What qualifies as a copy of an official case?

[TheBorg]

I read in the rules that it isn't allowed to create cases that already exist in official Ace Attorney games, but does it have to be a one-to-one recreation, or does it just have to have the same basic plot or characters with new dialogue and details? I'm confused.

[DeathByAutoscroll]

Turnabout Divergence by skyem is probably the limit to how close you can recreate a canon case, although even then she slightly changed up some characterisation and took the trial in a different direction. As long as your case doesn't read like you just lifted it from the game it's probably ok to reuse a canon plot (though please feel free to mix it up to make it more interesting )

Enthalpy Edit: This is not the official status of moderation. This is the poster's opinion.

[Enthalpy]

Please ignore DeathByAutoscroll's answer. Forum moderation wasn't even aware of that case until just now, and I'll need to play it myself to see where it falls, rules-wise.

The official moderation answer is that we're not going to give you a precise definition. We want to allow for creativity without being so similar to official cases that we risk putting ourselves in legal trouble should Capcom's lawyers start caring about this little corner of the internet. "One-to-one recreation" is absolutely out. In principle, "taking the idea of an existing case but creating something radically different from it" is okay, but how do you define radically different...? It's a judgment call.

Let's say your story is "Maya really did kill Mia in Turnabout Sisters." If you keep everything the same in the investigation, but change absolutely everything else, is that okay? No, one of the things we're judging is that you can't do a straight copy of large portions of the case. What if you add new talk options? Still, no, because so much of the copy is there. You might ask, "well, what if I make material changes to the first day of investigation." Then you have to ask how much is "enough," which is its own complicated problem.

Let's take a different approach. What if your story is still fundamentally "Maya really did kill Mia in Turnabout Sisters," and you change things throughout the entire case, but not completely? Then that's a really grey area and very context-dependent. If you use a glass light stand to say Mia should have had glass shards on her if there was really a struggle, that's a better situation than if you use Maya Fey's knowledge of a glass vase to say she arrived before Mia was dead.

If in doubt, please send me a PM with specifics, and I'll let you know what I think.