Interviewer: Most mystery adventure games back then were just about choosing an action out of multiple options, right?
Takumi: Yes. But with that, it doesn’t really feel like you solved the mystery yourself. Also, game consoles have a limited number of buttons. So how could I make an intuitive mechanic for a player to directly input their own deductions? Having them write out their own deductions one letter at a time was troublesome, so what else was there? What I finally arrived at was a mechanic that become the core mechanic of Gyakuten Saiban: confronting the culprit, and presenting evidence to the contradictions in their statements. In Cross-Examination scenes, witnesses usually make about five utterances. Suppose the player has five different pieces of evidence. If you need to prove a contradiction in the witness testimony by presenting a piece of evidence at the precise part, then you’ll have five utterances times five pieces of evidence, so twenty-five options.
Interviewer: It’s not a choice out of three options anymore, but out of twenty-five, so that’s eight times as many.
Takumi: And with that there’s the feeling that you’re truly worked it out yourself, that you made your own reasoning. And I had the feeling at that moment that this may well become a completely new kind of game. At the time, the protagonist was a detective, but I figured that we might try to show that this was a new kind of mystery game, out of fear of not standing out among all those other games. So was there another “professional” in exposing lies besides a detective? And so that’s how we arrived at the defense attorney standing in court. Within the world of mystery fiction exists the courtroom mystery genre, where the defense attorney does their own investigations and stands in court to defend their clients. I was sure there wasn’t a game set in court about a defense attorney yet, so that’s how the project started.
