This new trailer for Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective returns us to the distinctive chicken restaurant seen previously. This time, we can see the restaurant as it was before the cops so rudely barged in (through the wall). And we meet the chef, who possibly instigates said intrusion ... by singing.
Shu Takumi, the innovative mind behind the Ace Attorney series, has crafted a brilliant new masterpiece that’s sure to challenge the most ardent puzzle enthusiast out there. This will be the must-have Nintendo DS title for early next year. With quirky characters, gorgeous visuals, incredible drama, and Rube Goldberg-flavored puzzles, this is a guaranteed recipe [...]
Nintendo and Capcom have made a deal wherein Nintendo will handle European marketing and distribution for Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, and Capcom will publish it, with Capcom working alone in Australia and the Middle East. The most important result of this agreement, of course, is that Ghost Trick now has a European release date: January 14, just three days after the North American release.
The other positive result is that if Nintendo is handling marketing duties for Capcom's postmortem mystery ... there may actually be some marketing for the game. Dragon Quest IX, for example, enjoyed increased visibility thanks to Nintendo's use of television ads in the US and UK.
The dead will roam the earth starting January 11, 2011, to inhabit our donut carts and cabinet doors. Or at least one dead guy will ... in a DS game. January 11 is the newly revealed North American release date for Capcom's Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, in which an amnesiac ghost named Sissel solves his own murder and prevents the murder of others by manipulating objects (which, in turn, manipulate people).
While we would have preferred a Halloween release date for the ghostly game (because it would have been sooner), at least Capcom came through with a seasonally appropriate Halloween release date announcement.
A dead amnesiac's work is never done. In the latest Ghost Trick trailer (after the break), we see a new scenario in which a police car drives through a restaurant window, dropping a gigantic piece of meat on a bystander. Naturally, the only person able to set this right will be Sissel, a dead man with the power to possess and control objects.
Wait, does that mean a dead person's going to be touching the food in the restaurant? Gross. Of course, Sissel doesn't appear to be the only "free spirit" in the establishment -- it's staffed by a (literally) meatheaded, rollerskating waitress and a philosophically-minded bartender with blue Guile hair.
We'd happily take any opportunity to talk about Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective -- to our readers, our coworkers, our friends, people we meet in elevators, etc. So we happily jumped at the chance to talk with Capcom's Shu Takumi, the person responsible for creating the supernatural puzzle-adventure game. In a brief TGS interview, we spoke with Takumi about the unique humor in Ghost Trick and the Ace Attorney series -- and the relative uniqueness of any humor in a video game.
Your games tend to have a certain tone, they tend to be funny. Most video games don't even attempt humor. Why do you think it's so rare, and how is it that you can continue doing funny games?
I don't really know why people don't attempt to put humor in games. That's something I would actually love to know. I'd love to ask people why they don't try it. As for me, why I put humor in my games, and why I'm able to continue doing that: I like funny things. I like humor. I like writing mysteries, and mysteries have to be fun to read. They have to be something entertaining where you want to continue reading it. It can't be boring or dry. For me, what makes it interesting is adding a little humor here and there, using that to my advantage. Basically, I just write what is funny to me, whatever I'm interested in for other people to read. And that's how I'm able to continue in this manner that I do.
It's important what I write, but what I write is in Japanese, and part of that humor and part of what makes it unique is the translation. (Note: Takumi's interpreter in this interview was Capcom's Janet Hsu, who actually works on localization for the Ace Attorney games. She reported her embarrassment about translating praise for herself.)
When last we heard Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, Capcom's excellent spiritual (get it?) successor to the Ace Attorney series, was due in "winter 2010." With that in mind, we have bad news for would-be phantom detectives, as Capcom's TGS fact sheet for the title includes a "January 2011" North American release date. The good news: our time with the title in Tokyo this year has further convinced us that the wait will be worth it.
More screens and art here
Release Date: January 2011
Genre: Mystery Adventure
Platform: Nintendo DS™ and DSi™
Rating: TBC
Developer: Capcom
Ghost Trick™ Phantom Detective is coming to Nintendo DS™ and DSi™ in January 2011. Brought to you by Shu Takumi, the original creator of Capcom’s Ace Attorney™ series, Ghost Trick Phantom Detective tells an intriguing story combining logic puzzles and [...]
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At the beginning of Capcom's Ghost Trick you die. Then the action really starts heating up. I got a chance to play a new level at Gamescom last week, and now I'm going to tell you all about it. More »
We talked about it around the office and decided today's the day you have to get excited about Shu Takumi's Ghost Trick. It's all here in this Gamescom footage -- the amazing animation, the funky premise, the unique gameplay -- all you need to do is open your heart. Go ahead. Open it. We'll wait.
Ghost Trick and Phoenix Wright cross over! ... in these sketches by Shu Takumi, creator of both series. Capcom shared a series of Ghost Trick-related drawings made by the producer, featuring Sissel as a shadow and a Christmas tree, as well as various slices of (after-) life from the other characters.
The one here even features a bonus literary reference. The caption above is a quote from a haiku by Matsuo Basho, which translates to something like "I wonder how my neighbor lives?" And now that we've taken a brief detour into seventeenth-century Japanese poetry, you can find a video of Takumi drawing after the break.
Snippets of Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective footage went up on various outlets, mostly focusing on a sequence in which Sissel has to save a young girl named Kamilla from the game's nearly-blind assassin. Sissel is assisted in this task by Missile, Kamilla's dog -- who, like Sissel, has recently been killed by the assassin. Sissel rewinds time, and the two have to work together to get Kamilla in a safe hiding place before the killer arrives.
After the break, see a clip from GameVideos in which Sissel and Missile manipulate Kamilla through the use of donuts. Find more at IGN and GameSpot (who has a clip of Missile's fateful showdown).
After publishing our E3 2010 preview of Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, we worried that we hadn't adequately captured and conveyed the game's bizarre concept. We're not the only ones left a bit speechless by the amazing Ghost in the Rube Goldberg Machine adventure -- ooh, that's a good way to put it! -- as even the game's director, Shu Takumi, thought it a challenge to explain his new mystery game to the "bigwigs" at Capcom.
Joystiq: When you first had the idea for Ghost Trick, you had to go to someone and say, "Hey, we should make this game." I want to hear what that first day was like, and what their reaction was.
Shu Takumi: Since I made the Ace Attorney series for so long, I was like, "Please let me do something new!" So I went up to the bigwigs and said this, and they said, "You go ahead and do what you want, we'll see what happens." The concept was really difficult to explain, so they were like, "Okay okay, why don't you make something and we'll see how it goes." So, that's what happened when I first presented the idea to make a new mystery game.
Ghost Trick begins where most games come to an abrupt end -- with your death. It's of the intriguing, unexplained and very undignified variety, and leaves your spirit separated from your sharply dressed body. As Sissel, a sarcastic smooth talker who's cool enough to wear sunglasses even after death, you interact with the living world as a ghostly apparition in the hopes of preventing others from sharing your fate.
Coming from Phoenix Wright designer Shu Takumi, Ghost Trick is almost as fun to describe as it is to play. Youthful and witty dialogue is the obvious commonality between Takumi's new adventure and the Ace Attorney series, but there's a more subtle connection too: both are traditional adventure games that reconsider the role of inventory objects. In the case of Ghost Trick, the inventory becomes the entire stage.
- new date is June 19th
- Capcom wanted to release the game alongside Nintendo’s new DSi XL color schemes
- Nintendo Channel demo available in Japan
- play an exclusive scenario not in the retail game
- help Kanon, a girl that spends Christmas by herself, get back her smile
- demo also available on DS Station tomorrow and [...]
