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Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective
Ghost trick phantom detective boxart
USA Boxart

Developer

Capcom

Publisher

Capcom

Platform

Nintendo DS, iOS, Switch, PS4, Xbox One, Steam

Genre

Puzzle/Adventure/Mystery

Release Date

Nintendo DS
  • June 19, 2010 (JP)
  • January 11, 2011 (NA)
  • January 14, 2011 (EUR)
iOS
  • December 16, 2010 (JP)
  • February 2, 2012 (Intl.)
Switch
PS4
Xbox One
Steam
  • June 30, 2023 (Intl.)[1]

Rating

CERO: B
ESRB: T
PEGI: 12

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, simply known in Japan as Gōsuto Torikku (ゴースト トリック, lit. "Ghost Trick"), is a mystery, puzzle and adventure game originally released for the Nintendo DS. It was developed mainly by Shu Takumi, the man behind the Ace Attorney series. The game was released 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. An iOS version was released in Japan on December 16, 2010 and the rest of the world on February 2, 2012. An HD remaster was later released 10 years later for Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PS4, and Steam.

Gameplay[]

The gameplay of Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective mainly consists of two different phases. For the majority of the game, you will be controlling the protagonist, Sissel. Because he is a ghost he must move by possessing inanimate objects to reach his goal. When he possesses an object, he can manipulate said object if the option is available. An example is opening a door that was closed. First, Sissel would need to possess the door and then perform what is known as a 'Ghost Trick' to open the door. To navigate around an area, the player will need to press the 'Ghost' button to enter the Ghost World. When in the Ghost World, the player needs to drag Sissel to another object to possess it. Sissel's reach is limited, however, so to fully navigate an area, he must utilise the many items around the room.

The other part of the gameplay is controlled in exactly the same way, save for a few differences. When you find a dead body, you can communicate with the victim's spirit and travel back four minutes before their death. In this four minutes you have a chance to save the victim from death, by manipulating the items around the room. A timer counts down the seconds until the victim dies. As the time runs out you may slightly alter the fate of the target, while not averting their fate. This will help your goal and give you a checkpoint to start at if you fail. Because there is an amount of time before the death occurs, you have the possibility of failure, however, you may try again as many times as needed to save the persons life.

Later on in the game you will encounter Missile's powers, and he's able to swap any 2 objects that have the same shape! He has a longer spirit reach than Sissel, but he cannot manipulate objects or use the telephone lines (use a trick to dial a telephone) because he cannot do a Trick...

Additionally, the player will have access to the record during Chapter 1. It can be viewed by pressing the icon on the top left part of the screen. This contains information about the characters and it also includes a phone book. While progressing through the game, the record will be updated with more information.

WARNING: Spoilers follow!

Plot[]

The game starts with the player (a spirit named Sissel) coming to consciousness with no memories of his past. He sees a corpse of a man on the ground in a junk-yard, and believes he just recently died. Another spirit named Ray tells Sissel about the nature of spirits, and his special abilities known as "ghost tricks". He demonstrates the ability to inhabit objects and manipulate them. 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 detective, from an assassin. Sissel wishes to recover his memories, He then learns Lynne had come to the junk-yard to get information from him. Being the only lead to his past, Sissel decides to follow her. 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 suspected of being a spy. Yomiel escaped and fled into a nearby park, taking 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 a man named Sith, on behalf of an unnamed foreign country, 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 junk-yard, 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 body Sissel thought was his is that of Yomiel, the true identity of the manipulator, whose body had gone missing shortly after he was pronounced dead; 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 Yomiel to board a submarine belonging to Sith. They find Kamila and corner Yomiel before he can kill Lynne, but Sith then turns on Yomiel, extracting the meteorite fragment still in his body and sinking the submarine after he escapes. Yomiel reveals the meteor fragment is the source of his and the other spirits' ghost tricks, and that he had been working with Sith's organization to bring it to them, 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 fiancée, 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 fragment.

With apparently no escape and dawn approaching, Sissel realizes that, because Yomiel's corpse died ten years earlier, they can use their ghost tricks to travel four minutes before that point to try to change events. Sissel, Jowd, 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 fiancée'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. At the end of the night, Sissel finds that Ray is actually an older, alternate-timeline variant of Missile who had tried to go back in time to prevent Yomiel's death without Sissel's help but had failed, and waited ten years to ensure that Sissel would help out to fix events. As a new timeline is written, Sissel has now been adopted by Jowd, Alma, Lynne, and Kamila, while Yomiel happily waits out his prison sentence to rejoin his waiting fiancée. The closing shot of the game reveals that, because of the characters' actions to change the past, it is now Sissel who was struck by the meteorite fragment, living on as a spirit with the fragment in his body.

