
Wright Anything Agency (Phoenix Wright, Apollo Justice) | Defense Attorneys & Assistants | Main Prosecutors (Miles Edgeworth, Franziska von Karma) | Prosecutors & Judges | Law Enforcement | The Fey Clan | Troupe Gramarye | Kingdom of Khura'in
Original Game | JFA | T&T (Dahlia Hawthorne) | AJ | DD | SoJ | AAI | AAI2 | Manga | Anime | Victims
PL vs. PWAA | TGAA (Minor)

Witnesses, victims, and other minor characters that appear in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.

Note: There are spoilers for later installments as well as the first game. Read cautiously!

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The First Turnabout (Hajimete no Gyakuten)

Larry Butz (Masashi Yahari)

Voiced by (Japanese): Masaya Onosaka (SoJ), Tooru Nara (anime)

Voiced by (English): Josh Martin (anime), Steph Garrett (child - anime)

Played by: Akiyoshi Nakao (film), Riohei Kamamori (child - film)

"We were Romeo and Juliet! Mark Antony and Cleopatra!"

Phoenix and Edgeworth's "lovable" loser classmate and one of the series' most frequently reoccurring witnesses. A very over-the-top, downright idiotic playboy-wannabe, who always tries to get a girlfriend and fails to keep one, either they dumped him or they get killed (the very first case of the series has his girlfriend murdered). He seems to attract trouble wherever he goes, thus earning him the saying, "When something smells, it's usually the Butz".

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• Adaptational Heroism: Downplayed. At the end of Turnabout Goodbyes in the game, it's revealed that Larry stole Edgeworth's lunch money out of boredom, which led to Phoenix getting blamed. In the anime, he instead finds it picked up by a stray dog on the street and, after getting guilt-tripped by the dog, responsibly turns it over to the police and claims it legally when no one else does. However, he still doesn't chime in about finding the money during the class trial, which could've saved Phoenix a lot of trauma.
• Adapted Out: Inverted in the anime; Larry appears in "Farewell, My Turnabout", even though he didn't in the game.
• Artsy Beret: He always wears a beret when he is in his painter persona.
• Back for the Finale: Larry has the tendency to show up early on in a game, only to return in the final case as well. The only exceptions are the two Investigations games (in the first one, he only appears in the last case; in the second one, he only appears in the middle case), and Spirit of Justice (where he only appears in a DLC case).
• Big Damn Heroes: Multiple:
  • In 1-4, right as Edgeworth is declared guilty, Larry rushes in, yelling for the Judge to wait, and demands to testify, and sheds new light on the case in the process. This provided a large hole in Von Karma's case, which, in the end, cost him the trial. Due to this, he also saved Edgeworth's life. He pretty much saved the entire case for Phoenix, really.
  • And in the final case of Ace Attorney Investigations, he and Oldbag burst in with decisive evidence, helping to bust Alba for good.
• Be as Unhelpful as Possible: Things are never made easier for the protagonist in question whenever Larry is involved as a witness (or even nearby). Usually the truth has to be dug out of him due to either his genuine idiocy mistaking what he witnessed for something else entirely, or his deliberate coverup of details that implicate him in something embarrassing but inconsequential to the case at hand. It comes to a head in Investigations, when Edgeworth has to argue Larry's innocence to Shi Long Lang (who's looking to arrest him). Larry then interjects, forcing Edgeworth to prove to him that he couldn't have done it all while trying to refute Edgeworth... right in front of Lang. Edgeworth points out that if he were to win this "battle of wits", Larry's victory prize would be his arrest.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: A light example. He generally comes off as an easygoing and friendly guy, but is also a lazy liar who frequently intentionally hides important details about cases to save his own skin, often for petty reasons. Phoenix and Edgeworth, who have known him for most of their lives, are the only characters who are initially aware of this side of him, and react accordingly when around him as a result.
• Blatant Lies: In "Turnabout Time Traveler," he claims he has nothing to do with the case, despite having brought Ellen to Phoenix's office and having left his business card wallet behind at the reception hall.
  Phoenix: If you have to lie, at least do a better job of it!
• Blush Sticker: Pops up whenever he's flustered, which is often, as he has plenty of good reasons to be ashamed...
• Broken Pedestal: While Phoenix certainly never looked up to Larry, the reveal that he stole Edgeworth's lunch money as a kid (which in turn, caused the class to think Phoenix had done it) made Phoenix stop viewing him as a close Childhood Friend and instead as a nuisance.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: He's a talented artist, despite his many flaws.
• The Bus Came Back: After being absent from the series since Investigations 2, he returns in the DLC case "Turnabout Time Traveler" in Spirit of Justice.
• Butt-Monkey: He gets absolutely zero respect. Even Phoenix considers him less of a friend and more of an annoying pest after learning that he was the one who stole Edgeworth's lunch money back in the day. The Judge, despite having both tried him for murder and seen him in court as a witness, doesn't remember him in 3-2. He also refers to him as a 'useless-looking young man' and says that 'just looking at his picture makes the bile start to rise in (his) throat'.
• Casanova Wannabe: His bad luck at love is pretty much a running gag. In the manga, his girlfriend Belle turns out to be the murderer; the only reason she ever talked to him was for an alibi - though she wasn't planning on framing him. He also seems to distinguish each of his ex-girlfriends by the way they slapped him. None of this st ops him from hitting on every single woman he meets.
• Chick Magnet: Say what you will about his ability to keep girlfriends, but he's had at least nine girlfriends over three games, and most of them were models or worked other professions where good looks matter.
• Chivalrous Pervert: He is quite the pervert, but he is also a murderer's worst nightmare. When he is in a murder scene or other scene where someone is in danger, Larry will (inadvertingly) collect critical evidence, deliver critical testimony after his lies are broken through, save lives, create enough chaos to cause a murderer to make a mistake that allows the murder to be solved or otherwise interferes with a murderer's plans, and/or foil murder plots. He often does many of these things by accident.
• Cloudcuckoolander: He has his moments in which he draws the most ridiculous conclusion from what he saw or heard. He often shares very valuable information or evidence in the cases he appears in, but just as often the challenge comes from getting what that evidence really means, or proving that it's even relevant to the Judge. For example, in the final case of Trials and Tribulations, he saw "something amazing": Iris flying over a burning bridge, with Larry being concerned over her health if she kept trying to do such stunts; in reality, Larry was looking upside down, and what he saw was actually Misty Fey's corpse being swung under the burning bridge.
• Commuting on a Bus: His overall relevancy in the series varies wildly. In the first game he's one of the main secondary characters, appearing in all but one case, but then hes gone completely for Justice for All. Trials and Tribulations brings him back prominently for 2 cases. The Investigation games give him a couple of appearances, but after that he was gone for years until a DLC case for Spirit of Justice.
• Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: Throughout the third game, during which he is heavily implied to be going through a crisis over being vastly overshadowed by Phoenix and Edgeworth. By the end of it, he seems to settle on being an artist, a field where he actually possesses talent. This decision paid off in the long run, as he ends up making a name for himself as an illustrator by the events of Spirit of Justice.
• The Ditz: Probably why trouble follows him everywhere.
• Dumbass Has a Point: Edgeworth has to concede that he both saved Phoenix's life and got Edgeworth back into the country in record time. He just wishes that Larry would apply that kind of motivation to himself once in a while.
• Embarrassing First Name: Barely averted, given that Larry could have been called Harry.
• Flanderization: In the first game, while Larry was a massive screw-up and guilty of stealing Phoenix's lunch money in the backstory, he was still well-meaning and even tried to genuinely help during 1-4 after realizing his testimonial might be valuable. Later games, especially those written by Takeshi Yamazaki, would exaggerate his stupidity and chronic lying streak to where he actively makes cases more difficult due to his selfishness. His relationship with Phoenix and Edgeworth also goes from Vitriolic Best Buds to almost completely one-sided, as the two are left constantly questioning why they ever made friends with him.
• The Friend Nobody Likes:
  • While Phoenix at first considers him a well-meaning goofball, his repeated screw-ups try the attorney's patience to a point where he groans at the sight of him. Things are even worse between him and Edgeworth, who makes it no secret that he has no idea how they became friends in the first place and never has anything nice to say to or about him.
  • Made especially apparent in Spirit of Justice, when Phoenix introduces Larry to Athena reluctantly as "an old friend" but in his thoughts he says Edgeworth is his childhood friend without hesitation.
• Genius Ditz: He's actually a good artist, in more ways than one. He made two replica statuettes of "The Thinker" in his first appearance (with functional integrated clocks with voiced lines telling the time, no less), his sketches during Bridge to the Turnabout are on par with the rest of the game's art, and his stage performance as the Steel Samurai fooled even Edgeworth (a passionate Steel Samurai fan). He eventually managed to gain some success as a picture book author and a wedding sign maker as a side business... which is how he got involved with the whole mess of Turnabout Time Traveller in the first place.
• Giving Someone the Pointer Finger: One of his new animations in Spirit of Justice.
• Handsome Lech: He's rather attractive, and an unashamedly desperate womanizer.
• Hidden Depths:
  • During his appearance in case 3 of Investigations 2, a pair of his sketches become evidence. After his drawing in Trials and Tribulations, you wouldn't expect much, but they're actually pretty good, especially for ones he drew on the spot. He might actually have talent as an artist, which would explain why it's the only profession you see him in multiple times.
  • His appearance in the original Investigations reveals that he's apparently also an excellent actor, to the point of putting on a performance as the Steel Samurai in a stage play that was so excellent that even the notoriously critical Steel Samurai fanboy Edgeworth was moved to tears by it.
  • In Spirit of Justice, upon Edgeworth mocking him a little too much, he reveals his hand and shows he had gathered a lot more evidence than it initially appeared. He also ends up perfectly replicating the image of a sign chunk whipping by his window in high-pressure winds despite only seeing it for half a second... though he's convinced that he saw a pterodactyl.
• Hot-Blooded: He has a tendency of abruptly screaming mid-sentence, and his screams are loud enough to shake the screen.
• Idiot Savant: He's rather dim, yet he's an excellent artist and actor.
• The Illegible: When he tried to write "Mindy" on a love note, he wrote it so sloppily that it looked like "Wéndy" at first glance. Other characters initially thought that the note was for Wendy Oldbag.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: Hinted at in the third game's end credits. Both of his friends are legendary lawyers and pioneers in their field, while he can't keep a job or a girlfriend. Even his "thumbs up" sprite gives him an expression that makes him look like he'll burst into tears at any minute. Finally finding a profession that he's good at makes him ecstatic.
• Informed Flaw: People constantly make fun of his art and call it bad but all things considered it actually is pretty good. This is demonstrated most clearly in the end credits of Trials and Tribulations, the end of which shows a excellent drawing of the main cast done by Larry.
• Insistent Terminology: When he's working as an artist (and later picture book author) in Trials and Tribulations, Investigations 2 and Spirit of Justice, he insists on being called Laurice Deauxnim (Mashisu Tenryuusai). Few people seem to humor him.
• Karma Houdini: He somehow got away with making a bomb threat to the police while under the belief he was "eloping" with Ellen Wyatt.
• Leitmotif: "When Something Smells, It's Usually Me", in the third game. It returns in Ace Attorney Investigations 2, and gets remixed for the DLC case in Spirit of Justice. In the first game he has "Blissful People", sharing it with several other characters.
• Manchild: He's quite immature, although it only really starts to show after his Flanderization. Edgeworth even quips that talking to him is tantamount to speaking with a child in Ace Attorney Investigations 2. He reaches its nadir in Spirit of Justice, where even after nearly a decade, he's essentially the same person as before and even has his testimony named "Nick Is A Jerkface!".
• Mystery Magnet: He stumbles into many different murder scenes without ever intending to be there, and murder attempts happen around where he is. This is a somewhat good thing because his art and his testimony become critical more often than not once you manage to expose all of his lies that he habitually makes in his testimony by cross-examining him, and manages to foil some of the murderers' plans including saving at least one victim's life.
• New Job as the Plot Demands: He has a new job (and girlfriend) every time he appears. He's a hot-dog vendor, a security guard, and an artist over the course of the original trilogy, which results in him being a frequent witness. After realizing his talent as an artist at the end of the third game, he's stuck to the profession in each of his most recent chronological appearances (aside from a 10-Minute Retirement in order to pursue an acting career in the first Investigations game), to the point of becoming an acclaimed illustrator by Spirit of Justice.
• The Nicknamer: "Nick", "Edgey", and "Franzy" for Phoenix, Edgeworth, and Franziska respectively.
• Ocular Gushers: He tends to show his emotions in a very over-the-top way, including streams of tears flowing from puppy-dog eyes.
• Older Than He Looks: In Spirit of Justice, even nine years after the events of the Investigations games, he's barely shown any signs of ageing, unlike his friends. He certainly has not matured either.
• One-Hit Wonder: In-Universe example. While he has found professional success with "Franzy's Whippity-Whip Trip" by the time of Spirit of Justice, he's now struggling to make another big seller. He's not too pleased when Phoenix calls him as such and his efforts to avoid going down as one gets pretty desperate, like mailing the Wright Anything Agency ten copies of his new book, and the bill. He did seem to get a temporary break when he was commissioned by the hyper-rich Sprocket family to paint a wedding sign though.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: In the anime, the defense tries to delay Edgeworth's trial so he and Maya can retrieve some of the DL-6 evidence from Manfred's office, but because the recess was short due to Edgeworth faking an injury, Larry tries to disguise himself as the former using his jacket and cravat. He doesn't last ten seconds.
  The Judge: Who are you?!
  Larry: Uh... I'm Edgey! I-I mean, I'm Miles Edgeworth; an innocent man.
  Manfred von Karma: Remove this cheeky impostor from the courtroom NOW!
• Pen Name: Does art under the pseudonym of "Laurice Deauxnim," which he appears to have picked up apprenticing under Elise Deauxnim in 3-5.
• Phrase Catcher: "When something smells, it's usually the Butz."
• Renaissance Man: Shockingly enough, Larry is naturally gifted in pretty much all artistic fields, including sculpting, painting and acting.
• Serial Romeo: Larry seems to always date models, but he's not above constant flattery of any other woman in range, including Maya, who is supposedly kind of plain. If you show him a picture of Pearl in T&T, he'll call her a "cutie" and only back off when he realizes she has the same name as a girl he once dated, not because she's nine. (In this case, it's a sign that he's a Cloudcuckoolander, not a Comedic Lolicon pervert.)
• Spanner in the Works: Pretty much every case he was present in and his mishaps were the main reasons why Phoenix and Edgeworth were able to win their cases.
  • "Turnabout Goodbyes" (Case 1-4): Edgeworth states that Larry was the first witness Von Karma was unable to manipulate in advance, and thus the first unplanned element in his 40 years of prosecution. Basically, what was a screwup with his latest business venture featuring a dumb idea to re-inflate his Steel Samurai mascot balloon with a gas canister which sent the whole lot into Lake Gourd, inadvertently creating a fake monster hoax which introduced another Spanner; Lotta Hart into providing photographic evidence. Larry was stuck trying to find his balloon for several days until he found it floating in the lake late into Christmas Eve, going back ashore right when Hammond was shot at the Boat Rental Shop and hearing the first bullet being fired.
  • "The Stolen Turnabout" (Case 3-2): The culprit of the case hit an alarm buzzer so that a guard would come rushing to the crime scene, and see the victim and a different suspect. However, the only guard at that time was Larry, who didn't go to the crime scene because he was confronting one of his exes' boyfriend.
  • "Bridge to the Turnabout" (Case 3-5): Larry ends up being a witness to the cover-up of the murder thanks to being the only "idiot" to wander around a snowstorm, let alone one staying in a broken-down hut instead of the main lodge nearby. He even makes a drawing of what he saw, though he didn't realize what it was.
  • "Turnabout Ablaze" (Case 5 of Investigations): His accident in rehearsal leads to an in-universe case of Real Life Writes the Plot that catches the Big Bad in a lie.
  • "The Inherited Turnabout" (Case 3 of Investigations 2): His drawing of Katherine Hall pulling a trolley showed a contradiction that allowed Edgeworth to discover who was hiding Isaac Dover's body, thus allowing him to find the culprit behind the IS-7 incident.
  • In the manga, by getting arrested as the suspect in Turnabout With the Wind by various things he does to make himself seem suspicious (calling Bright Bonds to demand that he back out of Belle's life, and running from the cops), Belle ends up having to prove his alibi, and ends up incriminating herself with her own testimony.
  • "Turnabout Time Traveller": His return in Spirit of Justice proves this to be as much a part of his being as hopelessly falling in love and driving his old friends up the wall. To wit, his act of sneaking into a wedding reception derails the whole time travel cover up and forces the villain to kill his accomplice earlier than intended, making it possible to catch him.
• Surprise Witness: He realizes that he is a witness in a murder and busts into the courtroom just in time to stop a Miscarriage of Justice with his testimony. Even then, Phoenix had to correct several errors in Larry's testimony to make it useful.
• Taking Advantage of Generosity: Phoenix never agreed to defend Larry for free; he just assumed. It's also sometimes hard to draw the line on where he's mooching off his girlfriends or being an extreme doormat to them (e.g. Kiyance's gifts & suggestions on how to run his hot dog stand).
• 10-Minute Retirement: In the first Investigations game he declares that he's no longer interested in being an artist, and has decided that his true calling is acting. In the second game, however, he's gone back to being an artist, with Spirit of Justice demonstrating that he stuck with that career choice in the longer run.
• Terrible Artist: Subverted. Both Phoenix and Edgeworth constantly insult his artistic abilities, but this is suggested to be a result of them being unable to get past the fact that Larry made them, as all other characters praise his work. This is supported in Investigations, where Edgeworth is nearly brought to tears by Larry's performance in a play when he didn't know that it was him, but then immediately scoffs at it after learning that fact. In Spirit of Justice, he's gained enough prestige as an artist for the influential Sprocket household to hire him as a wedding reception sign designer. He's also infamously known for his ability to create high-quality statue clocks, which are noted to be so well-made that a witness thinks it was sold in a shop.
• Unfortunate Names: His last name is Butz, a misspelling of "butts". If his first name is corrupted by changing the "L" to an "H" like how Dick Gumshoe and Mia Fey did, you get a Punny Name that refers to hairy butts.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Played with; his gifting Mia the Thinker clock winds up giving Redd White the ideal murder weapon. However, White would otherwise have probably just killed Mia with whatever he had to hand, and his and April May's knowing details they shouldn't have known about the clock ends up exposing their guilt.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: His relationships with both Phoenix and Edgeworth can be summarized as this. In Edgeworth's case there's barely any friendship at all. Notably, Phoenix's opinion of him seems to gradually drop throughout the series, initially seeing him as a well-meaning goofball in the first game before acknowledging him as an obnoxious liar that he can barely tolerate in the third.
• With Friends Like These...: Generally, more of a liability and mooch than an ally. He does genuinely care about both Phoenix and Edgeworth, just less than he does about himself.

