Gyakuten Saiban 123 Naruhodō Selection Development Column 1: The 54-Fold Challenge

Title: The 54-Fold Challenge /「54倍への挑戦」
Source: Gyakuten Saiban 123 Naruhodō Selection official site

Summary: In anticipation of the release of Gyakuten Saiban 123 Naruhodō Selection (Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy) on February 21, 2019 for Switch, PlayStation 4, XBox One and Steam, the official website started posting a series of columns about the development process behind this game. While many of the previous releases in this series were accompanied by developers columns on their respective sites, this is the first time one of the ports has seen such a treatment. In the first column posted on February 6, 2019, director Kodama Shinsuke talks about the challenge of preparing a game that was originally developed for the small screen of a GameBoy Advance to HD.

Images are taken from the source column. Copyright belongs to their respective owners.

The 54-Fold Challenge

Nice to meet you. I am the director of this release, Kodama. In this first installment of three planned columns, I want to talk about the improved resolution!

Some of you might be aware already, but for this game, we had to improve the resolution of a game that was originally released in 2001 for a handheld system, in a way so it would also look good on large screens. The size of the screen of the original game was 240 pixels times 160 pixels. So we had to adjust that to high definition, to 1920 pixels times 1080 pixels. That is a 54-fold difference! Do you believe you could blow up an image 54 times and it'd still look good? And if you look closely, you'll notice the aspect ratio is different too... However, we of the port team bravely took on the challenge of changing everything to high definition.

Take Naruhodo-kun (Phoenix Wright) for example. He has plenty of appearances throughout the game, so we had to refine him completely. With the original drawings and the handheld screen as our basis to work from, we adjusted his contours and the finer details. Each frame has to be corrected one by one until they're all done. Amazing.

* Two Naruhodos. They are the same size for easy comparison. There are lines in his hair in the original drawings, so those details were added. Due to color limitions, the inside of his mouth and his necktie were the same colors, but this too was changed in a natural way.

As another example, we have this piece of evidence, a book.

On the handheld, you could only make out that something yellow was sitting on a chair holding something. What's that yellow blob? So here we consulted the original drawings, other evidence and the scenario. This book is supposed to An Introdution to Evidence Law and that yellow blob is a chick. As you can see he's holding a pipe. With the art sense of the designer adding their own touch, this too has become a cute piece of evidence! Yeah!

* Once you know it's a chick, you can't unsee it anymore. He's pretty wild, with his legs up on the desk. The window, book and hair make the cover a bit more colorful, making it look even more like an introduction book!

And one more example, this boat rental shop.

On the handheld system, you couldn't read the four characters at the end of the large sign. Simply blowing the image up to high definition wouldn't work here. So once again we had to go back to the original drawings and the scenario to find clues. But alas! The answer was nowhere to be found. The only thing left was to come up with something ourselves for those four characters.

The circumstances didn't allow us to redo all the illustrations like this, but I had my team made the art as clear as possible. It was pretty difficult changing everything to high definition, but in the end all I could do was cheer on my team... It's easy to talk, but not easy to do. I'm really grateful to the actual staff members working on this. Everyone has worked hard on Gyakuten Saiban 123 Naruhodō Selection, which will be released on February 21, 2019! Thanks for your support!

To be continued.