That one super-uncooperative witness
Gender: Female
Rank: Suspect
Joined: Wed Oct 20, 2010 12:14 am
Posts: 41
Yanking back an old topic here, but although the "trilogy" thing was never said officially, I think the reason so many people believe it might have been one is that usually things that were planned as multi-installment single-stories from the get-go, like Dai Gyakuten quite obviously was, tend to be trilogies. Assuming that all titles are meant to make up one story, like this one (where the full story is obviously not in the game), a trilogy is a very neat way to write things - you have the first part that sets things up, the second part that develops it, and the third part that clinches everything together, whereas doing this effectively in two parts is not quite as easy (although, of course, certainly not near impossible).
This is also why you tend to see
two closely-related sequels come in succession after an unexpectedly successful title, since trilogies are nice and neat - you can see this with things like Zero Escape, or even Ace Attorney's original trilogy (the first game did well, and then JFA and T&T were planned together). The first game has a self-contained story, the second one uses anything they can use from the first to build upon a new narrative, and the third one closes it off. Of course this is obviously not the case here, but you can see why the concept of trilogies is so alluring.
While duologies do exist commonly in the game industry, they're typically done for titles where the creators are doing every title individually (i.e. they're not betting so solidly on the series that they're certain they want to greenlight two more things at once), so typically those things have more solid endings where it could theoretically stop there. Since Dai Gyakuten obviously wasn't, and since it didn't sell as well as a main title would and got some pretty nasty criticism for its unresolved nature, people are more likely to think that maybe it wasn't always planned to be a pair like this - although of course it's all naturally still speculation, and of course maybe the "all the mysteries will be resolved" tagline is just to please people who disliked the first game's nature and this won't really be the end of the actual series.