Cindy Stone (Mika Takabi)

The first known girlfriend of Casanova Wannabe Larry Butz, who was murdered in her own apartment by a panicking thug who hit her over the head.

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• Asshole Victim: While she was cheating on Larry with several guys, its later downplayed in that she really did care about him.
• Gold Digger: She's got sugar daddies around the world.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Despite being an adulterer, she still cared for Larry enough to take his statue clock with her to Paris, despite it being heavy and difficult to use.
• Punny Name: It even gets lampshaded if, when asked what her name is, you pick what it's punning on. Cinder Block.
  The Judge: The person in question was a victim of murder, not ill-conceived naming, Mr. Wright.

Frank Sahwit (Hoshio Yamano)

Voiced by (Japanese): Shinya Takahashi (anime)

Voiced by (English): Ben Phillips (anime)

Played by: Ayumu Saito (live-action film)

A door-to-door salesman and the alleged sole witness of Cindy Stone's murder. This guy got the raw end of the deal when it comes to murderers in the series, for the same reason that a statement like that isn't a spoiler: he's blatantly shown to be the murderer of Cindy Stone before Phoenix even gets his name shown for the first time (bar the title screen on non-Japanese versions), and you can get him guilty without even having to press anything. He reappears in jail in the second case of Investigations 2, training as an animal groomer.

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• Adaptational Heroism: His killing of Cindy Stone in the localization is suggested to have been an Accidental Murder caused in a panic, while in the Japanese version it is presented as a spur of the moment crime caused out of anger.
• Bad Liar: Unlike most other murderers, whose lies only become obvious when presented with evidence they would otherwise be unaware of or forced to elaborate on their stories when being pressed, his contradictions are completely obvious. Much less so when he appears again in Investigations 2, where he still isn't an especially adept liar, but compared to the likes of Larry and Sebastian Debeste he's practically a master of deception.
• Bald of Evil: Downplayed variant. Sahwitt is partially bald (though it's usually hidden with a toupee), but the evil part still stands.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing:
  • In the original game, his remarkable politeness hides the fact that he's a petty criminal who's willing to get an innocent man convicted for murder to save himself.
  • In Investigations 2, Sahwitt portrays himself as a genuinely changed man who is now a model prisoner and running a legitimate business doing pet grooming for the prison's animals. In reality, he's still an unrepentant thief and murderer, and is just behaving so to get a reduced sentence.
• The Bus Came Back: Reappears in Investigations 2, a whole ten years after his sole appearance in the very first Ace Attorney game!
• Chekhov's Gunman: A minor example in Investigations 2. He seems to be just another witness in The Imprisoned Turnabout only he turns out to have been an essential part in Dogen's prison goods operations.
• Dodgy Toupee: His toupee makes him look younger by hiding his baldness. It'd likely be a lot more convincing if it didn't jump off his head whenever he gets surprised, though.
• Eyes Always Shut: In the first phase of the trial with him, before he throws his toupee and sheds his facade.
• Flat Character: In The First Turnabout, he doesn't get much time to get a unique personality due to how short the case is. His return substantially fleshes him out, while surprisingly changing very little about him.
• Hand Rubbing: Does it all the time, which in Japan is a sign of someone trying to suck up to his superiors.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Frank reveals that "The Thinker" is a clock, something he would not have known if he had not entered Cindy's room (which he claimed not to have done).
• Improvised Weapon: He clubbed Cindy Stone with the “Thinker” clock.
• Ironic Name: He's anything but frank, and he didn't just see the murder, he committed it.
• Keigo: In the Japanese version, he uses this manner of speech most of the time, but switches to extremely rough and rude speech when he's pressed.
• Non-Standard Character Design: Heavily averts the Mukokuseki art style typical of the series, which is probably why he was given a Southeast Asian-sounding surname in the English version as opposed to the European-style names most characters get.
• Not Me This Time: Played With in Investigations 2. Despite being the killer in the first case, he's not the killer when he reappears. However, he's their accomplice.
• Punny Name: "Frank saw it" and his name is Frank Sahwitt. Phoenix even lampshades this.
  Phoenix: Proof enough for you, Mr. Sahwit? Or should I say... Mr. Did It!
• Retcon: He's 36 in the first game, but in Investigations 2, which takes place 3 years later, he's 47. Recent re-releases of the original trilogy change his age to 44 accordingly.
• Robbing the Dead: Planned to rob Horace Knightley's corpse in Investigations 2, particularly his ring with a snowflake design.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: His attempt at running a legitimate pet-grooming business when he's served his prison sentence goes out of the window when his sentence is extended for being an accomplice to prison goods smuggling. He outright gives up after that.
• Starter Villain: The very first culprit of the series, and the one with very obvious contradictions in his testimonies.
• Stepford Smiler: When wearing the wig he smiles perpetually, but he does so to conceal his crimes.
• Stupid Evil: Up there with Furio Tigre and Terry Fawles. Frank is as abysmal at killing someone as he is at lying. Phoenix only has to sit back and watch as Frank digs himself into a corner.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: Practically the master of this in AAI2. The whole Logic Chess battle against him pretty much consists of waiting for him to make one and catching him out on it.
  Sahwit: I-If you're looking for the person who discovered the body... You should try someone else...
• Villainous Breakdown: After enough holes get poked through his testimony, Frank angrily throws his toupee at a displeased Wright (and Edgeworth in AAI2) and then froths at the mouth like he has rabies, before collapsing. He doesn't do the latter in AAI2.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: In Investigations 2, his Logic Chess forces Edgeworth to shift tactics as he doesn't change his facial expressions and body language at all unless he's caught in a lie unlike the previous Logic Chess opponents. The strategy is to pay attention to what he says.
• Warm-Up Boss: As the first culprit in the entire series, he's the only one you never need to press to find contradictions. He's also probably the easiest culprit to defeat in the entire series.
• Would Hit a Girl: Given that he conked Cindy Stone.

Turnabout Sisters (Gyakuten Shimai)

The Bellboy

"From hence forth I will be known as the 'bellboy who swore the affidavit'!"

The head bellboy of the Gatewater hotel. While never given a name, he is nevertheless an important witness in the second case of the first game.

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• Ascended Fanboy: The Bellboy is overjoyed both times a murder occurs in or near the Gatewater Hotel.
• The Cameo: As well as his main appearance in 1-2, he appears briefly in 1-5, is referenced occasionally by Phoenix, Shelly de Killer wears his outfit in the second game, and in Investigations, he appears as the real Proto Badger.
• Demoted to Extra: In the anime, he never gets to testify and only appears to tell Phoenix that Redd White was with April May at the hotel in the day Mia's murder happened.
• Distracted by the Sexy: Done on purpose by April May.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": We never hear his true name.
• Flat Character: He exists mainly to be a witness who isn't evil and give the player an introduction to cross examinations against characters who aren't killers.
• Jumpscare: In his cameo in Investigations, he nonchalantly pops out of a trapdoor floor backstage at Whitewater Park to prepare for an event. Not helping is that he was dressed as the real Proto Badger.
• Nice Guy: He's friendly, polite, and helpful, a rarity for witnesses.
• No Name Given: His is a particular case in the series as he does not even have a fake name or is called by his alias - he is just the bellboy.
• Nightmare Fetishist: He gets really into the idea that a murderer might have stayed at the Gatewater, though he claims it's because there's No Such Thing as Bad Publicity.
• Put on a Bus: Despite Case 2-4 starting in a Gatewater hotel, he doesn't make an appearance. You'd think he would be all over it, given his unbridled enthusiasm for anything related to both hotels and murder. (Somewhat justified, since he doesn't work at the Gatewater Imperial Hotel where 2-4 takes place.)
• Saying Too Much: While he was merely being used to make an alibi, he screws it up anyway after rattling off the price of the room service order he brought to April May's room, Phoenix freaks out at the price of seemingly one hot chocolate, only for The Bellboy to instinctively reaffirm that the total bill was that high because it called for two of them.
• Spanner in the Works: He accidentally states in court that April May was not alone in Gatewater Hotel when Edgeworth told him to not say that. This allows Phoenix to track down Mia's murderer.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: When he's not being a Nightmare Fetishist, he seems to think he's in a straightforward murder mystery instead of the Animesque Ace Attorney.

April May (Umeyo Shochiku)

Voiced by (Japanese): Mariko Honda (anime)

Voiced by (English): Jeannie Tirado (anime)

"I like a man with a big... vocabulary."

Redd White's secretary. Something of an airhead who easily seduces men because of her looks.

