Knowing that you now have this huge American fanbase, have you tried to cater to them in the translation of the later games with in-jokes or anything of the sort?

Not so much what you were talking about, but the localization team, instead of just translating the text and putting in different kind of accents or whatever, they really sat down and though about: These are the kind of characters we have, these are their personalities in Japanese, and how do we go about these characters in English to give them personalities as fleshed out as the Japanese version. So it really changed my perspective on localization, just thinking about making their personalities into personalities and not just text on the screen. A lot of what they did was they took the personalities and made sure they sounded like normal Americans, like wherever they were from, and focused on just getting natural dialogue and natural conversation.

You've mentioned adapting the humor and the characters for an American audience, but has there been a time in which you actually had to, say, change a puzzle because of cultural differences?

The one thing we did have to spend a lot of time on was because part of a case involves going on vacation in another time zone, making sure the times match up and so when you solve the case, it actually works out to be the correct time. That was kind of hard, since we went from Japan to LA. The Japanese game is set in Tokyo, which is 8 or 16 hours different from here, so matching up all the times was the one thing that had to be worked out.

Do you feel that the strength of the game and its character development comes from the game's episodic structure?

We put most of our focus on character development. If you think of them like a comic book, when you have a comic book and on the DS you play it in short periods of time. So we wanted to have something more digestible rather than trying to put a Lord of the Rings-style book into a comic book that you only get ten pages each. So we wanted to have short, digestible chapters, and that helped us with the gameplay and so it was too long and you don't get enough events as you go along, and you don't have the satisfaction of finishing a chapter, it might get kind of boring. So to focus on characters we went with the chapters, to have then feed off of each other and built that sort of dynamic.

Do you feel that this pick-up-and-play aspect is very important to the game, or would you ever consider a console version of Phoenix Wright?

Because of the gameplay style, we really wanted to have it on the Game Boy or DS, and that really determined what kind of game turned out. For us, the portable game system is something that is great because you can just pick it up and play on your way home from work on the train. And in your home, it's a much better environment for reading rather than sitting on your couch and reading - people don't like to read games usually. Because we had the portable system, that allowed the game to evolve in that direction. So right now we don't have any plans to put it on a console. I don't know if it would fit on a console in the same format it is now.