Six years after its original Japanese release, I spent the summer savouring The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. There’s an enormous amount to marvel at, from fantastic localisation to wonderfully expressive characters, to thrilling courtroom turnabouts and revelations I’ll try to avoid spoiling here. But what struck me most was how, in charting accidental student lawyer Ryunosuke Naruhodo’s journey from Meiji Japan to Victorian England, this is a rare game that captures the immigrant experience.
The premise of many games do, of course, involve journeying to new worlds. But even in the realms of fantasy or sci-fi, they can almost always be read from a Western, borderline colonialist, perspective. The term ‘immigrant’ itself comes loaded with connotations, especially considering Westerners who move abroad are referred to as expats instead.
There have been immigration-themed games, such as the dystopian border controls of Papers, Please, or Bury Me, My Love and its human portrayal of the Syrian refugee crisis. As important as these examples are, however, their focus is more on the perilous process of migration, rather than what life is like for people in a new country, with different customs, where they’re in the minority.
In Ryunosuke’s case, he’s a student from Japan who travels to England to learn from its judicial system, in the hope of transforming his own country’s legal system which at the time was still nascent to the concept of defence lawyers. Although this visit takes place within the context of a treaty between the two nations – based on the historic 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance, which did see a cross-cultural exchange between both sides – it’s clear the relationship is not really on equal standing. The implication is he is travelling to a superior nation – the British Empire was arguably the largest in the world in the Victorian era – and as such he is often treated as the backward Easterner and looked down upon by the British characters, despite being able to speak perfectly fluent English and have the rather respectable occupation of lawyer.
That said, this imbalance is present even when the game is in Japan, such as in Ryunosuke’s first trial where an English witness initially refuses to ‘condescend’ to speak in Japanese – the kind of behaviour you might associate with Brits abroad (or people from other Anglophonic countries). But it’s felt far more strongly once you arrive in London to find how brazenly xenophobic people are towards both Ryunosuke and the “Nipponese”, which his prosecuting opponent, Barok Von Zieks, throws about with as much contempt as a slur.