Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies Localization: The Trials and Tribulations of the Gameplay Mechanics Team
From the very, very beginning – back when we were still a skeleton team of just the core key members – Mr. Yamazaki, the scenario director kept insisting that “evidence shouldn’t be the only way to arrive at the truth – let’s find a way to add human emotions and psychological analysis to the mix!” ...Which is all fine and dandy, but isn’t court all about the evidence? “How can people’s emotions reliably lead to new breaks in a case?” I wondered with anticipation. This was going to require some extremely outside-the-box ideas, I thought. Ideas like...
・Mysterious goggles that allows the player to see a witness’s true personality as a specter!”
・A super high-tech, giant computer that can analyze a witness’s brain waves and heart rate!”
Talking with other members of the team, reading a ton of books on psychology, writing up a bunch of new ideas, showing them to Mr. Yamazaki, and then showing the rejected ones to the shredder became a daily routine for me. “That’s a pretty nifty idea...” he would say, but I could tell by looking at him that, “It’s just not working for me,” is what he was really feeling. When I sat down to reflect on this, it suddenly dawned on me. “What you’re saying and what you’re feeling are in contradiction to one another, Mr. Yamazaki...” I thought to myself, and in that moment, the underlying concept behind the Mood Matrix was born.
Full blog here
