Capcom released Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney in Europe last week despite the fact that its predecessor, Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations has yet to come out. We thought it was bad enough when the games were being released out of order, but now two pieces of tenuous evidence suggest that Phoenix Wright 3 may not see a European release at all.

The first (less convincing) sign is that Apollo Justice's (loud) Nintendo Europe webpage has the string "AceAttorney3" in its URL. That doesn't really mean that the third Ace Attorney game isn't happening, rather that Apollo Justice is the third Ace Attorney game to be released, and that whoever created the URL didn't save a space for the real AA3.

More troubling is the fact that there is a site for Trials and Tribulations, but there are no longer any links to it. Could this point to a cancellation? Court Records members speculate that T&T would get a higher PEGI content rating than the other Ace Attorney games, and because of that, Capcom wouldn't benefit from releasing it. In any case, both the U.S. and Japan have cheap and plentiful Trials and Tribulationses. Feel free to partake!

[Thanks, Maz!]

This thread on Capcom Europe's forums is from earlier in the month, but the info contained within is still worth noting. There's still no European release date for Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations, but a forum administrator has confirmed that it will be out after the May 9th release of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney.

As "Chompman" explains, "There's no spoilers in Apollo Justice that would stop you enjoying Trials and Tribulations if you played it afterwards though." Well, that makes it okay. European gamers are certainly used to later game releases by now, but out of sequence? That's a new and special way to irritate a fanbase.

Oh, by the way, the U.S. version of Trials and Tribulations is $18.99 at Amazon.

[Via NeoGAF]