@fitia I'm going to take it to a real post because this is getting really long for tags and idk if I should keep clogging OP's notifs.
(TL;DR: this is about the question of taking the Japanese Gyakuten Saiban and the English Ace Attorney as two entirely different works vs. letting Gyakuten Saiban, by virtue of it being the original, influence or even override interpretation of the English version)
You make an excellent point too about accessibility. Not everyone can or wants to learn another language just to understand a piece of media and the great majority of the Western audience for Ace Attorney (me included) doesn't speak Japanese, and it's unfair to expect that of anyone. The game very much stands on its own, and the localisation does a pretty good work of separating the game enough from its original cultural context (as much as possible) for knowledge of said original context not to be necessary to understand it.
At the same time I also feel like they couldn't make it work perfectly, precisely because that's not how the work was conceived in the first place. Janet Hsu's "this is California if the Japanese community had been more implanted and less persecuted in the mid-20th century" setting is indeed a really clever way to do this, but ultimately this was not meant to be America, and so there will always be discrepancies between the real-world America and Ace Attorney's America that cannot be explained away by the setting, as alternate as it may be. Ace Attorney uses the same assets, the same plot beats, the same lines than Gyakuten Saiban, albeit culturally adapted and liberally translated. Ultimately, I do think Ace Attorney remains a translation more than an adaptation, even though I admit this is debatable as it certainly skirts the line between those two things. I think the difference is felt mostly in all the small things I outlined in my previous tags; Gregory and Phoenix working on Christmas, Europe somehow being both more advanced in working with juries and also having less worker protections as America, Germany and the German language for some reason seeming popular, snow in California, etc., all those things that are at the root of the "eat your hamburgers, Apollo" meme.
(Besides, I will argue that even the reading of an adaptation is enriched from looking at the material it is adapting. But I don't think anyone ever really argued the contrary anyway.)
There are also differences that have nothing to do with culture, but rather with the temporal context in which it was created, like technology being very different from what it "should" realistically be in the time setting the game it set in, between the archaic Nokia-brick-type phones Phoenix and Edgeworth tout and Kay's futuristic Little Thief, all of this in the mid-late 2010s.
So what I'm saying here is, I feel like there is room for creativity in one direction like in the other, and ultimately I don't think one approach is more "correct" than the other. I feel like it makes as much sense to read Ace Attorney on its own with only the text itself as basis for interpretation, as it does to prioritise the context of the original game to understand it, as it does to mixing and matching and doing everything in between. Personally, I like doing a little bit of both; to use (what Japanese speakers have to say about) the original work to understand better things that may seem strange to me about the localisation, or to enrich my understanding of the characters' behaviour, and better understand the very deliberate choices that the translation made without dismissing those as anything but choices that are very much a part of the work itself.
I understand the original post as being a reaction to certain "gotcha!" posts that seek to discredit the localisation by using the original, which I agree is in bad faith because the original and the localisation do exist as two different and separate objects. At the same time I think it's also a bit of a fallacy to truly consider the two objects entirely distinct, considering their very close link.
