The folks over at the Scarlet Study recently released their fan translations patch for the 3DS version of Dai Gyakuten Saiban ("The Great Ace Attorney"). The patch translates the entire game into English and a version of the translation is also planned to be released for the Android port of the game in the near future. Here is a trailer the team made to celebrate the patch's release as well as announce their plans to create a similar patch for Dai Gyakuten Saiban 2, which they say is progressing at a "breakneck pace".

I'll be honest. When I first heard about this project years ago, something about it rubbed me the wrong way and I never had much faith in it. Even when they released their patch for the first episode I thought the translation quality was kind of bland and awkward to read so I didn't follow the project that closely.

However, I was wrong. I've been playing the full patch and it is actually pretty amazing so far. I replayed the first episode and the script is much more polished than the patch for Episode 1 I played back in 2017. I'm almost done with episode 2 now and am loving the game so far and the script continues to be very strong. If you want to learn more about the team that created the patch there is also a great interview from early this year where the group clears up some common misconceptions about the project.

Anyway, thank you Scarlet Study! It is pretty awesome to finally be playing Dai Gyakuten Saiban in English.

It turns out this is the thing that might get me to softmod a 3DS and import the games from Japan. Apparently it's trivially easy to do that sort of stuff these days.

I hope the translation is good. I found the one for Investigations 2 to be way better than it had any right to be, so I hope they're taking liberties when appropriate. Zero interest in playing an Ace Attorney game with a super-literal translation.

@arbitrarywater: From what I've played the translation is very good and I recently learned that some of the people that worked on the Investigations 2 translation also worked on this.

Finally got around to playing this and it's really good with some of the best music in the franchise and the quality of their localization feels totally in line with any of the official stuff. It's a really impressive project.

But boy do I understand why it probably had to be a fan project now.