It’ll be strange to cross-examine witness testimony for events we were party to, and yet here we are. Hopefully this one won’t give us a Lotta trouble.
One of the more interesting tidbits of Ace Attorney development lore was that Larry Butz wasn’t intended to be a witness in the fourth and final case of the original game. However, due to concerns about space on the GBA cartridge, they chose to reuse the asset.
And once it was proven that they could do that without worry, since the audience didn’t care, it opened the door for characters like Lotta to be reused and recycled for multiple cases across multiple game. There’s a reasonable fear that reusing characters like that has the potential to make the world feel “small”, because the same people are regularly getting involved in murders that are completely, totally unrelated to each other.
However, at the same time this allows otherwise one-offs like Lotta to flesh their characters out over multiple games. Sure, each of them still adhere mostly to the stereotypical archetypes of the murder mystery genre, but within that frame work they get to have an inner depth they normally wouldn’t.
And that’s a small, but important factor that enriches and elevates the series ever so slightly higher.
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