Two Medieval Ages: Great Ace Attorney Chronicles Instrumentals and Afghanistan

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Let's see how well I can force these two completely different topics into one article!

There is a lot of talk going on about what the United States is doing (or not doing) with evacuating Afghanistan. That's interesting and all and probably what people want to read commentary about, but there's something that's much more on my mind than that: how botched the Instrumentals selection is for The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles.

I can enjoy “various” tracks... but far from all...

There are similar problems behind both situations, so I'll try to... cover both things simultaneously. In terms of Afghanistan, the President Donald John Trump administration really wanted to pull out and end America's role in that endless war. His successor and the current American leader, President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., said much the same thing. Now it's happening and people are upset. No matter who would be the leader in charge, it'd be a messy, imperfect exit. But Americans shouldn't lose heart and want to decide to re-invade that country. I'm generally supportive of what the current American president is doing right now with Afghanistan, and happy he has the courage to follow through with it. (I might disagree with some specific executional details, but...)

Now the fundamentalist Islamic terrorist Taliban, which the Americans have been fighting off for two decades, have basically recaptured the whole of Afghanistan, already undoing whatever “progress” America supposedly accomplished. This is pretty similar to what's going on with The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles and its in-game soundtrack. Observe:

The music tab is only 33 songs long, and half (or more) of those songs are unused versions, which failed for a reason.
(Apparently, songs that they composed right on the first try were omitted.)
Meanwhile, The Great Ace Attorney Adventures alone has over 60 songs, according to YouTube.

I was excited when The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles was first announced and they advertised the existence of a music/sound gallery, which I said should be standard for all Ace Attorney releases moving forward because that franchise has such good music. Certainly it should've been in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy.

According to CAPCOM's own development blogs and timeline, they had always planned to put in background music from the game into a separate gallery. The “From the Vaults” DLC tab (which you'll only get if you buy the game early enough like I did), which seems to be music from The Great Attorney Chronicles Resolve (plus arrangements), was added later in the development timeline. So the original project plan meant that the music selection was going to be even more skimpy than what got in? How embarrassing.

Compare this to an earlier CAPCOM game collection released just last year: the Mega Man Zero/ZX Legacy Collection. The music player was such a core part of the experience that I wrote a review about it. ...And I mean the review is about just the music player, specifically. Not the whole game(s). Sure, it wasn't as fully-featured as I would've liked, but at least Mega Man Zero/ZX Legacy Collection contained all of the songs across the six games. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles couldn't even contain all of the songs across two. I know they're different CAPCOM teams, but corporations with multiple product lines still can and do establish basic standards that all the teams should follow.

Think of Mega Man Zero/ZX Legacy Collection establishing what a collection should be like to be akin to the United States presence in Afghanistan. Right after everyone is done thinking about that and they leave the scene, everything just reverts to a lame package, like The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles or the Taliban taking over Afghanistan and wanting to revert everything back to Medieval Islam.

No matter how many years you'll stay in Afghanistan, it'll still be a Medieval Age hell-hole.

I really wish that the Ace Attorney producers and project planners respected their collections the same way their Mega Man equivalents do. But much like how the Afghans really don't want to align with Western freedoms, the different teams will just do what they want to do. That said, not all Afghans want the Taliban back (and probably not everyone who works for Ace Attorney at CAPCOM want the level of goodies they're delivering).

Remember The Game Awards 2019 when they really wanted gamers to feel good about the existence of Afghanistan girls coding Afghan Hero Girl? It seems to actually have gotten pretty good reviews on the mobile app stores! However, the organisation behind it, Code to Inspire, is terrified right now because the girls doing computer science are probably not going to be accepted by the Taliban. Those women might now be forced into very involuntary marriages with terrorists and treated terribly... or worse.

Try to explain that to the Taliban and their interpretation of Islamic Law and see how far you'll get.

But maybe, and unlike with Afghanistan, CAPCOM's people can be negotiated with and we can stage a QUICK INTERVENTION with a defined GOAL: Get the Ace Attorney releases to have proper galleries.

Update, four months later: No intervention has occurred, but I counted the number of unique songs in the auditorium (the ones that got used). The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures has 15. The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve has 15 as well; two of those being remixes made just for The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. That's a mere fraction of the actual games’ number of unique songs, which I believe is over 100.


Ludwig has only completed up to case 4 of the first game of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. He was really upset that the leitmotif of case 3's defendant wasn't in the collection's instrumentals gallery. Now he has to venture to YouTube to listen to it, which is fraught with spoiler-ridden peril and related videos. He tried listening through the gallery while writing this article, but there's just so little content in there that he switched to listening to Mega Man Zero/ZX Legacy Collection's Music Player a little over halfway through. Let Ludwig know in the comments section your thoughts about The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles so far, or maybe you want to talk about Afghanistan. Maybe you can rate how Ludwig tied those two topics together.


It's just so disapponting how small the in-game soundtrack is. The concerts have more going on!