Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, known in Japan as Ghost Trick (ゴーストトリック, Gōsuto Torikku^?), is an adventure game developed by Capcom for the Nintendo DS and iOS.^[1] The story centers on the recently deceased protagonist Sissel, and his ghost's struggle to discover who he was when he was alive and who killed him. The player assumes the role of this ghost, who has the ability to perform various "Ghost Tricks" to solve puzzles and navigate the world around him.

The lead development was handled by Shu Takumi, creator of the Ace Attorney franchise. The game is published by Capcom and was released for the Nintendo DS in Japan on June 19, 2010; in North America on January 11, 2011; in Europe on January 14, 2011; and in Australia on January 20, 2011. A port for iOS was released in Japan on December 16, 2010 and the rest of the world on February 2, 2012.^[1] A high-definition remaster was released on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows on June 30, 2023.

Gameplay[]

Ghost Trick is an adventure game in which players control Sissel, a ghost that must use his powers to save lives. During gameplay segments, players can swap at will between the Land of the Living, where time flows naturally, and the Ghost World, in which time is stopped. In the Ghost World, Sissel can travel between objects within a certain radius. These objects are represented by blue cores, and in the Land of the Living, Sissel can animate these objects to perform actions, known as "Ghost Tricks", that open new paths or influence the characters around him. For example, moving a tray of donuts will prompt a character to change where he or she is currently seated, as well as giving Sissel access to new areas.

Much of the plot is driven by Sissel's ability to possess corpses. When he does this, he can return to the time four minutes before the corpse's death. In these four minutes, Sissel can attempt to use his Ghost Tricks to alter the situation, and ultimately change the future by saving the person's life. He can also communicate with the ghost of whomever he is saving, but only if the ghost is conscious. If the player fails to save the victim in time, he may choose to go back to the beginning of the four minutes, or return to a checkpoint created when the player manages to alter fate a little. Later in the game, players can switch control to Missile, the ghost of a small dog. Missile's spirit has a longer reach than Sissel, and has the ability to swap the position of two objects that are of the same shape.^[2] The majority of the gameplay segments consist of the puzzles that make up these scenarios.^[3]

Characters[]

Sissel&Lynne — Promotional art of Sissel and Lynne.

Sissel
Missile
Lynne
Kamila
Ray
Jeego
Inspector Cabanela
Detective Jowd
Beauty
Dandy

Bartender - The "Fastidious Glass Polisher" is a composed bartender at the restaurant Chicken Kitchen who continuously polishes glasses.

Pigeon Man - An unnamed junkyard superintendant with a blue pigeon on his head. He is an ex-police medical examiner who quit his job to research the powers of Temsik radiation after he came across Yomiel's unusual "corpse" ten years ago.

Memry - A skating waitress who serves chicken and drinking water to customers in the Chicken Kitchen restaurant. It is later revealed that Memry is an undercover agent. She helps the police plant a listening device, AKA "ladybug", to listen the foreign criminal couple Beauty and Dandy.

Chief

Blue Detective - One of the detectives investigating Sissel's death. He looks a bit like Phoenix Wright from the Ace Attorney games, wearing the same blue suit and red tie.

Green Detective - The other detective investigating Sissel's death. He dresses in a green suit like Winston Payne also from the Ace Attorney games.

Amelie - Amelie is the daughter of the Justice Minister, and the original target of Beauty and Dandy's kidnapping attempts. She's in the dark about what her parents are arguing about, mistakenly thinking it was about her mother's weird novels instead, and she's rather precocious and in a way, more mature than her parents. Amelie is also a friend of Kamila.

Emma - Emma is Lynne's neighbour, the wife of the Justice Minister and Amelie's mother. A romance novel writer and a formidable woman, she can knock out Missile through the wall of their apartments with a wine bottle and beat the living daylights out of rats. She's totally fearless. Emma left her husband after he didn't admit to his mistake publicly about being manipulated to order Jowd's execution, keeping their daughter away from him even during his birthday. Her rose-shaped hair blooms when she's angry.

Justice Minister - The Justice Minister is first seen lying dead on the ground in his own office. After going back in time, Sissel found out he got a fatal heart attack as he accidentally dropped his medicine and the water bottle. Sissel manages to save him by kicking the medicine back on the desk.

Medical Examiner

Detective Rindge

Leaflet Boy - The "Guardian of the Park" is an unnamed young man who stays in Temsik Park. He's often seen harassing people in Temsik Park with his leaflets about the "rock of the gods" and saving the park from being turned into a housing estate.

Bailey

Chef

Police Officer

Rock Jailbird

Curry-Loving Jailbird

Sith

Yomiel - He is the real owner of the body that Sissel mistakenly uses in his ghost form.

