an uncertain future for both Maya and Phoenix. Development After development of the original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney was finished, the writer and director Shu Takumi's boss, Shinji Mikami, told him that they should make an Ace Attorney trilogy, with a grand finale in the third game's last case. Development of the game began immediately when Takumi returned to work from his vacation: the producer, Atsushi Inaba, called him in to a meeting, and told Takumi that he wanted him to write the script for five episodes before the game went into full production, with a deadline of three and a half months. Takumi thought that this was "completely insane", as it had taken him an average of more than a month to write each of the four episodes for the first Ace Attorney; additionally, he felt that he did not have any "tricks" left to use for mysteries or any story threads to work off of. He wanted to protest, but still ended up having to do it. As soon as he returned to his desk, he drafted a work schedule: he scheduled two and a half month to write the dialogue, with half a month per episode, leaving him with a month to create the first prototype and figure out the "tricks" to be used in the mysteries. He doubted that he would be able to do it in time, but managed to write the whole script by the deadline. However, due to issues with memory on the game's cartridge, one episode ended up having to be cut from the game; it was later used as the third episode of the third game. After finishing writing the dialogue, Takumi was called into another meeting with Inaba, and was told to add a new gameplay mechanic to the investigations. Takumi wanted to keep the gameplay simple enough for his mother to be able to play it, and keep it focused on the core concept of finding lies; according to him, he immediately had a vision of the psyche lock system during the meeting with Inaba, but still asked for three days to come up with an idea. He found it easy to formulate the idea, but it took over a month to create the system; the biggest problem was how to visually represent the psyche locks. Takumi also drew storyboards for the episodes' openings, which consisted of series of