he didnt want soup >:(

ohhhhhhh yeah I think I see what you mean. it probably looks like fanart because I'm actually the one who drew it

My thought process for a hypothetical new Ace Attorney went as such:

Ace Attorney will not spoil the twists from their other games, even if it leads to weird/unsatisfying characterization and dropped plot threads.

As much as I wish it weren't true, Ace Attorney will never have a game without a young, female character in the main lineup.

If they make an AA7, even one year of timeskip means all the younger teenage girl characters (Trucy, Pearl, Athena) will be "too old."

That means AA7 will have a new teenage girl character.

However, I have a hunch (wishful thinking) capcom will return to existing popular characters again, since adding a lot of new characters in AA6 and TGAA (which I have still not played) led them to having more niche popularity than the older games

Also, the AA4 version of Phoenix scored way higher than the AA5-6 version of Phoenix in the 2024 popularity poll, and Trucy scored #4

So... if AA7 will probably have new characters, but we want a game with returning characters, then why not make a game that takes place during the 7 years timeskip?

If a game stars Phoenix during that time period when he's not currently a lawyer but canonically still helping solve cases, wouldn't the Ace Attorney Investigations format fit perfectly?

So, in my hypothetical AAI3, it would involve Phoenix and Trucy helping Edgeworth solve cases & creating the MASON system a year before the events of AA4. Instead of Edgeworth's "mind chess," there'd be a mini-game where you'd interrogate people under the guise of poker. You'd meed a young girl in Europe named Athena and help her out of a sticky situation. And of course, the AAI games all feature a flashback case, so in this game you'd play as Mia Fey, with Phoenix as her new apprentice.

I enjoyed designing the costumes for this! I even consulted a friend living in Japan so make sure the fashion wasn't too influenced by my western bias.

I gave Phoenix the blazer/hoodie combo because allegedly a lot of men in Japan do wear that, and there was a similar design in the AA4 concept art. And I gave him crocs because I thought it was funny.

Young kids are also a lot more socially aware than people give them credit for. Young children are perfectly aware that adults don't take them seriously. They know when their parents don't actually like them. They listen and remember when adults talk about them while they're in the room. Kids will develop basic abilities to charm etc. from babyhood and will begin experimenting with social norms and concepts of deception, appropriate information, and acceptable language and attitudes in toddlerhood. By the time a kid is five or six, they have solid social strategies for relating to adults and separate ones fr relating to their peers, that they'll continue to refine for the rest of their lives. They will also say completely off the wall shit because they don't have the context to know what is and isn't considered super fucked up yet.

By the time a kid is eight or nine, their main difference from adults is in experience, interests, and ability for long-term focus. An eight year old can think as intelligently and coherently as a thirty year old, they just have less experience and information to draw from, and are likely interested in very different things. They're also likely still slightly hamstrung by vocabulary and literacy, though much less so than a younger kid.