games to localize due to its focus on the story, and how it needs to convey the whole game world and its characters through just text; this made it a challenge to make the characters relatable for an American audience. Another thing the localization team had to keep in mind was to ensure that recurring characters were consistent with how they behave in the first Ace Attorney. According to JP Kellams, another staff member working on the localization, there was a lot of pressure on them to make a good localization, as the first game's localization had been well received; he also felt that there was room for creativity due to the game's style and subject, with room for humor that might not fit in other localizations. A lot of the humor in the original was based on Japanese wordplay; these jokes had to be redone entirely for the English release. Hsu felt that the game was more demanding than previous projects she had worked on, as the localizers "almost have to become [the characters]" in order to get the nuance and motivations right due to their complexity. One of the first decisions Hsu had to make was how to localize Maya's hometown and the mysticism of the Fey clan. She came up with the idea that the localized versions of the Ace Attorney games take place in Los Angeles in an alternative universe where anti-Japanese laws like the California Alien Land Law of 1913 were not passed, anti-Japanese sentiments were not powerful, and where Japanese culture flourished. This dictated what should be localized and what should be kept Japanese; things relating to the Fey clan and the Kurain channeling technique were kept Japanese, as that was Maya's heritage, while Japanese foods that were not widely known in the West were changed. Despite the setting in the United States in the localized version, the Japanese justice system of the original remained intact in the localization, as changing it would have altered the entire game structure. As the localization team wanted to keep the humor in the Japanese names for the characters, it was decided to make the English names contain the same kinds of double meanings: character name puns were based on their personalities or backgrounds, or were visual gags. A lot of the names were determined with the original Japanese name in mind; for the game's third episode, several