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• Animal Motifs: Cats. Her standard pose has her holding her hands up close to either side of her face like a cat pouncing, she uses words like "Rowr!" when she gets angry, and her 'Pressured' sprite has her adopt an angry, Cheshire Cat-esque grin.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Has a cute seemingly ditzy exterior, but reveals her true personality and becomes hostile under enough pressure.
• Brainless Beauty: Zig-zagged. While she seems like one at first glance, it's revealed to be mostly an act she puts on to divert suspicion away from herself. That being said, she still makes some rather boneheaded moves, and her downfall comes from her assumption that anything can be bought in a store.
• Curtains Match the Window: Has both pink hair and eyes.
• Death Glare: When pressed and cornered.
• Distracted by the Sexy: She weaponizes this trope, using her charm to get the court on her side and make them believe her. Unfortunately for her, neither Phoenix nor Edgeworth are buying it.
• Double Entendre: With her, it's just asking for trouble.
• Feet-First Introduction: In the 2016 anime, the first glimpse of April is her bare leg which she uses while in the bathroom to point where she wants the wine to be placed by the bellboy (actually Phoenix).
• Gonk: Normally she looks pretty, but once she's pissed off her face contortions look so bad it's ridiculous.
• Head-Turning Beauty: She has no problem to show her sex appeal, using a combination of ample cleavage, an innocent expression and a cutesy style of speech. Every man who meets her (except Phoenix and Edgeworth) is instantly smitten.
• I Take Offense to That Last One: When Phoenix calls her a "big fat liar" her only response is "...FAT!?"
• Naughty Nurse Outfit: There's official concept art of her in a sexy nurse uniform.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: She's not the cleverest wire-tapper, but she's far more competent than she seems at first.
• Psycho Pink: She's evil and has a lot of pink.
• Punny Name: April and May, obviously. The three kanji in her Japanese name idiomatically mean "high-, middle-, low-ranking" (and literally "pine, bamboo, plum". It's a Japanese thing). In fact, it's her and Redd's fault that the series has characters with punny names in the first place.
  • In French, she's called 'Masha Vril'; a combination of 'Mars' and 'Avril', which mean 'March' and 'April', respectively.
• Rose-Haired Sweetie: Subverted. Her pink hair may be natural, but her sweet demeanor is only an act.
• Sexy Secretary: She was the secretary of Redd White, the CEO of Bluecorp.
• Taking the Heat: Tries to do this for Redd White, denying her connections with him.
• The Tease: She likes to tease people and knows how to get her way.
• Third-Person Person: In the Japanese version.
• Twitchy Eye: The left side of her face twitches up every time she's caught off-guard.
• Undying Loyalty: Surprisingly, considering the kind of man he is and the kind of woman she is, April May is very loyal to her boss, Redd White, and is even willing to take the heat for him. When Phoenix originally tries to crack her, she outright asks him if he'd give up Mia Fey and insists she's just as loyal to her own boss. Potentially subverted, if Phoenix managed to convince her that he has her dead to rights, in which case she gives him a bit of information out of concern that he'll have her killed.
• The Vamp: She tries to be, but she fares poorly against anybody who can ignore her charms.
• Villainous Breakdown: After Phoenix manages to figure out April May's role in the crime, April May screams and causes one of the buttons of her top to pop off, allowing her breasts to bounce, before her face suddenly becomes Hulk-like and she starts screaming at everyone.
  April May: What's it to you, porcupine-head!? That stupid clock doesn't matter, okay!? She did it! And she should die for it! Die! […] Shut up, all of you! What gives you the right to talk to ME like that! You… you LAWYER!
• Wicked Heart Symbol: She wears a few hearts on her clothing, but she's a bitch and a criminal behind her sweet, cutesy façade.

Redd White (Masaru Konaka)

Voiced by (Japanese): Hiromichi Tezuka (anime)

Voiced by (English): Larry Brantley (anime)

Played by: Makoto Ayukawa (film)

"I am always abso-posi-lutely perfect!"

The wealthy president of Bluecorp who built his powerful company through blackmailing lawyers, judges, politicians, police, and all sorts of other people. Thanks to him, word of the police using a spirit medium for DL-6 got leaked to the press. So if not for him, Mia wouldn't have (specifically) become a lawyer herself. Then again, he's the one who kills her.

In the film, his involvement in the DL-6 Incident is the same, but he is instead a writer for a magazine and wrote the article that exposed police use of a spirit medium. He is also the witness to Maya's alleged murder of Mia as opposed to the Bellhop.

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• Adaptational Intelligence: His anime incarnation, while still a major Smug Snake and technically a mere Starter Villain, nonetheless shows noticeably more pragmatism (such as never hitting Phoenix just to prove a For the Evulz point — an action which incenses him enough to start going after White 100% in the game) and ability to roll with the punches in court.
• Adaptational Wimp: His live action incarnation, considering he's merely a writer and von Karma's pawn there, versus a wealthy blackmailer with his own company in the original Visual Novel. And he dies during the events.
• Adaptational Ugliness: His live action incarnation looks nothing like he does in the games; instead he looks like a mix between Severus Snape and Howard Stern, except Asian.
• Asshole Victim: In the movie.
• Bad Liar: For starters, he doesn't even bother to check that his testimony is consistent with as April May's. When flaunting his power to try to get Phoenix Wright arrested fails, he proceeds to incriminate himself with very little input from Phoenix himself.
• Beware the Silly Ones: He's somewhat goofy and not very intimidating until you realize that he is very powerful and has driven many people to suicide, and takes a sick joy in manipulating others.
• Blackmail: His specialty, and the basis of his business is to acquire the information that lets him blackmail whoever he wants.
• Bright Is Not Good: He's extremely flashy, wears a vibrant pink suit, sparkly jewelry, and sports purple hair. He's also an extremely dangerous blackmailer and murderer.
• Confess to a Lesser Crime: He almost gets away because of this. Edgeworth prompts him to confess to installing the wiretap in Mia's office, which would have given him an alibi to his intrusion in order to dodge the murder charge. Phoenix shuts him down by proving he couldn't have been at the office any time but the night of the murder.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Head of a big information firm, and rotten to the core.
• Death by Adaptation: Is poisoned in jail during the film, the day before Wright can call him as a witness in the Hammond murder case.
• Delusions of Eloquence: He prides himself on his large vocabulary of ten dollar words and thinks that "lesser" people can't keep up, despite him using all of them incorrectly. For example, he refers to April May as his "secretariat".
• Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat: With his massive number of connections, a decent amount of fake evidence implicating Maya, and barely anything concretely linking him to the case, had he simply kept his distance and let Edgeworth do his job, he would have almost certainly slipped out of the law's grasp untouched. Instead, he decides to not only change gears and frame Phoenix for the murder, but testify in court as a witness. This backfires completely, as it means Phoenix now has the real culprit on the stand and testifying... and it turns out, he's nowhere near as good at lying as he thinks he is.
• The Dreaded: Almost everyone in the local law enforcement is afraid of him, making the day with him as a witness difficult since the court (the Judge included) is on his side.
• Eagle Land: The localizations made him a Type 2 Eaglelander.
• Everything's Sparkly with Jewelry: Both his hands are covered in diamond rings, and one of his "confident" animations is to raise his hands and dazzle the audience with them.
• Evil, Inc.: He his the CEO of Bluecorp, which is an information firm that practices industrial-scale Blackmail.
• Evil Is Petty: A lot of his blackmail demands are things he doesn't actually need; he just wants to see his victims deprived of them (like Grossberg's treasured painting). He also straight-up assaults Phoenix, just because he can (the cops won't touch him).
• Evil Tower of Ominousness: His Bluecorp building, especially in the anime.
• Expy: Of Charles Augustus Milverton, another Blackmailer Smug Snake responsible for countless destroyed lives. And both men are ultimately taken down via Pay Evil unto Evil by different vengeful victims.
• Fatal Flaw: Pride. Redd White becomes so incensed that Phoenix would dare and try to challenge him that he decides to appear as a witness and try to implicate Phoenix in Mia Fey's murder without having any evidence to do so. Needless to say, this ends up biting him in the ass spectacularly.
• Faux Affably Evil: He acts like a quirky and jolly businessman, but this façade cracks when Phoenix questions him too much.
• Freudian Slip: If you press him on a certain statement, you can get him to make a pretty hilarious one.
  White: Then she turned and ran for the door.
  Phoenix: What did you do then?
  White: I gave chase, of course. (cue Oh, Crap! face)
• From Nobody to Nightmare: The Expanded Universe novel Turnabout of the Time Traveler reveals that, 15 years before the beginning of the series, White and Bluecorp were just a no-name start-up no one had heard of. Leaking DL-6 proved to be the chance he needed to begin gaining power, and by the time he murdered Mia he was running an extensive blackmail network that made him one of the most powerful men in the country.
• Gratuitous English: In the Japanese version - poorly. Mere words don't do it justice; it has to be seen.
• Gratuitous Spanish: In the English dub of the Anime - equally poorly.
• Greater-Scope Villain: In a way, he could be considered this to the whole plot of the original trilogy alongside Manfred von Karma, as he is the reason Mia Fey became an attorney in the first place (due to his involvement in the DL-6 Case) as well as being her killer (which would drive the actions of Godot and Dahlia in the third game).
• Hate Sink: Redd White is nothing more than a Jerkass who ruins people's lives for his own sick enjoyment. He's also a Smug Snake who thinks he can do whatever the hell he wants because of his status and rubs it in everyone's faces that no one can do anything about it.
• Head Desk: When Phoenix starts cornering him.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: In a general sense, him deciding to testify in court when he's already gotten out of it, since far as the court is concerned he doesn't exist (White is never even called to be a witness during the first day of the trial) is what allows Phoenix to prove that he's the real murderer. A more specific example is the piece of paper he used to pin the murder on Maya becomes an important evidence to prove his guilt; then it's implied that the list that Mia had Phoenix read in court that got Redd to confess is a list of people he's blackmailed. Especially noteworthy in that after White submits himself as a witness, Phoenix immediately finds a hole in his first testimony that's big enough for the crime to be pinned on him.
• Information Broker: Bluecorp provided enough dirt on just about every high-ranking person in the city to have real weight for White to use it as blackmail material and force everyone to do as he pleased.
• Jerkass: Speaks loudly how he can manipulate everyone to do whatever he wants. He even says that the courts, the police and the law are all "playthings" to him. Also, the way he was clearly preparing to throw his secretary under the bus for Mia's murder, and then casually accusing Phoenix of being Mia's murderer once Phoenix angers him shows how much of a despicable person Redd is.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: The master blackmailer is eventually blackmailed into confessing to the murder. Overlaps with Laser-Guided Karma as it was by the woman who he killed at the start of the case.
• Large Ham: "Welcome! Please furnish me with the title of your personage!"
• Laughably Evil: He's a ruthless CEO who has blackmailed hundreds of powerful people and even driven some of them to suicide. However, his Large Ham attitude, flashy appearance, and Delusions of Eloquence make him a rather humorous character despite everything that make him a Hate Sink. Especially in the anime with his Gratuitous English.
• Meaningful Name: Red and white mixed together creates pink, which Redd White sports.
• Man of Wealth and Taste: And way too damn proud of it.
• Narcissist: Redd is an incredibly vain and pretentious man with no empathy for anyone but himself who will gleefully ruin the lives of many without a shred of remorse.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: One may be tempted to brush him off as no real threat, since he's a goofball who dresses like an off-brand Liberace and misuses fancy words. But he's still a ruthless blackmailer and murderer who's driven multiple people to suicide.
• Obviously Evil: While his appearance is just overly flashy instead of actually evil-looking, his asshole behavior and chronic Smug Snake-ness prevents him from even trying to hide his shadiness. Also, the 1-2 intro blatantly shows him, you know, killing Mia.
• Psycho Pink: A male case; Redd White is Mia Fey's murderer and he sports a pink suit.
• Punny Name: Red, white, and blue. His color palette is comprised of combinations of the three colors. The kanji of his Japanese name mean "small, medium, large". Indeed, it's his and April's fault that the series have characters with punny names in the first place.
• Purple Prose: He's very fond of this, and occasionally makes up words entirely.
  White: Please furnish me with the title of your personage! ...Your name! What's your name? I was just inquirably asking the title that you go by.
• Real Men Wear Pink: Wears a vibrant pink suit.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Oh, yeah. His entire Verbal Tic is using unnecessarily large words whenever possible, often incorrectly, and he's not above outright making them up.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: He claims to even have the Chief Prosecutor under his thumb, placing him above the law.
• Shout-Out: In the Japanese version, his response when Edgeworth asks his name is to quote Muhammad Avdol:
  YES I AM!
• Sinister Shades: A blackmailer who, in the film, sports shades constantly.
• Small Role, Big Impact: He only appears in the second case and never makes an appearance beyond it, but his actions (mostly killing Mia) reach far past his involvement.
• Smug Smiler: His arrogant grin never leaves his face except for his Villainous Breakdown.
• Smug Snake: By the truckload. His overconfidence in his blackmail network proves to be his undoing when he decides to testify in court, despite the fact that it would be more pragmatic to remain out of the spotlight. Why did he decide to testify? Because he's annoyed at Phoenix not backing down at his threats and decides that he will have Phoenix convicted for the murder to get back at him, despite having no way to prove this beyond his word. The next day in court, Phoenix easily blows his shoddy testimony to smithereens (for reference, he doesn't even bother corroborating his testimony to match April May's) and it's not like he can threaten to blackmail anyone right out in the open in public court since blackmail itself is a crime. If it hadn't been for Edgeworth repeatedly throwing him lifelines, Phoenix would probably have gotten him convicted all on his own.
• The Sociopath: Remorselessly kills Mia, frames her sister Maya for it, ruined their mother and family's reputation, makes Grossberg's life a living hell for 15 years, plans to abandon his secretary to the court's judgement once she fails to keep the heat off of his company, assaults Phoenix and later tries to frame him for Mia's murder as well, and drove countless people to suicide with his blackmail racket, all just to preserve his own hedonistic lifestyle. He even refers to his blackmail victims as "{...} mere toys. Playthings for my amusement!"
• Starter Villain: Fits this trope for the series as a whole in a better sense than Sahwit, as White is the culprit of the first full-length case and the first villain in the series with a proper, calculated plan for murder, rather than just a common burglar who killed in the heat of the moment. Notably, he's actually one of the most powerful villains in the series in terms of societal influence, but is still easily defeated because he's that bad at testifying for himself.
• Stupid Evil: Downplayed. While Redd White is a talented blackmailer and extortionist, he's a woefully inept killer who couldn't bluff his way out of a paper bag.
• Sunglasses at Night: Constantly wears sunglasses in the film—even indoors and at night.
• A Taste Of His Own Medicine: After blackmailing many innocent people, Redd White ultimately gets blackmailed himself, courtesy of Phoenix and Mia.
• Verbal Tic: Using the biggest words he can get away with, and often using them incorrectly. He occasionally makes them up on the spot.
• Villainous Breakdown: Flips out several times, especially when Phoenix innocently reads off a list of the names of people he's blackmailed, screaming at him to stop. Ironically, this means he is blackmailed by Phoenix and Mia to confess his crime.
  Redd White: S-s-stop! Desist! Halt! P-please, stop! Make him stop! How… how did you get that list!?
• Villains Want Mercy: He pathetically pleads with Phoenix to not read off a list of people he's blackmailed.
• Would Hit a Girl: If him clubbing Mia says anything.

