Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

A view of the Ghost World, where time stands still and Sissel can transfer his spirit to nearby objects

Ghost Trick is an adventure game in which players control Sissel, a ghost who uses his unearthly 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.[4] The majority of Ghost Trick's gameplay segments consist of the puzzles that make up these scenarios.[5]

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 junkyard, 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 junkyard 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 falsely accused of being a foreign spy. Yomiel escaped and fled into a nearby park, taking young Lynne hostage. Jowd gave chase, but before he could shoot Yomiel, a meteorite struck nearby and a fragment 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; he is 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. Sissel then proves the Minister's daughter is safe at home, and without Sith's coercion, the Minister stays Jowd's execution. He tells Sissel and Lynne his fear that a 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 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 meteorite 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 meteorite fragment while keeping Jowd and Lynne alive—a new timeline is created. In the aftermath, Sissel comes to discover that he was actually a stray cat living in the park 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. Before returning to the new present, Sissel also 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.

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. "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."[6] The game was originally titled as "Ghost Spy", and was later renamed as "Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective".[7] 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.[8] Following a release on the Nintendo DS in Japan in 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.[9]

A remastered version of Ghost Trick is set for release in June 2023 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One. New features include an unlockable art gallery, and the ability to switch between the original music tracks and a rearranged soundtrack by Yasumasa Kitagawa.[10]

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.[58]

• Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective at MobyGames
• Official website Archived 2013-05-15 at the Wayback Machine (in Japanese)
• Ghost Trick entry at Capcom-Unity