You wake up dead in a scrapyard with a damsel in distress standing over your still corpse. A mysterious gunman aims at her. What do you do? How do you save her? And come to think of it, who are you? Such is the starting point of Capcom’s Nintendo DS mystery adventure, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective. We had the rare opportunity to sit down with Ghost Trick‘s producer, Hironobu Takeshita, and director, Shu Takumi (of Ace Attorney fame), to dig into the vision and conceptual design of this intriguing adventure.
The central gimmick behind Ghost Trick involves possessing nearby objects in order to influence their movements. As a wandering soul, the protagonist Sissel can, for instance, possess a bicycle in order to roll it forward or take control of a fold-up bed in order to unfold it. While these sound like mundane tasks, these are the only ways to influence the world at large. That rolling bike can bump into the aforementioned gunmen, for instance. Moreover, it’s possible to possess dead bodies in order to travel back in time four minutes in order to prevent the death of the body that has been possessed. In a final Ghost Dad-type maneuver, the protagonist can even travel over telephone lines in order to rapidly get from place to place. The central theme behind Ghost Trick is manipulation in its many forms.
Approximately 90% of the development team’s original vision is on track to make it into the final version of the game after two years of development with more than thirty characters involved in the storyline. When I compared the game to Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain, the developers were quick to laughingly point out that Ghost Trick doesn’t contain nearly as many plot holes as the Origami Killer mystery. That quip matches the tone of Trick perfectly, as it doesn’t take itself too seriously. In fact, the demo breaks the fourth wall several times to emphasize that the demo is, in fact, a demo and that the final retail version will do things just a little differently. It’s a fresh self-deprecating take on the ubiquitous E3 demo style we’ve all come to know.
Ghost Trick is on track for a 2010 release. When it does release, take special note of the exquisite character animation. The detailed 2D art style is one of the most unique on the platform, and it’s obvious how much time, effort, and talent have been spent on creating it. Kombo will have more information just as soon as we… possess… it.