Turnabout Samurai (Gyakuten no Tonosaman)

Will Powers (Saburo Niboshi)

Voiced by (Japanese): Shota Yamamoto (anime)

Voiced by (English): Chris Rager (anime)

"The Steel Samurai is the lead character in a popular kid's show. He walks the streets of Neo Olde Tokyo... Fighting battle after battle against the Evil Magistrate and his minions. Of course, he never really defeats the Evil Magistrate. Although... I guess he did defeat him this time..."

A TV star, and the first client Maya assisted Phoenix defending. Most well-known for his role as the Steel Samurai. He's also a total sweetheart. Appears again in 2-4 and in an Investigations 2 case, both of which have something to do with show business.

---

• All of the Other Reindeer: No one seems to ever let him forget his brutish appearance. Oldbag in particular.
• Animal Motifs: Phoenix compared him to a lion in 2-4. His hairdo and buff physique probably helps in that comparison.
• Apologises a Lot: Taken to hilarious levels when you present Pearl's picture to him in case 2-4, since both of them have this trope, when he tries (and fails) to guess her relationship to Phoenix and Maya.
• Badass Baritone: In the anime.
• Be as Unhelpful as Possible: Subverted, and hard. Befitting his kindhearted nature, Powers is one of the few witnesses in the series to be entirely honest and informative in his testimony. Which makes it all the more awful that Phoenix is forced to desperately find faint contradictions in an attempt to buy time for Maya's rescue.
• Big Brother Mentor: Describes himself as one to Matt Engarde.
• Broken Pedestal: Jack Hammer was his role model. Hammer accidentally killed someone and, while trying to kill Dee Vasquez, tried to frame Will Powers for it out of jealousy.
• The Bus Came Back: Twice. After appearing as the defendant in Case 1-3, he disappears for the rest of the game, as most defendants do. However, he reappears in Case 2-4, and even later on, in Investigations 2.
• Butt-Monkey: At one point Dee Vasquez notes that he's so ordinary looking, he's sometimes left behind by mistake when the rest of the company comes back from a trip.
• Carpet of Virility: To match his large, mane-like hair, he's got a hairy, masculine chest.
• Cross-Cast Role: In-Universe: He plays the titular Pink Princess in a new show, although it helps that the costume is also a full bodysuit like the Steel Samurai.
• Demoted to Extra:
  • He's the defendant of "Turnabout Samurai" and plays a major role in "Farewell, My Turnabout" as a key witness, but his third appearance in "The Grand Turnabout" sees him as a mostly superfluous character there to give a bit of exposition. Penny ends up with more lines than him.
  • He does show up in the anime for "Farewell, My Turnabout", but only in the beginning. He disappears completely for the rest of the arc.
• Face of a Thug: A Running Gag for him. Poor guy. He almost breaks into tears when Pearl says that she thinks his face makes him look kind. A rather foolish cop made this mistake and arrested him in case 2-4 as someone who must have done something. Upon interrogation, he is cleared and promoted from suspect to that case's star witness. Earlier, in case 1-3, Maya sees him and immediately says:
  Maya: Um, maybe I shouldn't be saying this… But he definitely did it. Murder. At least once. Maybe twice.
• Fall Guy: Hammer intended to make him this; let's just say it didn't quite work out as planned, especially once Phoenix takes his case.
• Friend to All Children: He doesn't just play the role of the Steel Samurai for the money, he also does it because he loves being someone for kids to look up to. In fact, the reason he never publicly revealed himself as the Steel Samurai is because he didn't want to scare the children with his intimidating appearance.
• Genre Savvy: When pressed in a part of his testimony in "Farewell, My Turnabout", he expresses concern how Phoenix managed to get a witness a Guilty verdict during every previous trial, and if that means he's going to get falsely blamed himself.
• Gentle Giant: He's a big guy with the Face of a Thug, but he's probably the sweetest guy you'll ever meet.
• Gossipy Hens: Rare male example. Despite being a celebrity himself, Powers loves celebrity gossip, seeing the world of celebrities as glamorous. Of course, that's partially because the poor guy perpetually has an outsider's perspective due to his appearance and meek personality.
• Hero Antagonist: As a result of becoming the prosecution's star witness in case 2-4, he becomes this because Phoenix is Forced into Evil by Shelly de Killer's Blackmail. He testifies truthfully unlike most witnesses you encounter in the Ace Attorney series from the get-go, and the only things that Phoenix can contradict are rather minor errors.
• Heroic Build: Extremely tall and buff. This is used as evidence against him in Turnabout Samurai, since he's seemingly the only one who could've worn the very large and bulky Steel Samurai suit and kill the victim. That is, until it turned out the victim himself, who is of a very similar build, was the one who wore the suit.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: He doesn’t think very highly of himself, as evident by some of his lines in 2-4.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Most of the time, Will simply can't believe who the real culprit is in a case because it's someone he trusts as a coworker. He just doesn't see the worst in people.
• Informed Deformity: His face, while rough, doesn't seem frightening to the viewer at all. Although this might simply be a case of him thinking he's genuinely ugly, and the only one who really rags on him for it is Wendy Oldbag.
• I Owe You My Life: He is eternally grateful for being saved in case 1-3, which is why he invites the heroes along to the awards ceremony in case 2-4.
• Nice Guy: Truly one of the most gentle and kind-hearted characters in the series. He is so nice that he is one of the few witnesses in the Ace Attorney series that testifies truthfully on the stand from the start, leaving only minor errors for Phoenix to contradict. Upon learning that the victim of 1-3 was jealous of him being the main hero of the Steel Samurai, Powers admits that if Hammer told him about this, he would've been glad to swap places with him.
• People in Rubber Suits: Reappears in Ace Attorney Investigations 2 to play the title role in the new Moozilla movie. The suit was also used for less pleasant reasons, but not by him.
• Punny Name: He's got willpower. "Niboshi" is dried sardines (yes, it's ironic). "Saburo" means "third son" or "three lights" depending on the kanji and could also be a pun with "niboshi" which could also be read with other kanji as "two stars."
• Wholesome Crossdresser: After the events of case 1-3, he stars as the title character of The Pink Princess: Warrior of Little Olde Tokyo.
• Younger Than They Look: He's 23 in his first appearance, making him younger than Phoenix.

Jack Hammer (Takeshi Ibukuro)

Voiced by (English): Phillip Annarella (anime)

Former big-name star of Global Studios. His final role was as the Evil Magistrate on The Steel Samurai. Died due to a stab wound.

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• Adaptational Heroism: The anime removes the part about him drugging Will Powers' lunch, only implying his jealousy towards him with the fact that he still tried to frame him with the injured ankle, and also implying that what happened with Manuel really was an accident.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: In-universe; Dee Vasquez believes that his killing of Manuel wasn't accidental, with her reasoning being that he wouldn't have put up with her five years of blackmail if it was.
• Blackmail: He was blackmailed by Dee Vasquez after he accidentally killed Manuel.
• Death by Irony: Gets impaled on the same fence that he accidentally killed another man on years before, which was also an unplanned tragedy.
• Evil Versus Evil: On one hand, he tried to murder someone and frame an innocent for it; on the other hand, his intended murder victim had been blackmailing him, ruining his career out of vengeance over a (possible) accident, and has used her ties to the mafia to make people disappear, including an attempt on the title character.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Although Oldbag sympathizes with him over his manslaughter and blackmail at Vasquez's hands, even she admits that he went too far by drugging Will Powers and trying to frame him for murder and cooperates with Phoenix when he proves what Hammer was trying to do.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Zig-zagged like crazy. His original intent for going to Studio 2 was to kill Dee Vasquez and frame Will Powers for the crime. He himself gets killed by Dee (albeit unintentionally), yet Will Powers still ends up getting blamed for his death.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Dies via impalement through the chest, but on a fence spike, rather than the Samurai Spear as originally believed.
• Karmic Death: He got killed while trying to kill Dee Vasquez (for blackmailing him) and was in the process of trying to frame Will Powers for it.
• Punny Name: Jackhammer.
• Spikes of Doom: Met his end on some of these. Specifically, Vasquez knocked him over a railing onto a spiky fence.
• White-Dwarf Starlet: His career went downhill after he accidentally killed one of his fellow actors, and the deceased's lover decided to take vengeance by actively smothering his career.

Wendy Oldbag (Kaoru Ohba)

Voiced by (Japanese): Yuu Sugimoto (anime)

Voiced by (English): Anastasia Muñoz (anime)

"Shush! I'm talking to my dear Edgey-Wedgey right now! Don't interrupt us, gramps!"

A hard-ass old woman who for some reason is a security guard, and another one of the series' frequent witnesses. Goes on long-winded rants at a moment's notice, and has a thing for soon-to-be dead actors and Edgeworth, the latter of whom (un)affectionately dubs her the "wicked witch of the witness stand".

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• Abhorrent Admirer: To Miles "Edgey-Poo" Edgeworth, who is usually the sole target of her affection. She also start swooning for Lang at some point but she insists to herself she's Edgeworth's girl.
• Affectionate Nickname: "Edgey-Poo", for Edgeworth.^note "Michan" in Japanese for Mitsurugi. It's as cringe-worthy as Edgeworth thinks it is.
• Berserk Button: Inverted. She usually calms down when Edgeworth shows up. For Edgeworth, though, she serves as his Trauma Button.
• Blush Sticker: Pops up at the thought of her latest celebrity obsession. Best not thought about at any length.
• The Cameo:
  • Only appears in the third game in the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue. She still wears the astronaut costume for some reason.^note (The developers had wanted to give her an entirely new outfit but ran out of time to create the required artwork, and so ended up going with the astronaut costume, rather than her security guard outfit from the first game, because of Rule of Funny)
  • She appears in a trailer for Apollo Justice, despite her not showing up in the game. An old woman that appears in Case 2 resembles Oldbag in both looks and attitude, but it's never confirmed to be her. It was supposed to be her, but this ended up an Orphaned Reference.
  • She appears in the Japanese trailer advertising the DLC case for Spirit of Justice despite not showing up in that either.
• Dirty Old Woman:
  • She make several lecherous comments towards Edgeworth, much to his embarrassment and disgust.
  • She also mistakes Shi-Long Lang's polite request for questioning as if it also were a pick-up line. She insists she's loyal to Edgeworth, however.
  • Her fangirlism towards Juan Corrida has shades of this.
• Donut Mess with a Cop: A security guard, but she's quite fond of donuts.
• The Dreaded: To Edgeworth. No seriously, meeting her, in his own words, makes his day go from “not my day” into “waking nightmare” territory. On the day in question, he had already relived his trauma with earthquakes, been accused of murder, had to deliver ransom money, been kidnapped, had his jurisdiction usurped, and discovered two separate murder victims.
  Edgeworth: (Nooooo! Why HER!? Why HERE!? Why NOW!?)
• Fan Disservice:
  • Investigations puts her in an extremely busty Pink Princess outfit.
  • You also get to collect her undershirt as evidence. Edgeworth is rightfully shaken by the very thought.
• Flanderization: In the first game Oldbag, while unpleasable and prone to insulting people, did have a reasonable side, and even helped Phoenix once it's proven that Hammer was trying to frame Will Powers. Later appearances would make her more and more abrasive and unhelpful.
• Grumpy Old Man: She has a horribly bad temper.
• Hoist by Her Own Petard: In Turnabout Samurai, the reasons she gives for suspecting Will Powers when she's on the witness stand are eventually used by Phoenix to cast suspicion on her.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • She will occasionally make comments about the judge being old. For obvious reasons, she has absolutely no room to talk.
  • In Investigations, she complains about a stalker letter she received (which was actually intended for someone else)... while she's been sending Edgeworth flowers for years.
• I Was Quite a Looker: Or so she says. In the manga, her grandmother Wendolyn is channeled and everyone mistakes her for Wendy because they look just like each other. There is an image of her as a younger girl, and if this can be used as an example, then it's actually true.
• Jerkass: Very reluctant to give help, especially if she thinks you're trying to smear the name of someone she adores. Usually you have to pay her off with something to get her to talk and even then she won't say it nicely.
• Jerkass to One: While she’s not very nice to anyone outside of Edgeworth, she seems to be rather harsh toward Powers in general.
• Leitmotif: She doesn't technically have a specific leitmotif, but "Noisy People" from Investigations tends to play specifically in scenes involving her.
• Motor Mouth: To the point of Edgeworth raising an objection to stop one of her near-infinite rambles in the first game. It gets pretty silly in JFA when she goes into one of her sprees while in an airtight helmet. This doesn't change in the anime, where she speaks at an annoyingly fast pace.
• Mystery Magnet: People keep getting murdered in or near areas that she has been in except for the courtroom. She is not culpable in any of them.
• New Job as the Plot Demands: She's a security guard in all of her appearances save Investigations, but she has a new employer each time, including 2 over the course of 2 days in Investigations.
• Old Windbag: To everyone's dismay, especially Phoenix's in the first case she appears in and Edgeworth's afterwards. Even her name is a pun on that, and the lampshades fly thick and fast.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • In Case 1-3, she goes silent and very calm the moment you irrevocably prove the victim (who she idolized) drugged the defendant shortly before he was murdered. She then proceeds to tell you VERY important information without ever raising her voice or spilling into a ramble. It is the only time in the entire series she acts this way.
  • In the manga, she pleads with Phoenix to defend Julie, insisting that she couldn’t have murdered Flip. Maya notes that she's "never seen Ms. Oldbag like this".
• Punny Name: Last name refers to the term "old bag" for an ugly old woman, and combined with her first name, also applies to her long-windedness ("windy old bag"). Her Japanese name is a combination of "old lady" ("obachan") and "idiot" (Oh Bakaoru).
• Red Herring: She is this in her first appearance in Turnabout Samurai - In the previous two cases, the first witness to accuse the defendant turned out to be the real murderer and conspirator helping the real murderer, respectively. Additionally, she is immediately hostile to Phoenix and Maya. Those two facts in combination make her the most obvious suspect to anyone expecting the case to follow the same formula as the first two, but in the end it turns out her testimony is mostly accurate (Save for a lie of omission only indirectly related to the case.) and she has nothing to do with the murder.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: She accuses Matt Engarde in Case 2-4 of being Juan Corrida's murderer because he's an evil person that wanted to get close to Juan and his manager to cause an scandal. Only the "wanting to cause a scandal" part is wrong, in fact Matt's motive was to avoid a scandal (although Matt had someone else commit the murder for him).
• Screw Politeness, I'm a Senior!: She rambles on and on about insignificant points, and gets pissed when anyone asks her to keep on track, and often calls poor Nick a "whippersnapper".
• Scrolling Text: At very fast speeds.
• Spanner in the Works: Manages to be such a major one in Turnabout Ablaze that it actually manages to get Edgeworth to thank her. Had she not held onto the specific box of Samurai Dogs that Alba bled on, there would be no way to dispute his claims of merely being lost on the way to the bathroom, which would keep Edgeworth from being able to decisively link him to Coachen's murder in the dressing room.
• Third-Person Person: In the Japanese version she always calls herself the very cutesy "Oba-chan".
• Unfortunate Names: Merely calling her by her last name ends up sounding like an insult to her age. Interestingly, she is identified in the text box by her last name, rather than "???" like everyone else, even before you learn her name. Maybe because it's a Meaningful Name.
• Unreadably Fast Text: Once she gets going, it's nearly impossible to keep up.
• Vague Age: Always written as "???". An easy to miss line in 2-4 reveals she stopped counting.
• Zero-Effort Boss: Of a sort in Justice for All. Four psyche-locks appear when she is asked about what she witnessed on the night of the murder and she refuses to speak about it unless you get her a present. Because she adores Juan greatly, all it takes is showing her his autograph to her to break all four locks at once.

