Among the offerings present in Capcom’s E3 booth is Ghost Trick, a brand-new DS adventure game from the makers of the Ace Attorney series. If you’re expecting a rehash, think again — in a way, this game is Capcom’s way of avoiding the rut that adventures often fall into, the exact rut that some have accused Ace Attorney of traversing after five games.
“Adventure games on consoles tend to break down into a ‘try every option until something works’ process,” producer Hironobu Takeshita told Famitsu magazine in an interview published this week. “There’s very little gameplay and very little for the player to actually think about. With this game, you get hints along the way for what to do within each four-minute vignette, but it’s still up to you to figure out the trick involved. You have to come up with the right answer at the right time, and it’s something you have to think over and deduce by yourself. That’s how we kept this from being a typical ‘try everything’ adventure.”
“You’re constantly getting the positive feedback of finding the answer locked within these four-minute dramas,” adds Shu Takumi, director of Ghost Trick and the main man behind the Ace Attorney series. “I think it’s the same sort of feeling as what you get when you finally unravel a mystery.”
In Ghost Trick you play Sissel, a recently-deceased man who uses his ghostly ability to possess items and try to prevent murders from happening. Each stage of the game begins four minutes before the murder’s pulled off, and Sissel must form a plan of action with the items at his disposal and pull it off at just the right moment to keep the would-be victim from getting offed. “The thing that really impressed me was the text part of the game, the conversations between characters,” Famitsu wrote in their preview. “There’s a real wit and tempo to them, and it makes Ghost Trick as fun to ‘read’ as it is to ‘play.’ The text, by itself, is the motivation that fueled my desire to keep playing.”
The story’s one aspect of it, of course, but Takumi also wanted to keep the game as quickly-paced as possible to keep people from getting bored. “We aimed to keep things proceeding at a speedy pace in the first half of the game,” he said. “The story starts to go more in-depth in the second half before breaking out some major twists, and it’d be nice if a lot of gamers feel compelled to play through to the end.”
What sort of gamer is Takumi shooting for, exactly? “This was the case for Ace Attorney as well, but I’d like people who don’t play games too often to give this a try,” he responded. “We tried to keep the game as simple as possible for that reason. For example, you’re only able to perform one type of action with each object you can possess — in the beginning, we were going to allow multiple actions that you chose from depending on context. We decided it’d be better to go in a direction that didn’t make the game complex to control. We could have made the game more complex, but considering that we want gamers to enjoy the story here, it’d be pointless. It’s a hard thing to balance correctly.”
Ghost Trick is due out late this year in the States, but it’s hitting Japanese store shelves next week, and Takumi couldn’t be more proud. “We had a really good environment set up for this project,” he concluded. “I was directing an incredibly talented team, and we had the time to really work on this game until we were truly satisfied with it. It’s a game I have supreme confidence in.”
