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Saturday Symphony is one of our Periodicals, in which we discuss the pieces of video game music we love.

It may be a single piece, it may be a group of pieces, or we might talk about a general theme in video game music or a particular games soundtrack. In any case, the goal here is to showcase that video games have had some truly fantastic pieces of music, regardless of era.

As you might imagine with our Asian-centered website, we’ll try to focus on the video games of Japan, but sometimes video game music from elsewhere may prove just too tantalizing to pass up. Either way, we want you to enjoy the music of video games along with us, so sit back, relax, and bring along some nice headphones.

While discussing music pieces generally won’t require divulging spoilers, sometimes it may happen – when discussing a final battle piece for example, or if the music is that intrinsically tied to the story the game is telling. It does happen sometimes.

Let’s begin!

This week’s Saturday Symphony: OBJECTION!

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Ace Attorney is a unique series that has been going strong for more than ten years.

It’s a visual novel game which story takes place in the courtroom. The hero, Phoenix Wright, is a defense attorney stuck with cases that he seems to have no chance of winning. However, with sheer guts, determination, and a lot of thinking outside the box, he manages to pull through.

The soundtrack for the Ace Attorney series is well-loved by fans, and has numerous tunes which you may find are easy to hum, similar to famous music heard in Capcom’s other popular series Mega Man and Street Fighter.

Today, we’ll talk about song which is heard throughout the entire series. It is not a song that gets remixed with each proceeding entry, but rather a song that will always get played whenever it’s time to get hype because Phoenix is about to get the bad guy.

The song usually comes on after Phoenix is troubled with the messy evidence in front of him, when he sees the answer and in a scream that echoes throughout the courtroom (in my mind it does, at least) he shouts “OBJECTION!”

That was from the original Game Boy Advance version of the first entry of the series, released in 2001 and composed by Sugimori Masakazu and Kimura Akemi. The theme has since been refined for its re-release on the Nintendo DS in 2005.

This is by far the most famous “Objection” theme of the series, and the one you’ll most likely hear a fan to start humming if you ask them to sing it for you. That being said, each sequential entry in the series has had their own “Obection” theme.

Here is the theme used in Ace Attorney: Justice For All, also composed by Sugimori and Kimura.

Not as catchy, huh? We know. But, it still did the job of hyping you up when you found the answer to a puzzle after looking so hard. The same can go for the theme used in Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations, composed by Iwadare Noriyuki. You can kind of hear references of the original theme in it.

When Apollo Justice emerged as the new hero in Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, it was obvious he would need his own “Objection” theme as well. Here it is, and this time it’s composed by Horiyama Toshihiko. It still carries similarities to the older themes, but has a sound as refreshingly new as the hero.

Overall, we all can agree that the melody in the original game is the one that best represents the “Objection” theme. Capcom understands this as well, and most likely will agree with us.

After all, it was the original theme that was used for rearranging when special CDs were released, featuring re-imaginations of famous songs throughout the series. We saw many reinterpretations of the original “Objection” theme…

such as jazz…

…and orchestra…

…and orchestra again…

…and even some funk…

…and for the big-screen adaptation.

Which is your favorite version?