Osaka police are using Ace Attorney to try and stop kids from smoking weed

Marijuana use is running a little too rampant, or at least according to the Osaka Prefectural Police, which sent in a request to Capcom asking the game developer to leverage its Ace Attorney IP “to prevent marijuana abuse, which has seen a conspicuous shift towards younger age groups.”

Capcom announced the joint campaign, which will be the first time its Ace Attorney series will be used in a juvenile delinquency prevention awareness program.

The program will involve the creation of 6,000 original posters, in addition to 4,000 original flyers that will come packaged with individually wrapped face masks. In some ways this can be viewed as a capsule collection equivalent to something like Reefer Madness, a 60s propaganda film that warned about the dangers kush posed to teenagers.

The flyers and posters will be distributed in areas where precocious youth might encounter them — at Osaka Prefectural educational sites, police boxes, and train stations, on December 9. Each poster and flyer features characters from The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, which was released in July.

Retro game — Ace Attorney isn’t the only video game franchise to be used to promote drug awareness. My favorite would have to be this clip from The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, in which Sonic warns against the dangers of taking unidentified prescription drugs that might just be laying around.

Capcom has been working with the Osaka Prefectural Police since 2013 and the company has plans to address climate change and other issues in the future. Ace Attorney characters pleading with us to recycle would certainly be more important than a call to put the weed down.

It sure would be a shame if someone were to hoard a large number of this limited release collection and eventually make a killing reselling individual posters down the line...