Busioness cards, a pocket tissue, and a plush pillow branded with the Naruhodo Office logo
Shu Takumi and others grouped around a conference table, comparing various Naruhodo Office prototype logos

acrylic stands are the scourge of character merch and I will not miss any opportunity to express my disapproval for them. what could have been a figure, or even a rubber strap, is now almost universally key art that you can stand upright. why do they keep making them? because they’re easy to make, and people keep buying them. we reckon with the market realities we are dealt, which means even I buy them for franchises that can’t lean on any other hope.

the untold truth to this criticism is that japan produces a lot of character merch still beyond acrylics. if you’re like me, you spend too much trimming the fat in prtimes article listings to find the meat, the good stuff. if you do this, you might end up with opinions like the supergroupies watches, a mere facsimile of better seiko variants, are just a slightly more palatable type of upscale for a different kind of sucker. down in the trenches with the commoners, the struggling defense attorney just trying to make it through his next case, is where you find the gold. this is why I am in love with the naruhodo office branded pocket tissue and memo pads fashioned as business cards, so soaked in the ordinary that I really can start to believe nick works out of a shoebox office in los angeles. shibuya parco, home to one of these capcom stores, is an oasis for this sort of bespoke merch, not accounting for it also being the place I drank dumb bitch juice (a tropical orange chisato mocktail).

ace attorney (gyakuten saiban when it doesn’t invoke “compton castles” as a backdrop) isn’t quite as forgotten as other cult favorites in the capcom library like viewtiful joe and mega man legends, especially in more recent years, but there definitely was a period where it felt like it was relegated to being their bastard child out west. everything beyond the original trilogy still seems like more of a footnote in comparison, and it’s not really until geiru’s balloons blew up that I can recall anything else fresher than godot finding its way into the newgrounds animation toolbox. not even mr smith could strike lighting twice, I guess. that cult status, though, as you might expect, has never stopped people from watching capcom TGS stage shows and being very upset that not only were we not getting an AA7 — this was especially fever pitch in 2018, when a capcom producer promised a year of luigi for phoenix — we also weren’t getting the ace attorney collab cafe, or a suite of merch to keep fujos hanging on. japan always got the better limited editions, so of course, they’re also the ones to get a naruhodo tissue too through a long spell of remasters. them’s the breaks. just be glad things have softened enough that we’ve started to get nendoroids in the last few years too.

the naruhodo office logo struck me here, as I’m fairly sure I’d never seen it across any other game material or promotional art. the emblem really is great too, being the sort of reliable balance that deserves to be on a masthead or business card. surely they didn’t do a custom job just for this new merchandise, right? well, no. where has shu takumi, director and scenario writer for the original trilogy, been for the past few years, you might also ask? overseeing the right logo design to go on a piece of luggage, apparently. the designer geek in me kneels out of respect, but I can’t help thinking your time was better spent elsewhere, takumi-san, even if it totally squares with everything I know about you being a perfectionist. maybe one day he will crawl out of the soshage mines, or wherever he’s actually holed up right now surely making a new entry in a beloved franchise. capcom is making a new video game, y’all!

'We prefer to show our feelings of adoration ー our 'suki' ー by appreciating the beauty of the moon ー the 'tsuki'.'
'Oh, I assure you it's quite based.'