The Great Ace Attorney and Adaptation

So, after years of Japan exclusivity the Great Ace Attorney games came to the west about a month ago. As a big fan of the series they've been on my mind a lot. I think they're brilliant, but that isn't what I want to really talk about right now. I want to talk about adaptation, truly transformative adaptation.

For those not aware, Ace Attorney is a series of games that are basically short mysteries wrapped in a plot about being a defense attorney. Through the course of successfully defending your client you inevitably solve the actual crime that took place in the process of securing an acquittal. It's very classic Perry Mason stuff. The Great Ace Attorney takes that premise and throws it back to circa 1900, the protagonist now being aided and abetted by the great Sherlock Holmes (or Herlock Sholmes as he's dubbed here to avoid any major tussle with the litigious Doyle estate). 

That's the basic premise, and a strong enough one to start with. Holmes is a character who has stood the test of time for being malleable and presenting many valid interpretations both by intent and inconsistencies in his initial writing. That said many adaptations "fail", to use a strong term, because they flatten the original work. Holmes is a character who introduces problems as much as fix them in a narrative. It's hard to not make him the smartest person in the room, for example, as it's a core appeal. This also means that he can't typically be portrayed as thinking about something for too long in a visual adaptation. Adaptations also typically lose grasp on what the Watson character is useful for, that seeing into that thought process directly robs it of much of its mystique. Here the Great Ace Attorney does quite well with its protagonist, young Japanese lawyer Ryunosuke Naruhodo, who ably fulfills the Watson role without the baggage of expectation. Naruhodo is clever but lacks the penetrating insights of the great detective, so he successfully allows the game to unravel the mysteries at a player's pace. Perhaps more importantly, his duties as defense keep him from accompany the great detective at all times which creates a mystery of what Sherlock has been up to and knows at any given moment. In understanding a Holmes story, the game's writer, Shu Takumi, had to ably demonstrate that he understood the Holmes and Watson dynamic.

That's just one piece of the puzzle though. A very great piece, but a piece nonetheless. It all would fall to pieces like a house of cards without a good Holmes. Relieved of the burden of being a viewpoint character, Holmes is free to be quite daffy. He is prone to bouts of sullenness, boredom if the case proves to be too simple, or simply trolling in some cases. Often Holmes will deliberately come up with completely nonsensical deductions seemingly just to have the fun of watching someone else slowly unravel the mysteries. At first the cast treats this as though he's legitimately confused, but when time becomes an issue Holmes is prone to suddenly becoming all business, in those rare cases he ceases to make incorrect deductions and instead guides the protagonist quite directly to the right conclusion. This is rare because it would make the game dissatisfying, but it's useful because that crack in the facade is key to reminding the player that his reputation is not for show. In other words the game has a pretty pitch perfect Holmes, he is an enigma, it's clear he always knows more than he wants to let on, prickly and prone to boredom and sometimes erratic behavior. It is an understanding of everything that makes the character interesting.

Which brings us to the most direct form of adaptation, and the most transformative. The narratives of the classic stories are well plumbed, many adaptations have a grab bag of the more famous aspects of stories used to make them more palatable to modern audiences, or to remind them of the things they've heard about but never read. In most adaptations you will see versions of The Final Problem, a showdown with Professor Moriarty. You will see an Irene Adler show up to bring about the closest thing to a "conventional" heterosexual romance for the great detective, you will see many mysteries plucked from these famous stories even though many of them only appeared once. Here Great Ace Attorney does its level best to avoid being ordinary, many of these touchstones are avoided, the greatest of the Holmes short stories will have aspects, characters, names or sometimes entire plots plundered from them but not in the way most adaptations tend to. These are always natural enough that one could easily not have any inkling what's being referenced if they weren't a fan, but to fans represents a careful selection of what elements truly fit this new narrative. Lynchpinning these together is one of the most famous stories, but also one of the longest narratives, and one that is allowed to remain a protracted mystery through most of both game's runtime. The work is full of ideas plundered from the source and reinterpreted as to be fresh. It is the beauty of the public domain in perfect form.

The other secret though, and one of the more fun ones, is that the Great Ace Attorney is doing the same thing to its own series lore. In many ways Great Ace Attorney functions as an adaptive, transformative version of the first three games in its own series. Lifting and improving ideas from that original trilogy without feeling like it's retreading them. It manages to produce a tighter more narratively satisfying version of these events, one with clear planning that avoids the problem of a narrative convinced it must resolve everything from game to game for fear it might otherwise never get the chance to.

In this way The Great Ace Attorney manages to be a game that couldn't be nearly as good if either of its constituent parts were missing. It could not be as strong without the ability to freely use the public domain aspects of Sherlock Holmes to underpin its mysteries, and it couldn't be as strong if it did not represent its writer's capacity to reexplore and fine tune his earlier work. The game is a triumph of adaptation that I have deliberately avoided giving any spoilers on because I feel it should be experienced. If nothing else I hope this convinces even a single soul to give this pair a shot.