What Could Have Been / Ace Attorney

If Phoenix Wright had decided to take fashion cues from Franziska von Karma.

Given the franchise has been around since 2001, there are unsurprisingly many examples that have been declared guilty and taken away, never to see the light of day again.

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General

• The prototype title was 'Surviban'.
• Kristoph's early designs included a kimono getup that made him look he'd fit right in with the Gotei 13.
• Franziska was a much colder-(but sexier-)looking woman ^note One design looked like Mia Fey. who licked her Whip of Dominance.
• Young Mia was a motorcyclist.
• Phoenix's hair-spikes hung downward (and were more natural).
• Pearl had plain, short black hair (and later Odango Hair)
• Dahlia had a hell of a lot of different appearances, all equally deceptively sympathetic.
• Phoenix and Franziska were slated to appear in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom. However, due to several reasons (explained on that game's Trivia page for that game) they were dropped. For the same reasons, both were dropped from the vanilla version of Marvel vs. Capcom 3. But while Phoenix has finally made it into the Capcom vs. series as of Ultimate, Franziska is still nowhere to be seen. This is ironic because, out of all the lawyers in Phoenix's series, Franziska would be the most qualified to appear, due to her proficiency with a whip.
• According to leaks, Apollo was meant to be a DLC character in Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite, however, low sales and poor reception ended up killing support for the game before that could happen.

Original Trilogy

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

• The early character designs◊ were very, very different:
  • The main character would have bright green hair and Franziska's sense of fashion.
  • The rival would looked like a young Manfred von Karma and had a pointy Beard of Evil.
  • The mentor would be a big, hulking man.
  • The assistant looked more like Ema.
  • The detective would be a hot woman.
  • An early concept for Wendy Oldbag gave her a much younger Brawn Hilda look.
• Because there wasn't much figured out about him ahead of time, Gumshoe underwent an evolution in character. For example, he originally was planned to be into horse racing, which is why he has a pencil tucked behind his ear in his final design.
• Maya originally being planned to be a lawyer-in-training under Phoenix. In a different blog post, it was mentioned that Phoenix met her and Mia under very different circumstances, that Turnabout Sisters would have been the first trial of the game (it was bumped to second as it was felt it was too big to be an introduction), and Phoenix originally would have been a detective who was arrested for murder after he walked into his office to find a corpse.^note Which actually happened to Edgeworth much later on. He then would have taken up his own defense because of how incompetent his own defense attorney (who became Winston Payne) was.
• The then-male Dee Vasquez was originally the director of Global Studios instead of the producer, while director Sal Manella was the screenwriter. She was changed when she became female and it was thought that a female director of an action TV show would be odd.
• Larry Butz went through a good many changes in character, originally being a 9-to-5 office worker and an Average Joe and ultimately going through some editing when the first trial was unexpectedly added to the game and included him. At one point, he was a tough guy who went around shouting how he wanted to kill everyone. This ended up being changed to him shouting that he wanted to die. He was also not meant to be a recurring character. Near the end of the production span, the development team ran out of time and decided to reuse Larry as a witness in "Turnabout Goodbyes".
• Back when Phoenix would have been a detective, the game title was "Surviban: Attorney Detective Naruhodo-kun" ("Surviban" being a play on words between "survival" and "saiban"). Before that, planned titles were “Attorney Brothers Three”, “Boogie-Woogie Innocence”, “Bingo Bengo” (another play on words, suggesting hitting the nail on the head "bingo!" in court), “The Beautiful Verdict”, “Amber-Colored Testimonies”, “The Objections in Your Eyes”, and “Let’s Raise Hamsters” (one of the people on the production team wanted the lead to be a hamster).
• Both Fey sisters were supposed to be alive, but Takumi was told he couldn't have both due to cast size. Solution? Have the elder sister killed and turn the younger into a spirit medium who can channel her sister.
• Marvin Grossberg was supposed to have more animations, but they were cut due to memory constraints and he was reduced to having only two sprites showing his default expression and his worried expression.
• The Nintendo DS remake of the original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney was originally conceived as a straight simple port exclusively for the international market, with no extra case. Like most software projects however, it underwent a bit of feature creep, first by giving Japan their own version of the port with Rise of the Ashes exclusive to them, and then making Rise of the Ashes available to everyone. What began a simple port and localization project became the equivalent of developing a whole new installment in the series.
• According to this interview with Shu Takumi, the Ace Attorney series was originally developed for the Game Boy Color. However, the dev team had heard rumors of the Game Boy Advance's development, and were eventually shown the product in full. They eventually caught wind of the Mega Man Battle Network games being developed for the GBA, and once they saw its processing power, they figured Ace Attorney would work better on this new console, so they reconfigured what they had developed for the GBC into something compatible with the GBA.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Justice For All

