Base: Gyakuten Kenji 2 · Nintendo DS · 2014 · Translation
Creator: Team scarlet study / Auto-Hey
Capcom declined to localise the sequel after the first game sold poorly, so fans translated the entire game — and for years it was the only way to read the Ace Attorney series' most highly regarded entry in English.
Gyakuten Kenji 2 was released in Japan in February 2011. Its predecessor, Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth, had reached the West and underperformed, and Capcom did not localise the sequel. This left an unusual gap: not an obscure spin-off, but a direct continuation of a story Western players had already been sold half of, and one that Japanese reception regarded as among the strongest instalments in the series. The fan translation was completed and released in 2014. Ace Attorney is a demanding target for this kind of work, because the games are almost entirely text — the mechanics consist of reading testimony closely enough to find a contradiction in it — so a translation must be accurate at a level where a mistranslated clause can make a puzzle logically unsolvable. It must also carry the series' heavy reliance on puns and character-specific naming, which the official localisations handle by rewriting rather than transliterating, and the fan project followed that convention to stay consistent with the games the audience already knew. Capcom eventually released the game officially as part of the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection in 2024, thirteen years after the Japanese original. For the intervening decade, the fan patch was the only English version in existence.