We Have No Objections to Ace Attorney‘s Action-Packed Music

By Marc Normandin | October 22, 2025 | 1:21pm

Video Games Features Ace Attorney

We Have No Objections to Ace Attorney‘s Action-Packed Music

Music plays an important role in setting the mood in almost any video game, but for Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, this is even more true than usual. Ace Attorney isn’t full of action sequences, but instead slow-paced, methodical investigations and questioning in court—it’s a point-and-click adventure game, one you will often seen described as being a visual novel series as well due to how much text there is within it, making the music even more vital for establishing mood and giving the player and their emotions cues as to how they should be feeling at any given moment. The music better sells what you see on screen, be it a scene or characters or the text you’re reading, as it helps to add another dimension to everything. Again, this isn’t exclusive to Ace Attorney, but it’s the specific moods it leans on music for that make it stand out.

In Ace Attorney, despite it being, as said, a slow-paced adventure game with a lot of reading and clicking around, it wants you to feel the kind of intensity you would from an action title. That’s not always the case, but arises when the moment is appropriate: when you’re trading proverbial blows in court. Ace Attorney wants you to feel the intensity that comes in a moment where defense attorney and protagonist Phoenix Wright feels as if his own life is hanging in the balance, even if you’re just reading his reaction to those moments rather than physically dodging an incoming blow or parrying an attack.

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Capcom, the developer and publisher of the Ace Attorney games, knows a thing or two about action titles. The original composer for Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Masakazu Sugimori, had previously worked on various Mega Man games for Capcom, as well as Viewtiful Joe, and would then contribute tracks to PlatinumGames’ Vanquish as well as Konami’s anime-girl-Gradius-like Otomedius Excellent. Naoto Tanaka, who took over for Sugimori with the first sequel to Ace Attorney and then wrote music for the DS release of the original, spent his career before that moment working on the Japanese Playstation ports of the first six Mega Man games, as well as various Mega Man X titles and Mega Man 64, the Nintendo 64 edition of Mega Man Legends. Post-Ace Attorney games, he would join Platinum and compose tracks for their action-heavy games like MadWorld and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. If Ace Attorney games seem out of place in those résumés, no they don’t.

There’s a logical progression to the intensity of Ace Attorney’s music that brings the player along for the emotional ride. As specific details are given about the crime being committed—say, when Detective Gumshoe is explaining what the prosecution is presenting as evidence of said crime—the track “Logic and Trick” plays, which is both intentionally catchy and not the kind of song that’s going to make you start to panic or get pumped up.

During the questioning phase in the courtroom, however, the same song, “Moderato,” is always playing in the background. It’s not intense, necessarily, not compared to what’s coming, but is meant to build up some light tension—you’re attempting to poke holes in a testimony that you know has holes in it. If only you can find them, which has to be done under pressure and with a limited amount of mistakes allotted to you before it’s Game Over.

After a yell of “Objection!” from Phoenix Wright during cross-examination of the witness, a song of the same name plays:

The idea here is to make the player feel as if they’re building toward something important and right, that they’re on the right track—it eases up on the tension a bit, but only to then present you with whiplash, as the true action-styled songs of the game begin. “Allego” features either Wright or his opposing counsel explaining why what was just explained or argued can’t be correct, in a more intense manner than in “Moderato”.

And when a hole is poked in that explanation, things all of a sudden sound like a Mega Man boss fight or a bout from Street Fighter—this track, appropriately, is called “Cornered”.

“Telling The Truth” slows things down, but it’s heavy, in the emotional sense—you could pop this in a Castlevania game while Dracula monologues at a Belmont, and it wouldn’t feel out of place. The weight of the moment is felt here, but sometimes you don’t get to “Telling the Truth” without a little “Suspense” first…

…or even a more aggressive and intense variant of “Cornered” that leans even more into sounding like Mega Man is in too deep.

An adventure game ramping up its music to show tension and danger wasn’t new with Ace Attorney by any means, but it’s the specific way in which Capcom’s composers chose to do it here. Something like Konami and Hideo Kojima’s Snatcher wanted to hammer the game’s sci-fi setting, roots, and influences into the player, so the music in its tensest moments is unmistakably sci-fi-influenced in nature. Ace Attorney eschews movie influences and goes with the game genres Capcom was best known for: fighting and action. Some of these Ace Attorney themes would fit in on a Mega Man or Street Fighter soundtrack no problem, and the reason for that is to truly make the courtroom proceedings feel like a battle. The images seen during these tracks also reflect this: Phoenix Wright and prosecutor Miles Edgeworth both appear as if they are physically taking damage with each statement that harms their case or argument or simply catches them by surprise. The only counter is a well-placed objection.

That intensity only increased in the DS version, which was a rerelease—and the first international release of Ace Attorney—with a brand new Turnabout (episode) included, in which you’re introduced to the younger version of a character that would play a significant role in the first from-the-ground-up DS Ace Attorney, Apollo Justice, as well some mechanics the devs were playing with in the transition from the Game Boy Advance to Nintendo’s dual-screen handheld. The musical cues, especially the leitmotifs, take a real jump here to represent the heightened tension and importance of each moment where someone’s life hangs in the balance—your foe here, in the end, is none other than the district chief of police himself, and revealing his corruption is given the kind of audio treatment it deserves, as it truly is an intense, back-and-forth bout where you’re regularly fighting from underneath. You can feel the importance of this man in the game just from how imposing his leitmotif sounds, but it’s also done in a way where it’s not immediately villainous—intimidating, yes, but that’s to be expected for a character in his position. It all becomes plenty villainous when paired with the intensity of a courtroom battle when you know he’s the key to it all, however.

The most recent entries in the series, the two Great Ace Attorney games, lack some of this intensity in favor of an era-appropriate sound, as they’re set in the past at the time that Japan is supposed to be creating a legal system based on that of western interests with a foothold in imperial Japan. Those games and their music are, like their titles, great, but both are missing something the earlier games had because of this shift, which only makes the intentionality and success of the original design that much more apparent.

Phoenix Wright actually has starred in other genres where this music is a more natural fit, as well: he featured in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3—and should have been in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, too, don’t even get me started on that—as well as the massive 3DS crossover RPG Project X Zone 2, which included characters from Capcom, Namco, Sega, and Nintendo all together in one purposeful, fan-service-y mishmash. The defense attorney, of course, was partnered up with Yakuza’s Kazuma Kiryu and Goro Majima, and thanks to his words magically and literally being given the power to injure opponents, Phoenix Wright was just as capable in battle as the hardened yakuza who warmed up to him in case they needed a good lawyer someday.

“Natural” or not, however, the more intense courtroom music in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney absolutely fits: it only seems like a mismatch if you haven’t played the game. To make a courtroom battle exciting, more was needed than just the drama of the back-and-forth arguments: music to make these moments truly feel life or death was required. Music that brought to mind something besides a point-and-click adventure, that made the courtroom feel like the battleground that it truly is in this game. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney was stuffed full of these kinds of tracks, and Capcom’s success with this surprise combo is part of why the games end up getting released on every single platform, every new console era; the pairing just works, and an all-timer was the result.

Marc Normandin covers retro video games at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Bluesky at @marcnormandin