Insights from the producer of the Phoenix Wright games.

Amidst the hustle and bustle of the show floor at the San Diego Comic-Con, I sat down with Minae Matsukawa, producer of the Phoenix Wright games, to discuss the latest entry in the DS series, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations. Working through a translator, she was more than happy to answer my questions about the upcoming title and the series as a whole.

Phoenix Wright has gained a cult status of sorts in America. Did you ever expect the series to become this popular when you decided to bring it to the United States?

Actually, I had no idea that it would become the kind of hit that it has. We were here a couple of years ago showing it off - the first one, before it actually came out - and we were worried: are people actually going to stop and check it out? At first it was very slow. The game eventually came out and sales were slow, but the fans who tried it out got it and really liked it and started to spread the word and I think word of mouth is what helped it to become what it has. I really had no idea when we released the first game here.

What do you think it is about the game that makes it attractive to so many people?

I think it might be the characters in the game that people like so much. In Japan, the characters are very Japanese, their names are puns on different words in Japanese, and we took a lot of care and time when we localized it so all of the humor and all of the puns - if there's supposed to be a pun on something, we made a pun in English. So I think the characters and the humor of the game is what really draws people in.

What was the process like in "Americanizing" the humor of the game? What major changes were made in the localization?

Well, the main change was moving the game's setting from Japan to America. So instead of Naruhodo in Japan, it is Phoenix Wright in Los Angeles. We moved the setting. In the process of localization, we had all these unique characters, and they would have different accents from different parts of Japan: they might be from the country, or Western Japan, or Eastern Japan. So we had to come up with ways to maintain the image of the characters and their feel. And so we would give them, you know, a New Jersey accent or a Southern accent or an Australian accent. It was a question of how do we keep the character and personality within the text. That was really the main change - maintaining that and translating at the same time.