• The opening of the first case was going to have a giant devil looming over Phoenix, instead of the Judge (inspired by the opening of Devil May Cry).
• Edgeworth was originally going to the the main prosecutor for the game, until the development team caught wind of his surprise popularity. Feeling that having the "genius" prosecutor lose every case against Phoenix wouldn't be adequate, Shu Takumi created Franziska von Karma as the game's main rival and saved Edgeworth for the last case. Thus starting the trend of a new rival prosecutor for every game.
• Pearl Fey was originally going to be a snobby rival to Maya of the same age who was only meant to appear in Case 2. But then it was decided that it would be more dramatic if Pearl was a little kid and the "rivalry" with Maya was being pushed on both girls against their wishes. The resulting new Pearl was considered so adorable that they expanded her role into other cases, eventually resulting in her effectively displacing Maya as Phoenix's sidekick for the second game.
• The game was planned to have five cases, but the last had to be scrapped due to memory limitations with the Game Boy Advance. It was later reused as the third case in Trials and Tribulations.
• The Psyche-Lock concept was originally envisioned as a single large glass lock that had to be broken through. This had to be scrapped as too difficult to pull off for the Game Boy Advance, though something similar would later be incorporated in the The Great Ace Attorney games.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Trials and Tribulations

• Many things were cut for memory reasons, including a design for a much-younger Gumshoe in the first trial and Oldbag showing up in a lei after her vacation. (She's in her "alien" costume from the previous game, even though the security guard uniform from the first game would have made more sense, because of Rule of Funny.)
• Among the English names considered for Diego Armando were Joseph Cuppa, Xavier Barstucks, and William Havamug.
• Godot was going to drink bourbon whiskey and smoke, but the production team worried it'd have a bad effect on kids, not to mention it would have bumped the content rating in the Japanese version. It was this experience of designing Godot's drinking habits that that later begat the grape juice drinking habit of Phoenix Wright.
• There were several different fonts considered for the "P" on Feenie's pink sweater.
• Luke Atmey's original catchphrase before "Zvarri" was "Schwing"!
• In all versions of the game, there exists unused code for Phoenix and Mia’s "Objection!" voice clips to Speak in Unison with an echo effect in the climax of Bridge to the Turnabout when Godot sees Mia’s spirit join Phoenix in pointing at him as he declares that Godot is hiding a knife wound under his mask that implicates him as the killer. Presumably, they got to the Fridge Logic and realized that it would make no sense since, in the context of the scene, Phoenix is presenting decisive evidence rather than objecting to anything.
• Pearl and Iris were originally supposed to die alongside Misty in the final case, leaving Maya as the Sole Survior of the Fey bloodline, but Takumi figured that it would make the Grand Finale too bleak.

Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney

• The game was originally supposed to be a soft reboot of the franchise, with Phoenix Wright not appearing. This is why almost none of the cast of the original trilogy appears. However, due to a mandate from Capcom, Phoenix Wright remained a main character in the series.
• The development team considered making the game with a fully 3D engine, but determined that the Nintendo DS wasn't powerful enough to deliver the results they wanted, causing them to stick with sprite graphics. It wouldn't be until the release of the Nintendo 3DS that they were able to go fully polygonal.
• Trucy was originally conceived of as a trainee ninja, before being turned into a young magician.
• Wendy Oldbag was originally supposed to appear in the game, as she appeared in one of the game's trailers, but she was cut from the final version of the game. However, in Turnabout Corner an unnamed but suspiciously similar old lady can be seen fighting with a police officer about getting into the closed park for her daily walk.

