Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective
I've been interested in this for a long time because it's a bit of a passion project from the dude behind the Ace Attorney games, which I really like, they're cool, go play them. Ghost Trick is also often rated as one of the best DS games ever of all time and people gush about it whenever it's brought up.
You're a ghost and you solve puzzles by subtly manipulating objects in the environment with the goal of saving peoples' lives. There's a big mystery which gets more mysterious as the game goes on, yadda yadda. It's kind of like a more proactive Ace Attorney. The bulk of the game is reading. In Ace Attorney, the reading is interrupted by moments when you have to drawn logical connections and press the correct button to make the story continue. The 'gameplay' is mostly you figuring things out in your brain. In Ghost Trick, you have to move your ghost bubble around and move the right objects at the right time in the right order, sometimes having to get things wrong so that you can understand how to get them right. It's more active than Ace Attorney and I think some people might find that more engaging.
I mean, it's cool a game, sure. I enjoyed it a fair bit. It has a lot of the quirky charm of Ace Attorney, very similar style of humour and approach to narrative depth (that is to say, overwrought melodrama that masquerades as pathos), and it's set in a sort of cartoon real world like Ace Attorney. What I mean by that is the game seems set in the real world but only when that isn't an inconvenience to the game's logic, or clashes with some stylistic goal. Every single phone in this 'real world' is a rotary phone, for example, because they wanted that aesthetic. But is it as amazing as people say?
No. It's a good game, well worth playing if you like Ace Attorney, but it doesn't deserve the sheer level of acclaim it has. Call me biased, but Ghost Trick suffers from a lot of the story-telling issues that crop up in a wealth of Japanese games. A lot of details are handwaved or flat out ignored if they would logically create problems for the story. Characters are defined almost entirely by superficial traits like speech patterns and modes of movement. Character motivations often don't make sense at certain times to enable the plot to continue, or change on a dime to imply some developmental shift or facilitate the next bit of plot without justification. There's an emphasis on mystery and twists which results in the story making no overall sense and forfeiting any hope at depth just for a few moments of either shock or surprise. And there's a huge amount of redundancy, with characters repeating themselves all the time, or dialogue that clearly implies something immediately being followed up with an exact explanation of the thing anyone above the age of seven would have already understood.
I make no secret of my general disdain for Japanese story-telling. Not all of it is bad, but there are trends and forms and tropes that the Japanese use, at the very least, more than anyone else that make for terribly told stories. Ghost Trick is rife with them and it prevents this game being anything more than a fun, quirky, and certainly unique little puzzle/visual novel/thingy. People who praise this game to high Heaven are, bluntly, weebs blinded by the fact that it's from Japan.
It's good, don't get me wrong, well worth your time, but it's nothing more than a fun weekend to file away under "Nice times I had not thinking about how hollow my life is."
Give it a go if you can find it anywhere. I suspect many of the issues I had with it won't be shared by many of you on this here forum.
), particularly some splashing water effects later on in the game.