Penny Nichols (Yumiko Mamiya)

"I don't care what kind of girl you might think I am; I need that card!"

An assistant for Global Studios who was present the day of Hammer's murder. Despite this, she doesn't play much of a role.

---

• The Bus Came Back: Like Sahwit, Penny finally returns in the final case of Investigations 2 after a 10-year hiatus from the series. Unlike Sahwit, her role is only marginally more important there than in the original Ace Attorney. Even Edgeworth barely remembers who she is.
• Contrived Coincidence: Like Cody Hackins, she collects Steel Samurai trading cards. She was looking for an Ultra Rare card that Cody happened to have a double of and was willing to give it away, and she herself was willing to trade an Ultra Rare Premium that Cody was looking for.
• Demoted to Extra: The anime severely reduces her already small role by not giving her any spoken lines, and she only gets occasional shots.
• Fangirl: She flips out when she discovers that Phoenix has the last Steel Samurai trading card she needs.
• Flat Character: Word has it the reason why she was even included in Investigations 2 was because of a popular in-joke among the staff as to who even remembered her, due to her incredibly insignificant role.
• The Generic Guy: She's possibly the most 'normal' and well-adjusted person in the entirety of Ace Attorney. The fact that having a grounded look and personality makes her stand out in this wacky Cast of Snowflakes is likely the main reason she is remembered in the fandom at all, and her small appearance in Investigations 2 plays up her basicness.
• Meganekko: She wears glasses, contributing to her dorky nature.
• Only Sane Woman: of the employees we meet at Global Studios, she's the only one who seems completely well-adjusted, in comparison to Will's weepiness and self-esteem issues, Sal's horrific man-child tendencies, Wendy's anger issues, and Dee's dominating treatment of her staff.
• Otaku: At least she is a much more adorable fan than the ugly Manella.
• Punny Name: Pennies and nickels. "Mamiya" might be a pun on "mania".
• Youthful Freckles: Understandably, as she's only 18.

Cody Hackins (Kyuta Ohtaki)

Voiced by (Japanese): Shizuka Ishigami (anime)

Voiced by (English): Kara Edwards (anime)

"I go to every live performance! I always take a picture when the Steel Samurai lands the final blow! Whizzam! I got 'em all! I never missed one! A perfect collection!"

A bratty seven-year-old Steel Samurai-obsessed fanboy. He's been to every live performance of it and decides that just once he'd like to see an actual filming of the show. The end result is he saw Jack Hammer get murdered.

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• Blush Sticker: Has two pink circles perpetually on his cheeks.
• Brain Bleach: His reaction after seeing that Will Powers also plays the role of Pink Princess.
• Bratty Half-Pint: He's obnoxious and sasses off to every character save Mia, whom he seems to like for some reason. He does ultimately volunteer a genuinely helpful photo in the end, though.
• Children Are Innocent: Word of God says that he was introduced as a witness because a child's reasons for lying would not be the same as an adult's in the same situation.
• Demoted to Extra: The anime doesn't hold a court hearing for his testimony because Nick and Maya decide to lure him out with the info (by way of Nick binge-watching Steel Samurai movies all-night long...and failing to recall the right stuff with Cody around but still gets the job done) without even having to require Penny's help with their fascination for collecting Steel Samurai cards (thus diminishing her role further). However, despite this, his role is more active in the events and he becomes a Spanner in the Works who convinces a heartbroken Wendy to speak up and give Nick the crucial evidence to indict the culprit in the case.
• Exact Words: He boasts about his 100% complete photo collection of every single one of the Steel Samurai's victories onscreen or in public performances. Note the word "victories". Phoenix realizes that the real reason why he didn't take a photo of the attack despite being literally in front of it was that the Steel Samurai lost.
• Harmful to Minors: Averted and then spoofed in the credits — you would think seeing a person killed before his very eyes might be traumatizing. However, due to being a young child, he clearly doesn't understand that what he saw was real. He does cry at the witness stand, though only because Phoenix took apart his testimony. But seeing Will Powers come out of a Pink Princess costume? That left a scar.
  Cody: It was kind of a shock for a boy of my tender age.
• Innocent Inaccurate: When he testifies, it's plain that he doesn't realize what he witnessed was a murder. Well, a killing, at any rate.
• Insufferable Genius: When Phoenix tries to buy him back with his own Steel Samurai card.
  Cody: By offering me something I already own, you're in effect eschewing the very basis of our consumer society, namely the principle of fair trade! Man, for a grownup, you sure are dumb!
  Phoenix: W-what do they teach these kids in school these days!? Quantum physics!?
• Intrepid Reporter: He claims to have taken pictures of every single one of the Steel Samurai's victories from the TV show to physical live-action public performances which he publishes in a book.
• Katanas Are Just Better: Despite the fact that the Steel Samurai mainly uses a spear, he carries around a katana on his back. He can't get it out of the sheath, though.
• Ocular Gushers: When Phoenix finally succeeds in taking apart his testimony. It sure doesn't feel good to make a child burst into tears as he realizes that his idol was killed.
• Otaku: As his Japanese name spells out.
• Punny Name: Code-hacker. As for his Japanese name, the first three kanji characters (in Eastern name order) form "otaku".

Sal Manella (Takuya Uzai)

Voiced by (Japanese): Masato Nishino (anime)

Voiced by (English): Tyler Walker (anime)

"I try not to pay much attention to things that don't interest me. LOL."

Director of the Steel Samurai. He embodies the typical image of an obsessive teenage (despite being 32) geeky fanboy, in both appearance, personality, and mannerisms.

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• Abhorrent Admirer: To poor Maya.
• Adaptational Heroism: In the anime, Vasquez moves the victim's body by herself, leaving him out of the loop.
• Big Eater: Eats quite a lot.
• Compressed Adaptation: The anime removes Vasquez's Fetch Quest for a missing script, which is instead changed to him finding it when first introduced.
• Crush Filter: In the anime, his first look at Maya has him see her with a more adult body, then reimagines that as a busty kimono-clad Magical Girl, prompting him to think up plans for a new show called "The Pink Princess".
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The anime shows how he's basically abused by Dee Vasquez, such as making him into a human footstool… while he still is overjoyed writing a script on the floor.
• Extreme Doormat: Powers and Oldbag describe him as a masochistic suckup to Vasquez willing to do literally everything she says, explaining why he helped move Hammer's body.
• Fat Idiot: Evidently he has some talent given his work as director, but the majority of his screentime shows that when outside of his work he's not exactly bright.
• Gonk: Is a fat slob with obviously poor hygiene and odious habits.
• Leet Lingo: His speech is littered with emoticons, LOLs, and 1337s. He even manages to speak a ":(" at the thought of having not been able to eat a T-bone steak. When he's speaking seriously, though, this gets downplayed to just occasional usage, rather than every other word - thankfully, since trying to decipher actually important information from this kind of speech would just be frustrating.
• Karma Houdini: If the success of his new show Pink Princess and his cameo in Investigations are of any indication, he somehow gets away with aiding in the coverup to a homicide and committing perjury.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: It took being silently intimidated by Edgeworth to get him to speak normally. Well, most of the time, but it made his Witness Testimony a lot easier.
• Otaku: In its worst form possible.
• Precision F-Strike: He says "WTF" when you first meet him. Later, he says "My ass is p0wned if I don't find [the script]". Especially noticeable as the games generally keep their dialogue swear free.
• Punny Name: He's as sickening as salmonella. "Takuya" comes from "otaku", and "Uzai" means "annoying".
• What Happened to the Mouse?: His fate is never revealed after it's revealed that he helped Dee Vasquez move Jack Hammer's body. Despite that, he was able to get Pink Princess into production and it became a success. He is seen again in Investigations eating lunch, but it's a cameo appearance that has no relevance to the plot.

Dee Vasquez (Sakura Himegami)

Voiced by (Japanese): Yurika Hino (anime)

Voiced by (English): Janelle Lutz (anime)

Played by: Miho Ninagawa (film)

"Don't hit your desk. It irritates me."

Global Studios (and Steel Samurai) producer that built the studio back up from the brink of ruin, and apparently is some sort of business genius. She's also got ties to the mob.

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• Adaptational Villainy: The anime removes the implication that Jack Hammer might have deliberately killed Manuel, along with the detail of Vasquez having been close to Manuel, which makes her less sympathetic than the game attempted to frame her as.
• Arc Villain: She plays this role for 1-3.
• Anti-Villain: Zigzagged. It's easy to see her as sympathetic in the game, as her murder was in self defense and it's implied that Manuel was close to her, but it's important to remember that she was still a petty blackmailer who spent years threatening and abusing Jack Hammer over Manuel's accidental death. Likewise, she's established to have been a member of the mob and ordered her goons to kill Phoenix and Maya so casually that it couldn't have been the first time she's given such an order.
• Berserk Button: When Maya mentions the incident where Manuel was killed by Hammer as an accident, she drops her stoic facade for a bit to yell at her before regaining her composure, angry that Maya believes it was an accident.
• Blackmail: She was blackmailing Jack Hammer after he accidentally killed another actor.
• Broken Bird: Five years ago, she watched Manuel die in an accident at Jack Hammer's hands. In the flashback, she is incredibly distraught at his death, the only time you see her act emotionally.
• Evil Versus Evil: The confrontation between Jack Hammer, who had no issues in trying to frame Will Powers of a murder out of jealousy, and herself, a blackmailer with ties to the mafia.
• Evil Wears Black: Marks her as a menacing, secretive woman.
• A Glass in the Hand: She breaks her pipe during her Villainous Breakdown.
• The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry: In the promotional manga Turnabout Crossover, she has a sister, Tampopo Himegami (Dandee Vasquez in the Fan Translation), who is (surprise!) also a producer. invoked
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: She's always smoking, and evidently has smoker's lung, since her speech is indicated by the lower-pitched beep-de-beeps usually reserved for males. ^note This may have been a glitch. It's changed to the standard female beeps in the iOS ports, though it's oddly restored in the 3DS ports based on the iOS port. Notably the only character in the series to be shown actually smoking, rather than using something like a lollipop or a bubble pipe.
• Graceful Loser: Once she is finally caught out as the killer (though in self-defense), she accepts her loss with dignity.
  "...Yes. I am guilty. It was me... Congratulations, Mr. Wright. I lose... again."
• He Knows Too Much: When Phoenix and Maya refuse to hand over the five-year-old picture of Manuel's death, she calls in her "boys" to "erase" them.
• Karma Houdini: Her attempt to kill Phoenix and Maya isn't even mentioned in court despite Gumshoe catching her in the act. Though seeing as she got arrested for voluntary manslaughter, this trope could be considered subverted, or at least downplayed. Also, the mafia connections were irrelevant to the murder trial, so mentioning them would have breached the court rules that could result in a valid objection.
• Killing in Self-Defense: At the climax of the case, Phoenix correctly deduces that her killing of Jack Hammer was an act of self-defense. She doesn't become more sympathetic because of it, however, seeing as Hammer's attempt was prompted by the fact that she had ruined his career by blackmailing him into submission.
• Knight of Cerebus: Sahwitt was mostly a joke, and White while a despicable bastard was also Stupid Evil the moment he was forced to speak in court. Vasquez meanwhile is much better at covering her tracks, and is the first time the heroes have to work to take out a culprit. Her backstory and the circumstances behind Hammer's death also begins when the series begins showing the culprits in a more three-dimensional light, with actions that are more complex than simple pursuits of wealth and power.
• The Mafia: She's got major connections in this criminal organization.
• No OSHA Compliance: Those spiky fence posts that Jack Hammer died by. One would think that the crew would have removed them after the same thing happened five years ago.
• Not So Stoic: When cornered during the trial.
• Punny Name: She's a diva. "Sakura" is obvious, and "Himegami" means "princess-goddess".
• The Quiet One: Part of why her Cross-Examination is so difficult is that she is very terse in everything she says, leaving very little to call her out on.
• The Stoic: Throughout much of 1-3, she doesn't seem to be concerned at all with the proceedings.
• Uncertain Doom: Averted. Although Dee did kill Jack Hammer and murder is normally punished with the death penalty in the ace attorney universe, she very likely escaped the death penalty and got a prison sentence instead. This is due to the facts that she lacked premeditation, killed Jack in self defense as Jack was the one trying to kill her, and the killing was technically an accident and Dee never intended to impale Jack on the fence.
• Villainous Breakdown: Once her role in Jack Hammer's death is proven, she squeezes her pipe so hard that she breaks it. Compared to almost every villain in the series, her breakdown is rather mild.
• Younger Than They Look: Despite looking middle-aged, she's only 34.