Dual Destinies

• Concept art for the game reveals:
  • An Athena design that was almost chosen had blue hair in antenna-like buns and a borderline-Raygun Gothic aesthetic. Elements of this early design would instead be re-used for Aura Blackquill.
  • Florent L'Belle may have been planned to be a female character at first.
  • Yuri Cosmos went through a radical redesign. His original concept had him with pointy hair, a tall elongated face and a mostache resembling fins, giving his head the appearence of a rocket. This would factor into his breakdown, which would involve the mustache "lighting" like a fuse and his hair "blasting off", leaving him with an extremely goofy looking face afterward. This was possibly cut for its similarities to Blaise Debeste's breakdown, and the "rocket hair" concept given to Solomon Starbuck, though more subtly.
• At one point during the final case, the phantom attempts to escape by using a grappling hook from his watch. He immediately comes back and it's played for a quick joke. The animation is an artifact from an earlier draft of the story where the phantom actually escapes Courtroom Nº4 making the case go on for a little longer. It was most likely cut out so the case, already one of the longest in the series, didn't feel too padded.
• Some file names discovered in the game's code indicate that, at some point in development, the DLC episode was going to be part of the main game, fitting in between what are now episodes 2 and 3 (where it takes place chronologically), and episodes 4 and 5 were once a single episode^note This makes sense in the final game as, unlike any other case in the series, these cases carry a single story thread; it's likely the change of suspect from Solomon Starbuck to Athena Cykes is what prompted the developers to break it up into two separate episodes, as the plot in the second part becomes too complex to be contained to a single episode.
• Maya Fey returning was considered for this installment, but she was dropped as the plot was already complex enough with bringing Phoenix back as a main protagonist and introducing Athena. When the next installment was in development, Maya's return was made a priority then.

Spirit of Justice

• Going into this game the writers knew they had to take Phoenix out of his comfort zone so they could provide challenges for him while keeping his status of legendary lawyer intact. In the end, they decided to put him in a foreign country, but one of the early ideas was to have Phoenix partake in underground criminal trials for the mafia where Phoenix would have to defend people accused of breaking the criminal underworld's own code of law. The judge, prosecutor, accused, and witnesses could all be criminals, giving Phoenix a hard time trying to figure out who to believe and a lot of reason to doubt his own clients.

Investigations: Miles Edgeworth

• Concept art for Shi-Long Lang featured him shirtless, with the constellation of Orion scarred on his chest. Seems the director objected to the toplessness, even after a feather boa was added to cover the nipples.
• A trailer shows Kay appearing in Turnabout Airlines. Whether this means Kay would have first appeared earlier, or that Turnabout Airlines was originally a later case, is anybody's guess.
• Originally the concept of the game involved Ema Skye as the protagonist and the game would focus on forensics tactics. It would have actually had her doing investigations alongside Edgeworth during the original trilogy and alongside Klavier during Apollo Justice.
• Concept art sketches show that Quercus Alba's design went through a phase with him looking much more like a gnarly old tree.
• Before it was a detective simulator, other genres were also considered, such as a dating sim and a fighting game.
• A murder case involving a teleportation trick was considered for the second game, but was scrapped. This scrapped case was used as the basis for the third Ace Attorney stage play, Turnabout Teleportation.
• Colias has an unused sprite, which frankly enough looks quite silly and could be considered his "damage" sprite.
• There's a whole lot of unused dialogue in Investigations 2’s first case. The first Logic deduction was going to be entirely different (and implied the weather would play a significant role in the mystery), and there's a whole lot of cut dialogue with Winston Payne, though he still doesn't get a proper sprite.

The Great Ace Attorney

• Concept art shows that the character designers considered giving Taketsuchi Auchi's glasses round lenses, since that was the norm during the Meiji era in real life, but decided against it and instead gave him more rectangular lenses for the sake of making him look more like his descendants, the Payne brothers.
• The collection's concept art gallery reveals Rei Membami was a late addition to Resolve Case 1, originally the defendant was going to be Yujin. This was changed because him giving co-consul advice for his own defence felt awkward, and because the cast would have been all men (and Susato pretending to be a man) otherwise.
• "Sandwich" in Resolve Case 4 was going to be a completely new character, but time and budget constraints meant he had to use a modified Beppo model. (And, consequently, he's implied to be the same person.)
• Jezaille Brett's death in the sequel was brought about by the game's scenario being split into two games, with Takumi stating her story had to be rewritten from the original one-game treatment.
• Likewise, Kazuma Asogi's return was not in the initial plan for the sequel, instead being brought about by fan reception to the character in the first game.
• According to his concept art, the character of van Zieks' Masked Apprentice from the second game was originally proposed for the first game, with the intention being to give Susato a personal rival in the judicial assistant to the prosecution. While the concept was dropped, the apprentice himself was proposed again for the second game. The fact that introducing a new character with such narrative importance so late in the story would have been awkward is part of what resulted in the Masked Apprentice actually being the amnesiac Kazuma Asogi.

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