Story[]

The game starts with a spirit coming to consciousness with no memories of his past except his name, Sissel. He sees a corpse of a man on the ground in a junkyard, and believes he just recently died. Another spirit named Ray tells Sissel about the nature of spirits, including the ability to inhabit objects and manipulate them as "ghost tricks". Ray also tells Sissel that he can use ghost tricks to go back four minutes before the death of a person and attempt to save their life. Sissel does so to save the life of Lynne, a young female police detective, from an assassin. Sissel learns Lynne had come to the junkyard to get information from him, and decides to follow her to recover his memories. Ray warns that Sissel's spirit will dissipate at dawn.

As the night progresses, Sissel and Lynne work together to save others, as Sissel learns pieces about the past. Ten years prior, Detectives Jowd and Cabanela had arrested Yomiel, a man believed to be a spy for Sith, a foreign intelligence agency. Yomiel escaped and fled into a nearby park, taking a young Lynne hostage. Jowd gave chase and before he could shoot Yomiel, a meteorite struck nearby and fragments from its impact struck and killed Yomiel. Jowd adopted Lynne into his family, including his wife Alma, daughter Kamila, and pet dog Missile. Five years prior to the present, Alma was inadvertently killed by a complex contraption that Kamila had built as a surprise for her birthday. Jowd hid the evidence and took responsibility for Alma's death to protect Kamila, going to prison under Cabanela's watch.

In the present, Sissel and Lynne discover that Sith has been behind the assassination attempt on Lynne, and is blackmailing the Minister of Justice into pushing for Jowd's execution, having claimed to have kidnapped his daughter, unaware that his subordinates mistakenly kidnapped Kamila instead. Sissel uses his ghost powers to help Jowd free himself from prison, though Cabanela recaptures him shortly thereafter. Without Sith's coercion, the Minister stays Jowd's execution, and tells Sissel and Lynne his fear that some spirit known as "the manipulator" is behind many of the recent events, including the death of Alma.

Cabanela is killed while investigating Sissel's body at the junkyard, but Sissel, with help from Missile (now a spirit with his own ghost tricks), undoes his death. Sissel is surprised to see that the manipulator used his corpse, which had yet to show signs of decomposition, to shoot and kill Cabanela while vowing revenge on Jowd and Lynne. Cabanela reveals that the Sissel's body is that of Yomiel, which had gone missing shortly after he was pronounced dead, likely taken by the manipulator; Sissel is confused by this revelation. The body showed traces of the same radiation in the meteorite, which they suspect is preventing it from decomposing.

Sissel, Missile, Lynne and Jowd follow the manipulator, who is still using Sissel's body to board a submarine belonging to Sith. They find Kamila and corner the manipulator before he can kill Lynne, but Sith then turns on Yomiel, extracting the fragments of meteorite still in Sissel's body and sinking the submarine after he escapes. Yomiel reveals he had been working with Sith's organization to bring the meteorite with its unique restorative powers to them, and had been taking steps to eliminate all those that knew about it, including Jowd, Lynne, and Cabanela. Yomiel had come to work for Sith as a spirit after finding his fiancee, also named Sissel, had committed suicide following his apparent death, having been promised the means to live a normal life by Sith once he had the fragments.

With apparently no escape and dawn approaching, Sissel realizes that Yomiel's corpse died ten years earlier and they can use their ghost tricks to travel four minutes before that point to try to change events. Sissel, Yomiel, and Missile all return to that point and are able to prevent Yomiel's death from the meteor fragment while keeping Jowd and Lynne alive. A new timeline is created. During this transition, Sissel comes to discover that he was actually a cat adopted by Yomiel after his fiancee's suicide, whom he gave her name to. Sissel had been in a cat carrier near Yomiel at the junkyard and struck by a bullet and killed. Further, Sissel finds that Ray is actually a long-existed version of Missile who had tried to go back in time to Yomiel's death without Sissel's help to prevent his death (in order to prevent the death of Kamila by doing so) but had failed, and ensured that Sissel would help out to fix events. Ray lied that Sissel's spirit would dissipate at dawn in order to put pressure on him and guide him along the right path to getting back his memories.

As a new timeline is written, Sissel (in his real form as a cat), has now been adopted by Jowd, Alma, Lynne, and Kamila, while Yomiel has happily just finish serving his prison sentence to rejoin his alive fiancee who waited for him. In addition to Sissel, Yomiel, Missile and Jowd appearing to be the only ones retaining their memories of the former timeline, it is hinted that Sissel still have his ghost tricks abilities.

Development[]

Development was handled by the creator of the Ace Attorney series, director Shu Takumi, who first "thought of this idea about five years ago"; "We were working on the third Ace Attorney and figured it was time to start thinking about the next thing. So I came up with a plan to make a new type of mystery, something different in style from Ace Attorney."^[4] Hironobu Takeshita was the producer, Koki Kinoshita was the artist and Masakazu Sugimori handled the music.