Manuel (Takumi)

An actor of Global Studios. He died in an accident during a filming.

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• Fatal Method Acting: He was killed after falling on a fence during the filming of an action scene. invoked
• Posthumous Character: He died 5 years prior to case.
• Satellite Character: Exists only to give Dee Vasquez motivation to blackmail and manipulate Hammer.

Turnabout Goodbyes (Gyakuten, soshite Sayonara)

Robert Hammond (Yukio Namakura)

Voiced by (English): Blake Shepard (anime)

Played by: Eisuke Sasai (film)

An attorney that once worked at Grossberg Law Offices. An Amoral Attorney that doesn't care whether his clients are guilty or not. He is the victim of 1-4, where he is killed via a gunshot.

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• Adaptational Jerkass: In the anime, his selfishness is taken further when after Yanni Yogi's insanity plea did earn a Not Guilty verdict at the cost of his social standing and his loving wife, Hammond mocks him for thinking this would work without consequence during the aftermath.
  Hammond: I didn't say it would be easy.
• Amoral Attorney: Even though Yanni Yogi was actually innocent, he refused to do proper investigation into the incident and instead had Yogi plead insanity to get him off. This in turn caused him to become a social outcast and haunted him for years.
• Asshole Victim: He was killed by the man whose life he ruined, something that's hard to feel sorry for him over.
• Karmic Death: He got killed by Yanni Yogi, the person whose life was completely ruined by his refusal to find actual evidence. Ironically Yogi had gone partially insane when he killed Hammond, 15 years after being forced to fake insanity to get a not guilty verdict.
• Kick the Dog: In the anime, he brushes off Yogi's complaints about how his idea to go for an insanity plea ruined his life.
• Posthumous Character: Like every victim in the Ace Attorney series, he's mentioned every time in the trial, and the job of the player is to find the truth behind his death.

Lotta Hart (Natsumi Ohsawagi)

Voiced by (Japanese): Reiko Takagi (anime)

Voiced by (English): Whitney Rodgers (anime)

Played by: Mitsuki Tanimura (film)

"Hey! You! Hold on, now! This gal's got a few questions to ask!"

Freelance photographer with a southern accent and a lotta hair. She occasionally appears as a witness when trying to capture some paranormal event or other hot gossip.

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• Adapted Out: Lotta does not appear in the anime version of "Farewell, My Turnabout". Larry takes her role.
• Ascended Extra: She goes from a spriteless cameo and a single line in the final case of Investigations to having a significantly larger role in the last two cases of the sequel.
• Be as Unhelpful as Possible: Played with. Lotta is actually quite truthful in her testimonies and rarely lies. The problem is she's also prone to make some very absurd assumptions, and her incredibly misleading photos do not help.
• Berserk Button: Lotta loves her camera. She always has it, and does NOT like seeing any abuse come to it, she will go nuts if it does. The first time you run into her she screams at you because you wasted all of her film by setting off the camera she was using. Maya forces Phoenix to pay for the expenses.
• Camera Fiend: As noted above, she's never without her trusty camera.
• Convenient Photograph: In every single case she's ended up in, because she has her camera on hand or somewhere in the vacinity, there's always a photo that shows exactly what happened or has a vital clue. Even though her photos aren't always clear, they're clear enough and have the relevant details necessary to help solve the case.
• Dumbass Has a Point: Manages to correctly identify the murderer in Case 2-2; Ini Miney, by pointing out that if Maya is innocent, she's the only one who doesn't have an alibi. In the same case, she's the only one who calls Franziska out on whipping people, and tries to get the judge to do something about it.
• Failed a Spot Check:
  • Much of the first day of the trial in 1-4 involves establishing that she could not have seen the murder in question, due in part to not looking at the boat.
  • "There ain't no way anyone was hangin' out behind that foldin' screen!" This is a subversion because there's good reason she couldn't see anyone. Maya was hidden in a box, and the person who had been hiding there was out in front, pretending to be Maya.
• Fiery Redhead: She has a red afro and she gets angry quite often, either at something Phoenix did or something bad that happens to her.
• Funny Afro: In the second game, she asks if you remember her name. "Lotta Hair" is one of the possible answers. Pearl remembers her as that woman with "cotton candy" hair.
• Going for the Big Scoop: This is Lotta's ONLY reason for being on ANY of the crime scenes she shows up at.
• The Idiot from Osaka: Lotta plays this trope straight with her brash personality, though she claims the stereotype is completely wrong - it's just her who acts that way. In the US version, she's The Idiot From The South, instead.
• Intrepid Reporter:
  • Subverted. She thinks she's this, but she doesn't really do any hard digging for info, and she contemplates a career switch whenever the going gets rough.
  • Case 4 of Investigations 2 has this played straight, where she, along with Nicole Swift, personally track down the black market auction at the P.I.C. offices in the Grand Tower.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Lotta isn't exactly what one would consider the nicest person in the world. In fact, the first time you find her she not only seems ABSOLUTELY NUTS but is loud and rude. Until you tell her she might be a witness to a murder. Despite being hot-tempered and sassy, she's actually one of the most willingly helpful recurring characters.
• Laughing Mad: Happens once in case two in the second game. It scares the heck out of Phoenix Wright.
• Leitmotif: "Blissful People". While she also shares it with other characters in the first game, it becomes associated solely with her from Justice For All onward. She even has this as her theme in Investigations 2, which otherwise uses its own set of "People" themes.
• Paparazzi: After Case 2-2, Lotta decided to pursuit a career with "more glamour and less gore". Obviously, this was the next logical step.
• Punny Name: She's got a lot of heart, especially for photography and her camera. "Ohsawagi" means "big commotion". When she shows up in 2-2 and asks if you remember her name, one of the gag choices is "Lotta Hair" playing off her actual name, and her funny afro.
• Self-Deprecation: Lotta is often pretty hard on herself. She often compares herself unfavorably to other Southerners. She also goes into a mini-Heroic BSoD in 2-2, for relatively trivial reasons, where she runs away from Phoenix yelling about how she's 'lower than garbage'.
• Shutter Bug: Lotta always has her camera on hand and you can tell she's nearby either by her mouth or by her snapping photos. Except in case four of Justice For All when it was stolen by Wendy Oldbag.
• Silly Walk: Or silly run. Her run-cycle in Investigations 2 is quite goofy, to be frank.
• Spanner in the Works:
  • Setting up her camera to automatically take photos upon hearing a loud noise in the first game ends up being critical to find out that the murder scene in a boat in Gourd Lake was actually a Frame-Up, and that the real murder happened earlier.
  • It's implied that she's the one that took the photo that depicts the Yatagarasu flying between the two embassies in the final case in Investigations. It ends up helping prove how the two Primidux statues were switched.
  • The killer in the fourth case of Investigations 2 may have never been caught were it not for Lotta sneaking into the black market auction.
• Stop Being Stereotypical: A weird case of this trope in the first game, in that she does it to herself. Specifically, when Phoenix and Maya first meet Lotta, Lotta admonishes them not to go thinking all Southerners are like Lotta, because "I'm the exception!"
• Talks like a Simile: Related to her Deep South stereotype.

Old Caretaker/"Uncle"

Voiced by (Japanese): Takehiro Hasu (anime)

Voiced by (English): R. Bruce Elliott (anime)

Played by: Fumiyo Kohinata (film)

"Ayup... ZZZ"

An eccentric old man that owns the boat rental shack on Gourd Lake, though he's convinced it's a pasta joint called the "Wet Noodle". He owns a pet parrot named Polly. He's a lot more connected to the case than is initially apparent.^{Click here to see spoilers} He's really Yanni Yogi, the suspect in the DL-6 case.

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• Adaptation Personality Change: In The Movie, he's a creepy old hermit who lacks the comedic traits of the game version of the character. Though both end up fake.
• Alliterative Name: His real name, which is "Yanni Yogi." Not so much in the Japanese, where it is "Kotaro Haine."
• Anti-Villain: While he did commit murder and willfully framed an innocent man for the crime, it is only because his scumbag attorney had him plead innocence by reason of insanity to a crime he didn't commit, forcing him to not only put up with the consequences of his actions in the eyes of the public and destroyed his personal life when his wife ended her life but also to act like a bumbling fool for over a decade just to maintain the illusion that he really was not of sound mind. He's really just a nice guy caught under awful circumstances and pushed to the brink.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Is revealed to be the killer but ultimately gets revenge on the 2 men who ruined his life, by killing Robert Hammond, the lawyer who made him plea insanity and unintentionally lead to the path that would expose Manfred von Karma as the real culprit of the DL-6 case, the case he was blamed.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: A quirk of the first game not carried over to subsequent instalments was that largely irrelevant characters with little significant role in the story would be given the label of their occupation in their character profiles, labelling them as unimportant. The old man is seemingly this, but turns out to be the culprit of the present-day murder, as well as one of the most important figures in the backstory.
• Follow in My Footsteps: He as part of his Obfuscating Stupidity mistakes Phoenix and Maya for his children and wants them to take over the "noodle shop" after he's gone.
• Graceful Loser: When Phoenix manages to prove his true identity without any doubt against it, he drops the act completely and fully admits to the court that he killed Hammond and Edgeworth is innocent for that.
• The Killer Was Left-Handed: The clue that revealed him as the killer was a picture of him shooting the victim with his left-hand.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Gives up and admits to what he did after strong evidence is shown that he's Yanni Yogi. Justified, as he really wanted to stop pretending he is insane and has a good excuse for his crime.
• Obfuscating Insanity: For fifteen years he acted insane to back up Hammond's insanity plea. He wasn't too happy about it.
• Punny Name: His name and his Split Personality resemble Yami Yugi. Meanwhile, "Kotaro Haine" is a reference to the poets Kotaro Takamura, who died of a broken heart; and Haine, who valued youth and romance.
• Red Herring: For fifteen years he was seen as Gregory Edgeworth's murderer (after being accused by Gregory when he was channeled by Misty Fey), having only obtained his innocence by a plea of insanity. Turns out he indeed wasn't the murderer.
• Red Right Hand: It's not immediately apparent, but he doesn't have any fingerprints.
• Scatterbrained Senior: He's clearly disconnected from reality and can't stay on topic for long. Not to mention the fact that he thinks he runs a noodle shop that, for some reason, also rents boats. It doesn't get more scatterbrained than that. Except, not really. The whole thing is an act and he's still entirely lucid.
• A Sinister Clue: He fires a gun with his left hand.
• Senior Sleep-Cycle: He keeps falling asleep standing as soon as he stops talking, and takes a second to wake up whenever he's spoken to. All part of his act.
• Snot Bubble: Appears whenever he falls asleep, which is often.
• Sympathetic Murderer: Robert Hammond prevented him from being convicted but ruined his life in the process. Yanni Yogi wanted and took revenge through a gun.
• Talkative Loon: He doesn't seem to have much of a grasp on reality. Subverted. He's faking it.
• Tragic Villain: He murdered the man that had ruined his life with a plea of insanity. He expresses no remorse for what he did, but the victim is painted in a worse light In-Universe than him after the truth is exposed. The Movie plays this up with a brutal Tear Jerker flashback to him witnessing his fiance commit suicide.
• Villainous Breakdown: One of the few killers to avert this. In fact, he inverts this. When exposed, he simply reverts to his more composed true self and calmly admits his crime.
• Vigilante Execution: Killed Robert Hammond for ruining his life and driving his wife to suicide.
• Walking Spoiler: About 90% of this article is spoilered out. It doesn't take much to figure out that there's a lot more to this odd old man than meets the eye.

\* We Named the Monkey "Jack": Names his parrot after his fiancee.

• Wham Line:
  • Not said by him specifically but when his parrot suddenly says "Don't forget DL-6!", his antics soon stop being funny.
  • He's convinced that Hammond's murderer is "little Edgey", the way he says it hinting about his past, and that he had met Edgeworth before.

Polly Jenkins (Sayuri Matsushita)

Played by: Yuko Nakamura (film)

Voiced by (English): Heather Walker (anime)

Fiancee of Yanni Yogi. She committed suicide after the DL-6 incident.

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• Driven to Suicide: After the DL-6 case, she couldn't stand the public harassment she and Yogi suffered and killed herself.
• Foreshadowing: Notice that she has the same name as the caretaker's pet parrot, indicating his true identity as Yanni Yogi.
• Happily Married: In the film, she was married to Yanni.
• We Named the Monkey "Jack": Yanni named his parrot after his dead fiancee.

Rise from the Ashes (Yomigaeru Gyakuten)

Lana Skye (Tomoe Hozuki)

"It's been a while, Your Honor."

Ema's older sister, and Chief Prosecutor (as of the first game, but she hasn't been mentioned since). Went to the same law school as Mia.

