Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective has a bit more up its sleeve than other adventure games on the DS. After nearly ten years working on Capcom’s Ace Attorney franchise, series creator Shu Takumi has achieved something even greater. By making a game and narrative that makes the most of the hardware, Takumi gives DS owners one of the last gems of the system.
Upon starting the game, you enter the role of a lifeless corpse hidden away in a junkyard. It doesn’t exactly hint at great game design possibilities, but it does make for a good mystery. Soon enough, you depart from the protagonist’s body and manipulate inanimate objects that populate each level in an effort to find out your name, your murderer and why you are in possession of these powers. Takumi’s admiration of detective novels shines through every aspect of Ghost Trick, making the 6-10 hours you’ll spend in the night of a ghost solving his own murder an unlikely pairing of a good mystery and colorful, quirky characters, like the ones that have populated Takumi’s previous titles.
Originally devised as a game much broader in scope and methods of input, Ghost Trick has been stripped down to its bare essentials since it was initially planned in 2004. Like the best DS titles, all you need is the stylus in your hand as you tap and drag across the screen, the most basic, tactile methods that remain novel. The bottom screen displays the environment with objects you can possess marked by a blue flame, while the top screen gives a close-up of the selected object and the action it can perform. As complicated as this may seem in text, there is always an apparent, linear path that the objects in the environment lead you down. The trick is in timing and awareness.
Each stage gives the player a simple problem to be solved: either an opportunity to gain intel from a possible suspect or a chance to save someone from dying. You often find a dead body at a new scene, gather clues from speaking to their spirit and then rewind time to four minutes before their murder. By hovering your stylus over the screen and taking possession of various objects, you work your way around the environments and discover the clever logic behind each puzzle. These tasks can often lead to trial-and-error repetition, but the game does an excellent job of breaking up the pace with colorful dialogue that often gives a hint to a problem without addressing the solution directly.
Once you befriend a recently deceased pompadour pup by the name of Missile and save him from his cruel fate, it becomes apparent that Ghost Trick has a lot more going for it then mystery and logic puzzles. Everything about the game oozes personality and charm. The characters have European influence that sets them apart. They are all lovingly animated in a style that recalls rotoscope technology of a bygone era found in games like Prince of Persia and Flashback. The soundtrack of smooth jazz complimented by wonky synths also helps set the mood. But most of all it’s the dialogue that drives forward Ghost Trick and makes it into a memorable interactive mystery.
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it's stupidly overpriced over here but i'm gonna buy it anyway, as soon as my exams are over !!!! fans of this game, please buy the game. the paradigm of gaming should shift into these types of games with soul.
The remaster is fine, the major thing that's people hate about it is that there is no widescreen. There's also a glitch that when you import your demo save you don't get the cheevos for the chapters you completed and the chapters don't unlock.
I'm referring to how this was (is?) the highest rated user score game on metacritic. I say was since the User Score leaderboard seems to be broken (it just gives an assortment of random games), but Ghost Trick has a 9.6 so I assume it's still the highest overall.
i just want to say btw; this game's graphics for being a DS game are actually fucking insane. i have a feeling it'll be sort of lost on people with the remaster, but this game on DS is TRIPPY to play. there are no games like it on DS
really interesting, i'd agree that objectively 'worse' graphics can still be aesthetically better in other ways. i especially felt this way with Link's Awakening on Switch, which was polished but almost too polished you know. i don't think it's just nostalgia either.
on a more serious note; not only you're right, the game also gameplay-wise and story-wise compliments DS very well. for example being able to move the core with the pen fluidly and when the manipulator breaks the 4th wall... i know that we all shat our pants...