Many players and publications have claimed that the Ace Attorney series was written to be a critique, satire, or parody of the Japanese legal system. These arguments often compare the series' setting with cultural differences and criticized elements of it, including but not limited to: a statistical ~99% rate of conviction; the reliance on witness confessions to secure them; immediate assumptions that a suspect is guilty upon arrest; the lack of a jury; corruption and incompetency among the police, prosecutors and judges; and exaggerated verbal or physical abuse in courtroom proceedings.

However, creator Shu Takumi's statements tell a different story. While he planned out Ace Attorney as a mystery game, he and other developers became concerned that the legal setting applied to it might misinform players about how the Japanese legal system works, but they did not know anyone who studied law to ask for input (Takumi later stated that he was afraid to ask lawyers who had not played the series for their impressions of it). In the end, he insisted that realism was not the point of the game, but to recreate his perception of a tense courtroom atmosphere for a logic and reasoning-based mystery game.

At one point during development, he and a group of developers visited a small local courtroom and sat in on four criminal trials as a "team-building" exercise, with a murder trial as their last. Takumi recalled realizing just how relevant crime is to everyday life and that the courtroom's atmosphere was quiet, undramatic, and "almost homely", notably lacking gavels and the shouting of "Objection!" However, he intentionally did not change the tone of the game's courtroom to reflect this, and it remained based on his original, exaggerated expectations before the visit.