Tatsunoko vs. Capcom's producer, Ryota Nitsuma, was asked recently by NGamer Magazine about adding Phoenix Wright into the game. Phoenix Wright is from Capcom's Ace Attorney series, and Nitsuma had this to say.
R&D actually really wanted to include these characters, especially Phoenix Wright and Franziska von Karma because she's got a whip which would be easy to implement. But because Phoenix Wright only has one move, 'Objection!', we struggled.
We designed a move for him: when he says objection, the actual writing attacks the opponent. However, 'objection' in Japanese is 'igiari' — it's four characters, whereas 'objection' becomes ten.
When we localize, the balance of the game gets destroyed because the move becomes bigger. There'd be no way of avoiding it! We had to remove him for these reasons. In the future, it is one of our aims to get him in.
What's interesting to me is that it seems like a pretty simple fix to used an abbreviated version of objection, like 'Objt.' which should come out to the same length as 'igari', or alter the font size, swap in multiple exclamation points or some other characters to make the length the same.
Here's a visual showing how you can keep the character length roughly the same for both words.
