Ace Attorney fans have been hoping for the announcement of a new entry for many years now, but today, we got a surprise instead. Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies VR is a virtual reality version of the fifth mainline game in Capcom’s lawyer-themed adventure series, and it’s coming to Meta platforms next year. You can watch the reveal trailer below.
This port gives Dual Destinies a more hands-on approach, allowing players to pick up evidence to inspect, examine environments for clues in first person, and use gestures and voice commands during cross-examinations: You can literally yell “Objection!” to object to a witness’ contradiction. You don’t physically inhabit the protagonist 100% of the time, however – dialogue during trials still involves seeing characters in third person, meaning you’ll still get to see Apollo, Phoenix, and Athena’s over-the-top animations.
According to the game’s store page, it will come to Meta Quest 3S, Meta Quest 3, Meta Quest Pro, Meta Quest 2, and Meta Quest, though developer Amata K.K.’s description of the game omits the original Meta Quest from that lineup. It drops sometime in 2027.
Personally, I find this to be an odd move for the series. Capcom has been generous and thorough with its HD collections of the older Ace Attorney titles. After the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection dropped in 2024, the only remaining Phoenix Wright adventure you couldn’t play on modern platforms was his crossover with Professor Layton. As such, it seemed like the only next step was a brand new entry, so a VR adaptation is particularly surprising.
Ace Attorney also isn’t a series that needs to be a VR title. As fun as it might be to yell “Objection” every couple of minutes during a cross-examination, the vast majority of gameplay is non-voiced dialogue. Unlike the highest quality VR games, which work best in short bursts, Ace Attorney games are long, and wearing a headset just to mostly read text for a few hours doesn’t sound appealing.
Finally, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies is my least favorite Ace Attorney game, but I understand why it was their pick here. It’s the series’ fifth entry, but it was the first foray into 3D, so it’s the earliest release that could be reasonably set in VR. You can play it without playing prior titles, but I’d always recommend the original trilogy’s HD collection over this one.
The best game to get the VR adaptation would have been The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, as it’s a better standalone adventure and it’s been longer since that game’s release (2021) compared to the HD re-release of Dual Destinies, which dropped in 2024’s Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy. But even though The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is a better game, Dual Destinies is shorter and has more of the series’ iconic characters, so it’s a more reasonable first project.
The silver lining is that Capcom is neither developing nor publishing this game (that’s all being done by Amata K.K.), so there’s a decent chance Ace Attorney 7 is still in the works – the development team won’t be preoccupied with finishing this VR title first. Maybe this VR version will drastically change my opinion of Dual Destinies, but it’s unlikely. I’ll find out when the game drops sometime next year.