Ghost Trick: An Underrated Gem

Platform: Switch (also on DS, PS4, XB1, Windows, iOS)
Release: 2010 (DS), 2012 (iOS), 2023 (Switch, PS4, XB1, Windows)

Ghost Trick is a stand alone project helmed by Shu Takumi of Ace Attorney fame that originally came out in the heyday of the Nintendo DS. I never got around to picking it up back then, perhaps because what I really wanted was another Ace Attorney game, and largely forgot about it until the Switch remaster.

By this time I knew it was regarded as an underrated title, so I decided to pick it up, and I'm really glad that I did as it may well be one of Shu Takumi's best written games. Since the ending wraps up the story completely and it would be hard to narratively justify a sequel, that's likely why Ghost Trick slipped away into the realm of being an underappreciated classic, but now that the remaster is available on multiple platforms (most importantly Steam), it'll be easy for players to find for years to come.

In Ghost Trick you play as an amnesiac ghost, recently deceased, who discovers he can manipulate objects around him, much like a poltergeist, to influence the actions of nearby people. Additionally he can travel from place to place via land lines (this game is clearly pre-cell phone era) as long as he knows the destination phone number, and most importantly, he can rewind time to 4 minutes before a person's death and by using his abilities it's possible to change their fate, resulting in a new timeline.

Using these "ghost tricks" results in a fun bit of puzzle solving which absolutely ties into the plot itself, but what we're really here for is the story. So there will be spoilers for a 13-year-old game after the break!

What I really like about Ghost Trick is that the game is really good at feeding the player bits of information, enough to keep them interested, but not so little that our ghost feels like he's making no progress. It's more like he keeps getting pieces of a puzzle and the first ones he gets are deceptive in how they fit together.

Sissel, as he later deduces must be his name, essentially wakes up in a junkyard, aware that he's dead, but without knowledge of who he is. The only clue he has is a woman inspecting his body, who seems to have a hitman coming after her. When she gets killed, he's able to rewind to her last four minutes and save her life. More than once, because she needs a lot of help getting away.

In fact, it's pretty funny how Lynne gets used to dying and later even expects that Sissel will find her if she dies and fix things, because one thing that remains even if the timeline changes is the memory of that death. Additionally, Sissel gains the ability to communicate with the person he saves. Since it's a gameplay mechanic, a lot of people end up dying in this game. In fact, most of the cast dies at some point, which allows Sissel to talk to more and more people in his quest to find out what really happened.

Initially Sissel and Lynne have competing priorities on a similar deadline. Sissel was informed by another ghost that they will only last until morning, so he wants to find out who he is, why he was killed, and he has until sunrise to do so (and it's early evening at the start of the game). Lynne is trying to stop the execution of a man she believes to be innocent from happening the next day, and despite Sissel's hopes, she actually has no ties to him and doesn't know who he is. In fact, she tells him he was the one who called her out there.

Once he discovers the prisoner she wants to save knows who he is though, Sissel's goals and Lynne's goals become the same thing. While they aren't entirely a duo since they often investigate separately, she is the closest to being a secondary protagonist since her mission ties into the central story and like Sissel was there at the start of it all.

Discovering Sissel's true identity is the greatest joy of the game, so I'd like to discuss how well it was set up. Sissel, as we learn by the end of the game, is not the ghost of the blond man in red whose corpse he "woke" next to, but actually the recently shot (and killed) cat inside a bag the man was carrying. While every other ghost in the game figures out who they used to be within a few minutes of being dead (it seems all ghosts are a bit confused when they come to), Sissel doesn't gets his memory back, not even fragments, for the majority of the game because it turns out that he was trying to remember a life he never had. Since the cat wasn't immediately visible when he came to, he did not consider it an option.

And I love all the little tidbits and foreshadowing that prepare the player for the reveal that Sissel is actually a cat, so it doesn't come out of nowhere.

We see the cat come out of the bag earlier in the game (its corpse being possessed by Yomiel, his owner), and we also know from Missile's death that once dead there is no language barrier between humans and an animal (or other animals for that matter). So the fact that Sissel the cat has been talking to human characters this entire time fits within the previously established worldbuilding.

Aside from that, he frequently mentions not having any concept of various mundane parts of human life that you'd think he wouldn't have lost along with his personal memories.

When I finished the game I realized I'd spent most of it playing as a cat and dog chasing after the humans who care about them (since Missile becomes playable later in the game), and it just put a smile on my face.

Ghost Trick is populated with a number of larger than life characters like the Ace Attorney series, but I found it interesting how the antagonists were handled. For most of the game we know there's this shadowy organization trying to force the innocent man's execution, and all its members are easily identifiable from an artistic standpoint for having blue faces, so it seems they are the villains of the game, but in the end they don't really matter.

The one who does is Yomiel, the blond man in red who threatened to kill Lynne when she was a kid, but was killed by a freak meteor landing and implanting a shard in his body. This meteor is the genesis of all the ghost tricks in the game, since a ghost only gets tricks if the person/animal died while affected by its radiation. Yomiel ends up being stuck not really alive but not really dead, and the piece inside him still emits radiation into the present day, which is why Sissel came to gain ghost tricks, because he died in close proximity to Yomiel.