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• Aloof Big Sister: Comes off as one at the beginning of Rise from the Ashes, since she's acted cold toward Ema for two years, resulting in relations between the sisters being strained. Turns out to be a Defrosting Ice Queen, though.
• Ambiguously Gay: While the Japanese version has Mia and Lana be polite acquaintances, the English translation goes for the far more suggestive phrasing of "intellectual attraction" to describe their relationship. While Lana is relatively formal with most people besides her sister, referring to Phoenix as "Mr. Wright", and likewise calling her subordinate Edgeworth by his surname, she refers to Mia by her first name.
• And I Must Scream: According to Ema, when she's acting cold, aloof and professional, she's actually screaming from the inside.
• Big Sister Instinct: Comes with the whole Promotion to Parent thing.
• Curtains Match the Window: Although she has blue eyes in the official art◊.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: She goes through this process over the course of 1-5, having become an Aloof Big Sister since SL-9. This is in large part due to breaking Gant's hold on her.
• Emotionless Girl: Subverted, she does have emotions, but she has something to hide so she stopped showing them so that she doesn't slip up. Ema even tells Phoenix that she knows her sister too well: she's outwardly cold but she's screaming on the inside as she's being pressed.
• Forced into Evil: By Damon Gant. She ends up hating herself for what she has become, driving away her loved ones due to her guilt.
• Fingore: Her shocked animation has her biting her thumb so hard, that blood gushes out.
• The Heart: She was considered a pillar of emotional support for the team investigating SL-9, and prevented Jake from emotionally collapsing over his brother's death.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Says this regarding her fabricating evidence, claiming that it's to get Darke and criminals like him convicted, but it's actually to protect Ema.
• I Shall Return: Even though her evidence forging crimes killed her career as chief prosecutor, she promises to work her way back up the legal world so she can work cases with Ema.
• Not So Stoic: She becomes quite outraged when Phoenix appears to shift the focus of suspicion to Ema, but he manages to find a way to incriminate Gant in the end.
• Practically Different Generations: She's 13 years older than her sister Ema.
• Punny Name: "Skye" comes from, well, "sky", tying in with her Japanese name. "Hozuki" means "jewel moon".
• Promotion to Parent: Her parents died when she and Ema were very young.
• The Stoic: Shows no emotions outwardly.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: She initially appears very cold, and one of her sprites involves her dismissively turning her back to the viewer. She shows a warmer side later on, especially toward the end.
• Taking the Heat: Gant forces her to take the fall for his murder of Bruce Goodman, lest her sister Ema be charged for killing Neil Marshall. It's implied that Gant was originally trying to frame Edgeworth given that Goodman's body was found in the trunk of Edgeworth's car(a plan that wouldn't result in Gant sacrificing his most valuable pawn), but Angel Starr's interference resulted in Lana being charged.
• We Used to Be Friends: Used to get along well with Angel and Jake, until her personality changed after SL-9. A sisterly variant happens with Ema, who's bitter about Lana's cold behavior, but not so much that she wouldn't get help for her.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Ema was brought back for Apollo Justice, but Lana hasn't been seen since. She was last seen waiting to be tried for forging evidence, hence she had to spend some time behind bars, but other than that it's unknown what happened to her or how much time she will spend in prison.
• When She Smiles: She's been stone-faced for so long that even her sister says she forgot how beautiful she is when she smiles.
• You Monster!: Uses this phrase on Phoenix when he presents evidence that seemingly implicates Ema in killing Neil Marshall.

Bruce Goodman (Michio Tadashiki)

"We can't transfer the evidence out. There are too many questions left unanswered!"

A detective that was in charge of the SL-9 case. Death caused by a stab wound in the chest.

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• Dead Man's Chest: Found in a car trunk.
• Names to Trust Immediately: Nothing indicates that he had any part in the forging of evidence for SL-9, and the fact that he went unpunished seems to suggest that he never took any of the blame.
• Punny Name: He was a good man, and as Jake Marshall put it, good men die young. "Tadashiki Michio" comes from "tadashii michi", meaning "morally right path".
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: Killed in a moment of haste because he wanted to reevaluate a closed case from years ago, thinking something might be fishy about it.
• White Shirt of Death: He's stabbed to death and bleeds all over his white suit.

Angel Starr (Kyoka Ichinotani)

"The name is Angel Starr. Don't you go forgetting it. Or before you know it I'll have you whimpering at my heels."

A former detective whose ability to wring information out of suspects earned her the nickname the "Cough-Up Queen". Like Marshall, Starr worked on the SL-9 case, but in her case was fired instead of demoted and now works as a lunch vendor (hence why she's not in the law enforcers' section). With her connections (boyfriends) in the police department, she joined Marshall's attempts to continue the investigation of SL-9. Since the case ended she developed a hatred for prosecutors, and is the primary witness of Goodman's murder.

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• The Alibi: As you play through Rise from the Ashes, a large amount of evidence accumulates against Miles Edgeworth which heavily implies that someone was trying to do a Frame-Up against him. Angel Starr's witnessing of a stabbing in the alleged crime scene in the garage proved that Edgeworth was nowhere near the alleged crime scene, so Edgeworth was called to prosecute his boss instead of sitting in the defendant's chair in that case because he is the highest-ranking prosecutor under the chief prosecutor.
• Busman's Vocabulary: Since she's a lunch vendor, she tends to make puns and metaphors based on food.
• Dominatrix: Implied, as she offers to crush Phoenix under her heels.
• Duality Motif: It's very subtle, but her "good mood" eye is dark blue while her "don't mess with me" eye is silvery blue.
• Expressive Hair: Her mood is indicated by which eye is covered by her bangs.
• Gold Digger: She admits to having multiple "boyfriends" at the Police Station. It's not money she's after, she uses them for information regarding SL-9. Although it's not stated if they're literal boyfriends or just friends in high places.
• Good Cop/Bad Cop: She's implied to have been so effective at getting suspects to confess (thus earning her the title "Cough-up Queen") because she's capable of doing the good-cop-bad-cop thing by herself.
• Good Eyes, Evil Eyes: Has one of each.
• Hypocrite: In court, she keeps insisting that prosecutors forge evidence and twist testimonies to get the verdicts they want, at the same time Angel herself is giving false testimony to get the verdict she wants.
• Lethal Chef: Played with. Her lunches are delicious, but some of the items on her menu range from "questionable" (Squid Wheels) to "Is this even safe to eat?" (Peppered Fish Guts, among other things). She likes to give these particular lunches out to people she doesn't like.
• Little Black Dress. Hard to see in the game, but she wears a dress under her coat.
• Meaningful Name: "Kyoka" refers to the flowers you leave at a grave, and "Ichinotani" is a famous battlefield from the Sengoku period.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Check out that Japanese name.
• Peek-a-Bangs: Which eye gets covered depends on her current personality.

• Pretty in Mink: Wears a gray fur coat, trimmed with light gray fur.
• Punny Name: She's the prosecution's starr witness.
• Really Gets Around: She has a bunch of boyfriends... although it's not made clear whether they are genuine boyfriends, or if she was just using them to find means to investigate the SL-9 incident.
• Signature Headgear: Is bento-themed, with the rice attachments.
• Single-Issue Wonk: On the stand, she's obsessed with proving that Lana planned to murder Bruce Goodman. Edgeworth actually doesn't care all that much about this and is quite prepared to believe it was spur-of-the-moment, but her attempts to prove her own theory end up undermining Edgeworth's case.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Downplayed. To her credit, she was a skilled detective, enough so that The Judge eventually remembers, and she's shown to be quite tenacious and perceptive in her own right. However, she remains confident and continues to brag even after Phoenix shoots her down multiple times.

  Angel: How dare you! My powers of deduction are not to be underestimated!

  Phoenix: (Really now...)

• Spanner in the Works: The fact that she witnessed Lana Skye stabbing Bruce Goodman's already lifeless body threw a giant monkey wrench in whatever plans Lana and more importantly, Damon Gant had for covering it up.
• This Cannot Be!: After her third testimony is cracked and it's made clear she wasn't where she said she was:

"How many years have I been getting the better of men...? To think that the tables could be turned..."

• Tsundere: To the point where her hair flip and revealed eye indicate which "mode" she's in.

Jake Marshall (Kyosuke Zaimon)

"When there's gunshots, there's bound to be bullets."

A Cowboy Cop and ex-detective that was demoted to a patrolman after SL-9. Because of the suspiciousness of the decisive evidence, the abruptness and hastiness of his demotion, and the fact that he wanted to know the truth behind his kid brother's death, Officer Marshall refused to let the case go.

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• Armor-Piercing Question: (To Lana Skye) In that trial two years ago... Did you really only use legitimate evidence!?
• Big "NO!": "I only got one word for you, pardner... NOOOOOO!!!"
• Biting the Handkerchief: Or rather, the jerky.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Let's face it, it's par for the course at this point. He's a literal Cowboy Cop who nevertheless was inclued in a task force to investigate a Serial Killer who never left any evidence behind and tirelessly works to reopn the case.
• But Now I Must Go: Due to his own crimes involving assaulting a cop, he's taken off the force, presumably spending some time in prison as a result. He laments to Ema that they won't be able to work together on cases in the future.
• Cowboy Cop: Played straight and literally. Not only did he use to be a cop, he's willing to go outside the law to get things done. Word of God holds it that he was made a cowboy so that he wouldn't be a complete Expy of Godot, as Jake is the Godot in the Fey-Skye parallel.
• Dramatic Wind: His defeat animation has his poncho billow wildly as if he was dramatically shot in an old cowboy movie.
• Ironic Echo: Phoenix telling him to explain himself in eight words or less, when he learns about the fingerprint-sensing locks on his own locker that he used to hide a bloody coat. For extra irony, the ensuing sentence is nine words long.
  Jake: I only got one word for you, pardner. NOOOOOO!!!
• Hopeless with Tech: A Type 2. Jake knows the bare basics of how to operate the security camera system (meaning, he knows how to delete footage). But beyond that, he'll even admit in-court that he couldn't tell you how a bicycle works. He's one of the few who had no idea that the evidence lockers use a fingerprint system.
• Knight in Sour Armor: He's bitter about being demoted, but is willing to risk what's left of his career to find the truth behind SL-9.
• Knight Templar Big Brother: Commits theft and assault, not caring about the consequences, in order to find out who really murdered his younger brother.
• Leitmotif: "Detective from the Wild West" a.k.a. "Renegade Sheriff", which naturally sounds like something out of a cowboy movie.
• McNinja: A one-to-one inversion, though only in the game's domestic release.^note The games took place in their native Japan in domestic markets, but the setting was changed to America for the English localizations Despite being a Japanese police officer, he's a stereotypical Old West cowboy, complete with a poncho, ten-gallon hat, and theme music straight out of a spaghetti western.
• Meaningful Name: The kanji in "Zaimon" mean "sin" and "gate", which are fits with Damon Gant's own Japanese name.
• Punny Name: "Marshall", like a wild west sheriff. Since he lacks his brother's skill, he could be considered a "Fake Marshal".
• Quick Nip: Often seen drinking from a hip flask. At one point he is shown opening the flask with his teeth and spitting out the stopper, suggesting the flask is normally just for show.
• Spanner in the Works: His secret investigation into his brother's death was what kickstarted the whole plot. Damon Gant even admits that none of this would've happened if he had gotten rid of Jake as soon as he could.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Due to only deciding to break into the evidence room on the day of the evidence transferral by stealing Goodman's card, this prompted the latter to submit a lost item report to Gant, who decided to just take him to the evidence room instead of lending him his card, leading to Goodman's murder.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Gets one regarding impersonating Goodman, trying to steal the evidence and assaulting Meekins when he came in after him.
• Youngest Child Wins: Subverted. According to Jake, Neil, the prosecutor, is significantly smarter, but Jake wound up outliving him.

Damon Gant (Kaiji Ganto)

"You know, we should all go swimming together sometime! Jolly!"

Highly eccentric Police Chief. Although he does some pretty odd things (for a guy that intentionally looks like Zeus), he's highly intelligent, clever, and cunning. He used to be Lana's partner when both were detectives.

