A while back, Turnabout Idol, the first Ace Attorney novel, was released. I think I already mentioned it then, but it was not the first time (and not even the second time) that the series had been published as a printed story.

The very first time was back in 2007. Turnabout Bridge (Gyakuten no Kakehashi) was a short story published in two parts in the literary magazine IN-POCKET and was written by Kenji Kuroda, who wrote Kodansha's five-part Ace Attorney mystery manga that started in the same year (he also wrote the Ace Attorney Investigations spin-off). I finally got a copy of this story earlier this week and I wrote a longer review here, but in short:

It's a case where Phoenix is defending a girl, Kanae, who is accused of killing an actor The girl is a regular customer of Eldoon, like Phoenix and Maya, and Eldoon asked the two to help Kanae. She was an almost obsessive fan of the actor and when she found out he was staying in a hotel for a shooting, she took a room too.But then the actor got himself killed, and the only way out of the locked hotel room was through the window, to the window opposite (which was Kanae's room). Payne thinks it's an open-and-shut case, especially as he has a decisive witness, but yeah, this is an Ace Attorney story so you know what happens.

I remember a lot of people were bothered by the (intentional) non-canon-ness of the manga. This story is set in the manga-universe (as it features the same writer), but I guess this could fit in the canon. It's a regular case, and with no specific dates and only features Payne and Eldoon as familiar faces. The scenes with Phoenix and Maya eating ramen are fun by the way.

The story features a couple of simple sketch-like illustrations, in the same style as the cover featured in the linked review.

Anyway, this is definitely one of the more obscure Ace Attorney stories, especially because it was never collected after its original publication in IN-POCKET.

---

Dang. Here I thought it was another newly published story I didn't hear about until now, where Phoenix ends up falling on a bridge again.

Thanks for sharing, Ash! Do you know of what more recent titles (doesn't have to be GS) has Kenji Kuroda been working on? I feel like aside from Gyakuten series stuff, he's kinda disappeared out of view. Wow, I just googled his name and the name of a law firm popped up...

---

I think he writes an original novel every two, three years, and you also sometimes see stories of him pop up in mystery anthologies. He also works on other novelizations of games, like those of Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Ao-oni.

---