The first three Ace Attorney games originally released on the Game Boy Advance, which required the developers to come up with creative ways to save on memory storage. For example, if every sprite in the game was produced with the 256 colors it was capable of, then they wouldn't fit on the cartridges. To work around this restriction, evidence photos and scenes of memories were drawn to be monochromatic, using only 16 colors, which would take up only a quarter of the size for the same number of images.

In the Japanese and English versions of the game, Jean Armstrong is the owner of a terrible French restaurant, known in English as "Très Bien". In the French version of the game, Armstrong is named Luigi Labocca and owns a terrible Italian restaurant known as "Bellissima".

Although it had never been stated that Mia Fey had won all of her completed trials, Shu Takumi considered this to be true when considering how the game's fourth episode "Turnabout Beginnings" (which canonically features the first trial for both Mia and Miles Edgeworth, the latter of whom had been stated to have a perfect win record in trials prior to the events of the first game) would be resolved:

The original Japanese version of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Trials and Tribulations features a scene where the character Spoiler:Pearl Fey mistakenly spills curry on a scroll. She does this because her mother gave her a direction in writing to "Put a splendid end to the master of the house", but Pearl misreads the kanji "華麗" (pronounced Karei, meaning splendid or gorgeous) as "kare" which means curry. The English localization changes Spoiler:the note to say "Gravely roast the Master in the fires of Hades and bring our vengeance to fruition." and has Pearl instead spill gravy on the scroll.

Hideki Kamiya, best known as the game director of Devil May Cry, voiced Godot in the Japanese version of Trials and Tribulations.