The game was originally titled as "Ghost Spy", and was later renamed as "Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective".^[5] Following a release on the Nintendo DS in Japan on December 2010, the iOS port was released for the rest of the world on February 2, 2012. The first two chapters are available for free, with additional chapters costing extra.^[6]

In an interview with Official Nintendo Magazine in 2013, Takumi said that he'd love to make a crossover video game between Ghost Trick and his other series, Ace Attorney, speculating that Phoenix Wright could be killed, while his killer would be prosecuted by Sissel.^[7]

Release[]

2023 remaster[]

A remastered version of Ghost Trick was released on 30th June, 2023 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One. It runs on the RE Engine^[8] and features upgraded visuals rendered in 1080p at 60 frames per second.^[9] As the development team was no longer restricted by hardware limitations, the remaster uses the high-resolution 3D character models that the original DS sprites were rasterized from.^[10]

The remaster also includes the mobile Ghost Puzzle minigame, music and concept art galleries, customizable widescreen borders, support for nine languages, achievements in the form of "Challenges", a new song composed by Sugimori, and the ability to switch between the original and rearranged soundtracks during gameplay.^[11]

The remastered version will also be available for iOS and Android on March 28, 2024. While Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective was previously released for iOS, Capcom will delist it on March 25 in order to release the 2023 remastered version.^[12]

Reception[]

Ghost Trick was the best-selling DS game in Japan during its release week at 24,000 copies.^[13] It dropped to number nine the following week with an additional 20,000 copies sold, and then to number 22 for its third week.^[14]^[15] Capcom has listed the game as a contributor to the low sales of its first quarter of its 2010 fiscal year.^[16] Results from a poll conducted by Dengeki showed that Japanese gamers found Ghost Trick to be the 13th most interesting game for the first half of 2010.^[17]

The game was well received on both platforms according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. In Japan, Famitsu gave the DS version a score of one eight, two nines, and one eight, for a total of 34 out of 40.^[18]

Ghost Trick received significant praise for its "buttery smooth animation".^[19] 1UP.com editor Justin Haywald praised the DS version's puzzles and story. But he pointed out that, "The concept is novel and fun, though you might feel occasionally frustrated by the trial-and-error process to get at a solution." Ultimately, the story's quick "concise plotting and entertaining puzzles" helped elevate the overall experience.^[20] Daemon Hatfield of IGN gave the same console version an Editor's Choice award, praising the game's mechanics and animation, although he noted that it "gets a little wordy sometimes." GameSpot praised the unique gameplay and memorable characters.

411Mania gave the DS version 8.9 out of 10 and called it "a must have for your DS library. The game will provide you with 18 chapters and eight to ten hours of high quality entertainment and a gripping storyline. The deeper you dive into the game, the more compelling the mystery unfurls, and the more you’ll want to stay up late into the night finishing this addicting game."^[21] The A.V. Club gave it a B+ and said that it was "just one indication that the DS, in its twilight years, is also in its prime."^[22] The Escapist gave it four stars out of five and called it "a clever concoction that will stretch your brain in pleasantly unusual ways. It strikes just the right balance between whimsy and challenge, always just the right amount of difficult and bizarre." The Daily Telegraph gave it a similar score of eight out of ten, stating that "The puzzling, while fearsomely inventive and effortlessly pleasurable, unfortunately doesn't fulfil its obvious potential. But if you are possessed by Ghost Trick's charms, you will find an affecting, charismatic game with a whole lot of spirit." However, Wired was less positive and gave it seven stars out of ten, stating that "Part of the appeal of the Ace Attorney series is the 'Eureka!' moment, that feeling of brain satisfaction that can only come out of solving a particularly grueling puzzle using nothing but your wits. Ghost Trick has no eurekas, only 'Oh... is that it?'"^[23]

Awards[]

The game was nominated for Best DS Game of E3 2010 by GameTrailers, though it lost to another Capcom game, Ōkamiden.^[24] GameSpot gave Ghost Trick the awards for "Best Handheld Game"^[25] and "Best Game No One Played,"^[26] while also nominating it for the "Best Puzzle Game"^[27] and "Game of the Year"^[28] categories. The game also won the award for "Best Nintendo DS Game" of 2011 from GameTrailers.^[29] Ghost Trick was also nominated for an Annie Award in the "Best Animated Video Game" category, alongside another adventure game Catherine.^[30] GamesRadar included Ghost Trick in its list of the top 50 Nintendo DS games of all time.^[31] GameTrailers nominated Ghost Trick for the "Best Story" award.^[32] GameZone gave it the "Nintendo DS Game of the Year" award.^[33]