What sets Sega’s Valkyria Chronicles 3 apart from Capcom’s Ace Attorney Investigations 2? For English-speaking fans of either franchise, the differences may be inconsequential since an official release of either game in the future seems unlikely, especially since been a decade since both games were released.

While Sega (of America) hasn’t explicitly stated that they won’t be localizing Valkyria Chronicles 3, their relative silence on the matter over the years speaks volumes. It’s noteworthy, that they decided to localize Valkyria Azure Revolution, which some fans consider amongst the worst JRPG games released in recent memory, but continue to remain silent about Valkyria Chronicles 3.

Considering the lack of information from Sega, I’m not particularly surprised. The poor sales of Valkyria Chronicles1 and statements at the time from Sega staff indicated that the future of the Valkyria Chronicles series hinges on the sales of Valkyria Chronicles 2 which seem to have come to fruition to an extent as we didn’t receive a proper entry in the Valkyria Chronicles franchise until 2018 with the release of Valkyria Chronicles 4.

What is truly disappointing is from what limited time I’ve played Valkyria Chronicles 3 it appears to have returned to the series’ roots, featuring a grittier setting, an intriguing story, and an interesting cast of characters. If anything Valkyria Chronicles 3 appears to have been better suited to be the follow up title to the original game than Valkyria Chronicles 2.

The same can also be said for Ace Attorney franchise with Investigations 2 never having a localized release from Capcom.

This is surprising considering the relatively decent sales of previous Ace Attorney titles released on the Nintendo DS2. It didn’t help matters when Nintendo released the 3DS to North American and European audiences, giving Capcom even less incentive to use their resources on a previous generation Nintendo portable device. What particularly bothersome about this is that since the release of these games there have been games released that you would have believed would have received the same treatment as these games did with Valkyria Azure Revolution and the Great Ace Attorney (Dai Gyakuten Saiban) games.

Thankfully in the case of both games there are fan translations available, although both are playable[^3], in the case of Valkyria Chronicles 3 there are areas that were not translated including downloadable content, but that the primary story has been translated enough to be playable. In addition there was an announcement on the Valkyria Chronicles fandom/wikia pages that a new translation was under development.

  1. While I was working at a video game development studio some years ago I had come across the legitimate sales figures for Valkyria Chronicles 2, this was around 2013 or 2014, and I recall being taken aback by how poorly it sold, if I am able to find the exact amount I’ll update the information here, but I recall it being somewhere in the range of 15,000-20,000 copies sold.
    Please disregard sales figures you might encounter on VGChartz as they aren’t accurate sales figures. ↩︎

  2. The first game Ace Attorney: Phoenix Wright sold 368, 763 copies in North America (20, 000 shy of the amount sold in Japan). The fourth game, Ace Attorney: Apollo Justice, sold 234, 015 copies in North America while Ace Attorney Investigations sold slightly less at 158, 484 copies. ↩︎