Tonight, I "bought" and rewatched the Ace Attorney movie, this time without subtitles. It was sometimes difficult to understand, but it was pretty cool to see so much of the vocab, names, and phrases that I'd seen in Kiyo's let's play of the games recently. I was particularly proud to recognize the word "muhai" (undefeated), which I'd only learned this morning after seeing it in Kiyo's Rise From the Ashes video and looking it up.
I remember being really frustrated at the end when I watched the movie the first time, because there's a post-credits scene which isn't subtitled and I had no idea what they were saying or what it was about. This time around, I was able to understand a little bit of it, but I couldn't hear some of the lines because the credits song continued playing over the scene and drowned out the witness's voice.
One thing I found really bizarre about the movie is that they changed the time of Lotta Hart's first photograph from 11:50 to 11:30. The movie made much more drastic changes than that, but all the other changes serve an obvious purpose of shortening the cases or making the story more dramatic. However, the photograph time change serves absolutely no purpose. In both the games and the movie, the only relevance of the time is to prove that there was a gunshot before midnight, and so having it happen at 11:30 vs 11:50 has absolutely no plot significance. So why on earth would they change this?
Speaking of changes, there seems to be a plothole with the movie's version of the DL6 incident. In the games, everyone is trapped in an elevator for hours, explaining why they all pass out after the first gunshot. However, the movie changes the location to the evidence room, but everyone still conveniently passes out after the first gunshot for absolutely no reason.
One other strange thing about the movie is that most the trial audience is wearing funny outfits for some reason, such as hats and even blue and pink wigs. It's very strange looking. Also, this notable does not happen in the flashback to Karma's trial. In the flashback, everyone is wearing formal black suits, not a cosplay outfit in sight.
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Also during/after the big post yesterday, I read a bit about AA on the fan wiki and came across an interesting note about the names of The Bellboy and Penny Nichols.
In the Japanese videos, the bellboy seemed to be referred to as "Boid", and it came up so much that I assumed that was his name, especially since Kiyo kept talking about him as if that were his name. So I was rather surprised to see the wiki say that his name is never revealed at all, and he's only known as the bellboy. What's up with that?
Edit: I went back and checked, and his dialog is just labeled "Boy" in Japanese, so presumably that's just his title and he's never named there either. And I think I misheard - it sounds like Kiyo refers to him as "Boy" as well.
As for Penny Nichols, the name on top of the dialog box just says "staff" when she talks, to the point where for a while, I thought her Japanese name might actually be "Staff", but it isn't. The fan wiki however says that in the (English) game, there's a goof where her dialogue box says "Penny" before she even introduces herself, the opposite case.
Here she is in her very last appearance in Japanese (in the post case 4 credits epilogue sequence), still listed as "staff":
And here's her first appearance in the English games, listed as "Penny" before she actually reveals her name. I wonder why they changed it.
Also, I got up to the part where they talk to Gumshoe about Jake Marshall, and apparently, he isn't American after all. Phoenix assumes he must be American, but Gumshoes says he's actually Japanese, which would explain why he has a Japanese name. (In the English version, Gumshoe says that he's from "West LA" at this point).
