Ace Attorney Wiki:Age reckoning

The age contradiction is a set of inconsistencies in information presented in the Ace Attorney series. More specifically, it refers to phenomena that occur due to the negligence of the game developers with respect to the passage of time in the series. These phenomena include similar birthday ranges for major characters as well as age reports that outright contradict each other.

Blatant contradictions

 * On Feb. 16, 2012, Miles Edgeworth was 20 years old. However, on Mar. 20, 2018, six years later, his age was recorded as 25.
 * On Apr. 11, 2013, Phoenix Wright was 21 years old. However, on Oct. 9, 2026 (seven years after Apr. 29, 2019), 13 years later, his age was recorded as 33. In fact, the same contradiction was produced from a smaller time gap in the Japanese version, in which The Stolen Turnabout happened on September rather than on October, and Phoenix was 26 at that time.

Reasons
The main reason for these contradictions is that the game developers did not consider birthdays when putting down the ages of the characters. Instead, they treated the non-flashback cases of each game as constituting a specific "year", and characters did not age during that "year". This mindset would cause problems when the games began to straddle the new year.

Resolution
To resolve these issues, this article proposes that editors conform to the attitudes of the developers. However, ages listed in court records will be treated as ages that the characters will reach by the end of the "year" of the game. One could think of it as a school-year type of arrangement.

For example, if we take Miles Edgeworth's birthday to be in November of 1992, he would be going on 24 in Turnabout Sisters. In Turnabout Goodbyes, he would be actually 24, and in Rise from the Ashes, he is still listed as 24 (and is actually 24), even though he would turn 25 in 2017, because RftA is in the "year" of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.

Consequences
Characters with ages listed only in Rise from the Ashes, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Justice For All and Phoenix Wright's cases in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations will have 2 possible years of birth that correspond to the "years" in those games. This would apply to almost all characters to which this applies for the sake of consistency. For example, Moe is 46 in JFA (2017-2018), so his year of birth is listed as "1971-1972". Characters with ages listed in "flashback" cases and the other two games do not suffer from this phenomenon because Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney and the four original episodes in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney do not straddle the new year.

One could simply say that these "years" begin sometime between Mar. 23 and June 16, but this causes problems with Edgeworth's age issue.

Edgeworth
One solution to Edgeworth's problem would be to say that Edgeworth wasn't quite 20 when he first prosecuted, but he would turn 20 during 2012 or the beginning of 2013.

Phoenix
The developers probably meant for Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney to take place in 2025, seven years after Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations in 2018. However, they made the mistake of setting the flashback case of Turnabout Succession to Apr. 29, 2019, and then setting Turnabout Trump to Apr. 20, seven years later. Apr. 20, 2025 is not even six years after the flashback case!

One solution would be to determine Phoenix's year of birth to be 1993. The justification would be that Larry Butz was also born in 1993, and Phoenix doesn't get his own profile until T&T, anyway. Turnabout Memories would be taken as taking place in 2013-2014 (which is consistent), and Phoenix would be considered to be going on 21.

Another solution would be to overlook the blunder and take Phoenix's age as 34 in AJ. This avoids the stretch that one would have to make to claim that Phoenix, whose birthday would not be for at least nine months under the former solution, is going on 21.

Ema
Ema Skye suffers from the same issue that Phoenix does, except she doesn't suffer from blatant contradictions. Her year of birth could simply be taken as 2001 to account for both ages (as she is 16 in 2017 and 25 in 2026).