Chasing Yomiel while also chasing Sissel's identity makes for great tension, because the more Sissel learns about the man using the false name "Sissel" the more he doesn't like the person he's learning about. When he discovers "Sissel" is not a corpse so much as someone using a ghost trick to temporarily control another's body and leaving his shell behind, he has no idea who he is at all and no longer wants to be Sissel anymore. The game has a nice way of depicting that when Sissel's dialogue portrait changes from the blond man to a nondescript ghost.

Yomiel is also the only antagonist who is truly dangerous since he also has access to the ghost world and is aware that there are other ghosts working against him. Screwing up during one of the "rewind to save a life" segments, can actually result in Yomiel turning to the camera and directly calling out Sissel, which I found unsettling in what is otherwise not a scary game at all.

The thing with Yomiel is that he initially comes off as just an awful person. He's stolen government secrets through use of his ghost tricks and he's selling his services to the highest bidder, which turns out to be a foreign country. The price for his service is eliminating everything and everyone that had something to do with the meteor incident, hence why Lynne is targeted and why we have a former detective, now death row inmate, having a rushed execution.

But Yomiel is betrayed by his client who actually just wants the meteor shard trapped within his body and removes it while Yomiel possessing another person (leaving his actual body an empty shell).

I have somewhat mixed feelings about the finale of the game because Sissel, Missile, Lynne, and a couple other characters end up on the submarine belonging to the shadowy foreigners when they confront Yomiel while he's possessing the body of a young girl. The bad guys nick the meteor shard and escape, ejecting the compartment that holds Yomiel's body, and sinking the rest of the submarine in the process.

There is no way out for the human characters. They can't fix the sub. But they manage to load the ghosts (including a newly dejected Yomiel) in one of the submarine's remaining torpedoes and shoot it towards the ejected compartment to try to get help.

Once there and they revive the detective, who had died in that chamber, Sissel realizes there is still one other corpse in the room whose death he can reverse. And this is a doozy of a moment, because you realize "Yeah, Yomiel died, but it was years ago!" Most of the people we save died shortly before Sissel does his revival trick so the new timeline barely changes, but this is their only option, so they actually jump back ten years, to just four minutes before Yomiel gets hit by the meteor.

The reason I have mixed feelings about this, even after beating the game, is that it changes so much. Almost everything we fought through the entire game, the desperation at the end when escape looked impossible, doesn't happen anymore!

They stop Yomiel from holding the child version of Lynne hostage, the detective ends up not shooting (or thinking he was going to shoot) him, which undoes all the guilt he felt, and when everything lines up save for the fact it looks like the statue they used to block the meteorite is now going to fall on Lynne, ghost Yomiel possesses his old self and pushes her out of the way.

This redeems Yomiel as a character, who actually wasn't a hardened criminal, but got frightened and overwhelmed in the past, and then gradually went insane while in his half-alive/half-dead state. Past Yomiel is not killed, but in the new timeline he survives the stone falling on him and spends some years in prison, only to be on the eve of his release in the epilogue, which brings us up to our new present day, where Sissel is now a cat owned by the detective and his family, which is now intact since he doesn't end up in jail this time over his wife's murder (she was actually killed by Yomiel) and their daughter has both parents now.

Everything wraps up, even the identity of the mysterious tutorial ghost and why it sent Sissel off to find himself in the first place, and now that the radiative meteor will likely not be around dying people/animals anymore, there shouldn't be anymore ghosts and their tricks. Sort of. Cat Sissel from the past ends up being the one impaled by the meteor (when they deflected it, it went into the grass where his past self was hiding), but assuming cat Sissel remembers everything that happened he'll probably be careful going forward.

Given the level of changes caused by rewinding time so far back (to the point Sissel never got close to reviving all the people who died) I'm not sure the characters still remember the "original" timeline, though I suppose it's possible, and that's largely because Sissel keeps his name when he comes to live with the detective's family even though Yomiel was the one who named him.

When we were getting Yomiel's backstory and how he lost his fiancée during his trapped between life and death stage of his existence, we learn that having the cat helped him cope, and thus he named the cat Sissel, after his fiancée. I admit once I learned that Sissel was a woman's name I thought that the cat might have been female, since there's no way ghost Sissel could have known their gender, but the cast continues using male pronouns with the cat, so I guess Yomiel either wasn't particular about matching the gender of the cat to the name or Sissel could be a gender neutral name in the fictional country they live in. (Actually, it's probably the latter since none of the characters comment on Sissel having a woman's name when he chooses to appear like the blond man.)

In any case, despite my conflicted feelings about the complete rewind of the last ten years, I still enjoyed Ghost Trick and the moment I saw the cat first appear in Yomiel's death scene and realized that must be Sissel. It was a long chase to find out who he was in the end, but was very worth it.