Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney And “The Takumi Style”

In an Iwata Asks interview for Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney, Shu Takumi mentioned that he’d been reluctant to work on the game in the very beginning because he’d had a very established view of the Ace Attorney universe. This changed when the idea of magic was brought forward. Despite this, however, Takumi only truly threw himself into the game during the last stretch this year, which was about when both companies started concentrating on working on their respective parts of the crossover title.

Although Level 5 CEO, Akihiro Hino, says in the interview that Takumi was like a main staff member figuratively and literally, as he was credited with organizing everything to be at its most effective presentation-wise, Takumi noted that the cultures of Level 5 and Capcom really were very different, so there were times where the two would be overly courteous to each other. Sometimes, they would cautiously say something while carefully noting the other’s reaction all the while.

“It took some time before we could start to say what we truly felt and truly confront each other,” he tells Iwata. Conversely, Hino admits that his strategy had been to “let Takumi do whatever he wanted” from the very beginning.

“There were quite a few times when our staff would raise an issue where we simply couldn’t see eye-to-eye, where I would tell them: ‘Then why don’t we do it how Takumi would want us to do?’” Hino says. This was nicely summarized by Iwata as a “Make things easy for Takumi to work his creative juices” strategy.

On Takumi’s end, he felt that this project was very different from his usual work. Usually, he would think up and dive deep into the scenarios inside his head, but he had always had full control of what he wrote. This time, there were other’s suggestions to take into account.  He noted that writing scenes he never would’ve written himself and listening to new ideas was a very interesting experience.

He was also very careful about other aspects of the game, such as the voices. Hino stated that Takumi would have the actors record the lines “Objection!” and “Hold it!” over and over again for two hours. Takumi added that originally, Ace Attorney’s voices were done by the development staff themselves (and Takumi himself voiced Phoenix), where they’d record 30-40 trials and choose just the best one.

It’s because of this intensity and the cooperation from both sides that Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney has what Hino has termed “the Takumi-style” to it.