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• Affably Evil: Need fifty bucks? He's your guy! Try to reopen that case Damon doesn't want anyone looking at? You get stabbed! He maintains an almost grandfatherly demeanor even when flagrantly threatening Phoenix and Edgeworth during Lana's trial. Additionally, after his Villainous Breakdown, he expresses sad self-reflection over his actions, regret over losing The Judge's friendship, and good wishes for Phoenix's and Edgeworth's futures.
• Angry Fist-Shake: When you begin to get close to catching him.
• Beard of Evil: Since he's the main villain of Rise from the Ashes, his beard also counts as one of these.
• Beat: There's quite a few times during his conversations with other people and his witness testimonies in 1-5 where he just sits and stares for a few seconds before saying anything, including once where a piece of evidence is shown for a few seconds before he starts speaking about it. It's somewhat unnerving.
• Big "NO!": Plus special effects.
• Blackmail: He has Lana do his bidding as chief prosecutor under threat of her sister being framed as Neil Marshall's killer.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Uses some variation of "Been swimming lately?" as a greeting, eerily stares in silence for moments at a time when asked questions, and calls the Judge, Phoenix, and Edgeworth "Udgey", "Wrighto", and "Worthy", respectively. Still regarded as one of the finest detectives that the police force ever had, and is a well-respected member of the law community. He's also an extremely tough opponent, using his knowledge of the legal system to toss aside incriminating evidence and manipulate the entire prosecutor's office into doing his bidding.
• The Chessmaster: He came across the aftermath of a fight between Joe Darke, a criminal who he didn't have enough evidence to convict, and Neil Marshall, an honest and righteous prosecutor, both unconscious, with a young, traumatized Ema Skye in the room. Rather than just killing Marshall and framing Darke for the murder, he instead framed Ema so that he could use that as blackmail to force Ema's sister Lana to frame Darke, thereby creating a layer of protection in case the lies started to unravel and simultaneously granting him unlimited use of Lana as a pawn for any of his future schemes. He came up with that complex plan in the amount of time it took for Lana to catch up with him.
• Cool Old Guy: About as cool as he's eccentric.
• Conspicuous Consumption: Gant's office on the top floor of the police station looks more like an old cathedral than the office of a public official, what with the marble floors, elegant furniture, and the giant pipe organ installed in the back wall. It's noted by Phoenix during his visit to the office that it's likely paid for with taxpayer dollars.
• Cool Shades: You never see him without those sunglasses.
• Da Chief: The Chief of Police of whatever city the game takes place in. He's far cheerier and less by-the-book than most examples, though.
• Death Glare: What his odd staring habit turns into, once the case has progressed far enough for him to get involved in the proceedings. They're so long, you'll think the game crashed. If not for his regular blinking.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • He invokes his right to refuse to testify, only to find out the hard way that it also meant that he withdrew his right to testify any further.
  • His preparation of "insurance" to prove that Ema was responsible for Neil Marshall's death involved cutting a piece of his vest off which had Ema's clear handprint on it. However, he forgot to actually kill Neil first and then cut the piece out as it lacked any blood from his lungs being impaled on a suit of armor's halberd as a result of the "accident". This lack of blood proves that Ema only knocked him out on the floor after shoving him, and then Gant impaled him on the halberd.
• Dirty Cop: It's implied that he had been forging evidence even before SL-9, what with Angel's observation that he always managed to produce "incredible" evidence on the cases he worked on.
• Eccentric Mentor: To Lana Skye when she was a detective. He looks like this to Edgeworth in the present day, but he's mostly just having fun at his expense.
• Evil Genius: Damon Gant is an extremely talented police officer. He's also an extremely cunning murderer, liar, tactician, and orator.
• Fallen Hero: Before the Joe Darke killings, Gant was a well respected and valiant police officer. After the events, not so much.
• Graceful Loser: After his initial Villainous Breakdown and ranting about how he should have dealt with Jake, he calms down, suggests that he won't make it to his lunch date with the Judge and says the legal system is now in Phoenix, Edgeworth and the Judge's hands.
• He Who Fights Monsters: His desire to bring down criminals led to some... loosening of his moral standards.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Twice. First, the pieces of evidence he took as "insurance" were later used against him, and when it seemed he would succeed in putting the blame on Ema, his own arrogance was what did him in.
• It's All About Me: He scoffs when Edgeworth raises the possibility that he committed the evidence forgery for someone else's sake. Of course, this shows the pragmatic side of the trope, as he's perfectly willing to help someone else if he also stands to benefit. In his own words:
  Gant: There are only three people I look out for: Me, Myself, and I.
• I Will Punish Your Friend for Your Failure: If Lana tries to implicate him in killing Neil Marshall or Bruce Goodman, he'll ensure that Ema gets prosecuted, as he frames her for accidentally killing Neil.
• Knight Templar: What he eventually became; interestingly, he also described Manfred von Karma in a similar manner.
• Large and in Charge: With 6'1"/185 cm a rather tall, and imposing looking man; fitting for the Police Chief.
• Large Ham: Mentioned to use Bold Inflation in everyday conversation and otherwise make things sound overly-grandiose.
• Laughing Mad: In his Villainous Breakdown—with escalation!
• Leitmotif: "Swimming, Anyone?" Appropriately, it's an organ piece, even if it does sound slightly silly and jovial (there's a big organ in his office).
• Loud of War: Gumshoe claims he sometimes punishes detectives who screw up by dragging them into his office and playing the Ominous Pipe Organ for hours. For the record, it's apparently loud enough to be heard from the ground floor of a nearby building anyway, and Gant's office is on the 12th floor.
• Lucky Seven: His police ID number is 7777777. It's also his safe combination.
• Meaningful Name: Damon is probably a pun on demon. The first kanji of "Kaiji" is "sea" (he brings up swimming a lot), and his name as a whole might allude to a Chinese proverb: "You can pick on the mountains, but don't pick on the sea [because the sea is merciless]". "Gant" (and "Ganto") come from the French word for glove, which he is always seen wearing. Marshall states during his testimony that the murderer wore gloves. Also, if you change the a's in his name to e's, you end up with "Demon Gent", which he very much is. It can also sound as "demon god, showing he is evil, competent and has a high rank and name in society.
• Nice Guy: Is very nice and polite to anyone he meets, and spends most of his early time on screen being a jovial friend to the prosecutors that he works with. Not so much in the present day, as it's what he used to be in the past after his promotion, according to the Judge.
• The Nicknamer: Calls the Judge "Udgey", Phoenix "Wright-o," and Edgeworth "Worthy."
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: His odd staring habit and overly cheery demeanor turns him into this as the trial goes on. Especially when it is revealed that he's a Dirty Cop and he starts acting more hostile.
• "Not So Different" Remark: He pulls this on Edgeworth, claiming that they both share the same loathing for criminals and willingness to do whatever it takes to see justice be done. It really got under his skin.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: It doesn't take long before it's shown that he's quite intelligent and he's one of the most cunning murderers in the series.
• Old Cop, Young Cop: Implied to have had this dynamic with Lana in the past, considering they used to be partners when both were detectives and he's almost forty years older than her.
• Ominous Pipe Organ: Quite explicitly seen and heard in his office and leitmotif, respectively.
• Psychotic Smirk: In one of his sprites, which makes it clear he's smarter than he appears. He pulls it out usually when lording a fact over someone else.
• Red Baron: Was known as "The Crime Computer" during his detective days with Lana Skye.
• Sarcastic Clapping: One of his favored animations is to do this while laughing at you. It initially looks like he's just a cheerful old man laughing at his own jokes, but later fully becomes this once he gets serious about keeping anyone away from SL-9. His Villainous Breakdown involves him clapping faster and faster.
• Stealth Insult: His nickname for Edgeworth, "Little Worthy," sounds affectionate, but suggests that Edgeworth is of little worth. Compare the more insulting "Un-Worthy."
• Thunder Shock: In his "Damage" animation.
• True Final Boss: In a sense, is one to later versions of the original game, being the culprit of the extra case that gets unlocked after the credits of the initial final case. The extra case is far longer than the one where Von Karma was your main opponent, requires far more effort from Phoenix to get anywhere close to the truth, and Gant is also far more thorough and powerful than even the seasoned prosecutor.
• Villain Has a Point: In a way, Gant is frighteningly accurate - on several whole levels. Even prior to this case, Mia was left with no choice but to blackmail Redd White into turning himself in. Also, he tells Edgeworth that, one day, he will have to go outside the law and present illegal evidence to fight criminals. Two years later, Edgeworth has to do exactly that in order to take down Quercus Alba and his smuggling ring. And seven years after that, Phoenix, with Apollo Justice's help, has to present forged evidence to take down Kristoph Gavin. Additionally, though his actions were horrible, Gant's overall desire to see tighter control of the legal system becomes A LOT more understandable in light of some of the criminals Wright and Edgeworth encounter (think Alba's agents pretending to be defense attorneys and prosecutors, not to mention the phantom impersonating Bobby Fulbright). They also both had to unofficially hire a hitman onto his own former client since the latter held Maya hostage in order to secure a Not Guilty, only to instead demand a Guilty verdict now that the court proved that he betrayed a very dangerous man.
• Villainous Breakdown: His hair becomes a bolt of lightning and he goes Super Saiyan. His final breakdown, after you prove the decisive evidence that he provided is admissible is him going Laughing Mad and applauding at utterly insane speeds.
  Damon Gant: I knew I should have gotten rid of him… That good-for-nothing scum! For two years he’d been snooping around the department, trying to get something on me! Crimes are being committed every day, yet he insisted on hounding me!
• Villainous Legacy: Goes to jail and is never seen again but his "Not So Different" Remark towards Edgeworth causes him to run away in self-doubt which causes Wright himself to have a crisis of identity, making him responsible for much of the emotional trouble the two go through in Justice For All.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: His actions are unquestionably and utterly vile, and he is definitely a nasty and selfish person, but after his initial breakdown, he really does seem to believe what he did was necessary to fight criminals. His tone and words also seem to suggest that maybe he didn't really want to go through with his deeds, but felt he had to. Furthermore, the way he praises Wright and Edgeworth, rightfully noting how they are a good team that makes sure justice is served, suggests he may even feel a bit relieved that they figured everything out, because now the legal system is in a way stronger as a result.

Mike Meekins (Susumu Harabai)

"Sir I... I wish I didn't have to tell you this... but last year, tragedy struck a rising star at the precinct! I lost my case files four times... in three days! They fired me!"

An over-enthusiastic cop that is unnecessarily respectful in speech (he broke the dialogue boxes in the Japanese version). He's not the brightest bulb, doesn't have much luck, and is rather clumsy. He looks up to Gumshoe and aspires to be like him.

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• Alliterative Name: In English, Mike Meekins.
• Butt-Monkey: He idolizes Gumshoe, so that's enough to make him a Butt-Monkey by default.
• Catchphrase: Has a tendency to begin his answers to questions by saying "If I had to say I was (X) or (Y)..."
• Gonk: His head is the shape of a traffic sign and his eyes are wide open, making him the sort that looks distorted rather than ugly.
• Kindhearted Simpleton: Meekins isn't particularly skilled or intelligent at much, but he means well.
• Meaningful Name: He's certainly meek, and the "Mike" might refer to that megaphone. "Susumu" means "press forward".
• New Job as the Plot Demands: From a cop in the first game, to the Blue Badger in Investigations to a court bailiff in Apollo Justice. He is shown to still be in the police force in Investigations, just placed undercover as the Blue Badger. In the end credits, he states he was fired afterwards for losing his gun (although the page quote suggests it was for losing case files).
• No Indoor Voice: Doesn't help any that he always has a megaphone in his hand.
• Non-Standard Character Design: Looks nothing like any other character in the series, with the appearance that he's from a completely different game.
• Retcon: In Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, it's indicated (as shown by the quote above) that he was fired six months before the events of the flashback case, for losing his case files. In Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth, it turns out that he lost his job two months before the events of the flashback case, for losing his gun in the middle of Gatewater Land. Possibly justified by him not wanting to admit that he made a mistake which could have endangered the lives of children, and so coming up with a marginally less humiliating explanation for his firing.
• Spanner in the Works: He ends up walking in on Jake Marshall attempting to steal the SL-9 evidence, ending up creating a separate "murder" at the evidence room. Phoenix going to investigate the evidence room ultimately helps place Gant there, although Phoenix wins by proving Gant killed Neil.
• Verbal Tic: Speaks extremely politely and addresses everyone as "sir".
• Younger Than They Look: Downplayed. While it's hard to tell how old he is from his appearance, the fact that Meekins speaks incredibly politely to everyone and is rather enthusiastic gives the impression that he is a new recruit, likely a little older than Maya. Not only is he 5-6 years older than her, he still looks and acts the same way in 2019, when he is at least 24. Part of the problem is that he's drawn so that he only looks around 4 to 5 inches taller than Ema, who is 5'1", when he's supposed to be 6'2".

Neil Marshall (Naoto Zaimon)

Jake's younger brother, and was the "King of Prosecutors" two years ago. He was the initial prosecutor on the SL-9 case.

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• Death by Origin Story: Said to have been killed by Joe Darke. Case 1-5 involves you solving both his murder two years ago and Bruce Goodman's more recent killing.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: After the fight with Darke concluded, Gant took Neil's body and impaled it on the statue in the office.
• Improvised Weapon: When he went to save Ema, he resorted to pulling out the broken ornamental knife from his King of Prosecutors Trophy.
• Papa Wolf: Died trying to save Ema's life.
• Posthumous Character: Deceased prior to 1-5, though still plot-important.
• Punny Name: He and his brother both dressed as cowboys, so they're "Marshalls". He's the "Real Marshal".
• World's Best Warrior: At least according to his brother, he'd never lose a fight. The fact he ended up dead after the confrontation with Joe Darke is one of the reasons Jake suspects foul-play had a hand in the case.
• Youngest Child Wins: Subverted. According to Jake, he's the smarter of the Marshall brothers. However, he was murdered prior to the story, and his older brother outlived him.

Joe Darke (Joe Aokage)

The defendant of the SL-9 case, and a spree murderer. Yet despite the circumstances, there wasn't any decisive evidence against him. But when he killed Prosecutor Marshall, Edgeworth was able to get him a guilty verdict and the death penalty.

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• Adaptational Heroism: Thanks to a translation error, the localization ends up implying that, rather than making a voluntary appearance to the police for questioning, Darke turned himself in out of guilt for his crimes.
• Ambiguous Situation: Why exactly he committed his murders is never explicitly given. It's postulated at one point they may have been motivated by a desire to eliminate witnesses, with his initial crime just being a car accident, but even this is stated to be just speculation in-universe.
• Asshole Victim: While the one murder he didn't commit was what ultimately had him executed, nobody denied that he deserved his fate.
• The Faceless: His in-game portrait is of the Face Framed in Shadow variety. Ultimately subverted with a recurring flashback image where you can clearly see his face.
• Framing the Guilty Party: Despite the many murders he committed, he truly was framed for Neil Marshall's murder, though he did attempt to kill Marshall before, but failed.
• Grayscale of Evil: He's long dead by the time Case 1-5 starts, and is only seen in black-and-white photographs and pictures.
• Meaningful Name: He was an average joe who after one accident, led him down a very dark path.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: His Japanese surname, "pale shadow", is even creepier.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Very little is stated for certain regarding Darke, other than that he used to work as a salaryman before committing his murders. Even an explanation for his motives is stated to be nothing more than in-universe speculation, and he is treated more as a ghoulish demon than a normal human being.
• Not Me This Time: Posthumously. He did try to kill Neil Marshall, but someone else finished the job while he was unconscious, and Darke was framed for it to get a conviction.
• The Perfect Crime: He left practically no decisive evidence that could tie him to the murders, which took himself turning himself in and being framed for a final murder to take him down.
• Posthumous Character: He was executed years ago, but his actions still impact the plot.
• Psycho Knife Nut: His first killing was a vehicular homicide (possibly an accident), but the rest seem to have all been knife murders.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Giving him the death penalty was entirely justified — he was a Serial Killer with a half-dozen victims to his name, including that of a child. However, the murder he was convicted of that got him executed was of the one guy he didn't kill (although he was going to).
• Serial Killer: The most biggest example in the franchise, boasting six actually five victims to his name before he was captured and executed for his crimes.
• Would Hurt a Child: One of his victims was a child. He was also willing to try and kill the 14-year-old at the time Ema Skye.

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