Chapters[]

Development[]

Development was handled by the creator of the Ace Attorney series, Shu Takumi. "I first thought of this idea about five years ago," Takumi told Famitsu magazine. "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." Composer Masakazu Sugimori was inspired by some photos Takumi initially gave him to write the main theme. He also took inspiration from paintings he owned while writing the soundtrack.

The game was originally titled as "Ghost Spy", and was later renamed as "Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective".[2]

Release[]

The game originally released June 19, 2010 in Japan on Nintendo DS, with a North American and European release the following January.

Following a release on iOS in Japan on December 2010, the iOS version 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.[3] This version includes graphically enhanced sprites, a user interface that is consolidated into one screen and has visually sharper text.

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 Ace Attorney, speculating that Phoenix Wright could be killed, while his killer would be prosecuted by Sissel.[4]

On March 2023, a new HD port of Ghost Trick was announced for all major platforms featuring new behind the scenes content and HD assets. It was released on June 30, 2023.

Critical reception[]

Ghost Trick was the best-selling DS game in Japan during its release week at 24,000 copies. It dropped to number nine the following week with an additional 20,000 copies sold, and then to number 22 for its third week. Capcom has listed the game as a contributor to the low sales of its first quarter of its 2010 fiscal year. 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.

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 two eights and two nines, for a total of 34 out of 40.

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. 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. Brian Rowe of GameZone gave it 8.5 out of 10, calling it "a perfect storm of clever puzzles, suspenseful storytelling, and spectacular visuals that hasn't been witnessed since the heyday of LucasArts adventures. The linear plot makes this a one-time experience, but one that is so enthralling and witty that you'll be thankful for the opportunity." Edge gave it a score of eight out of ten, saying, "How apt that interactivity and fiction should finally merge in a fiction about interactions. The dead are restored, and the genre with them." AJ Glasser of GamePro gave it four stars out of five, saying, "The conclusion the plot hurtles toward you may not be one you saw coming (I didn't), but the satisfaction of getting there cancels out all the tufts of hair you ripped out along the way working out the tougher puzzles." Martin Gaston of VideoGamer.com gave both the DS and iOS versions seven out of ten, saying of the former, "It's an elegantly crafted thriller that stands out as an original, charming and beautiful adventure," and calling the latter "an elegantly crafted thriller that stands out as an original, charming and beautiful adventure. As an experience it's well worth the price of admission, but sadly Ghost Trick lets itself down with its overall simplicity and the disappointment of its crucial final act."

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." 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." 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 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?'"

Remaster[]

A high resolution remaster of the game was announced during the February 8, 2023 Nintendo Direct, marking the game's first return to consoles since its original release. It has improved frame rates, the user interface being consolidated into one screen for a comfortable gameplay experience and it has all-new features to enhance the gameplay, for example it adds new "challenges", which you can complete by meeting special conditions. It comes with nine languages including Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese and Korean. In the extras, there is an art gallery, it contains concept artwork and finalized illustrations. The songs are available in the music jukebox as well. The remaster released on modern platforms such as the Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One, and PC (via Steam) on June 30, 2023[1]. In the 2023 Capcom Spotlight presentation, it was revealed that Yasumasa Kitagawa (who composed most of the songs for The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles) remastered all of the music tracks and it features a new song that is composed by Masakazu Sugimori. The player also has the ability to switch between the original and rearranged soundtracks during gameplay. After pre-ordering this installment, the consumer will receive customizable widescreen borders and a couple of music tracks as a bonus. Lastly, the remaster uses the RE Engine.

Notable changes[]

iOS[]

  • Ghost Puzzles mode

Remaster[]

  • Rearranged music + new original track
  • Extras mode, including challenges + illustrations & music collection
  • Ghost Puzzles mode from the iOS port

Music[]

A soundtrack, entitled Ghost Trick Original Sound Track was released on June 24, 2010. It featured music from the game, composed by Masakazu Sugimori.

In September 2023, Capcom released the rearranged soundtrack (entitled Ghost Trick Original Sound Track 2023) on Spotify, Apple Music, and other music streaming services.

Cover Art[]

References[]

External links[]

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