Like Ace Attorney, Ghost Trick is chiefly a mystery adventure, but the resemblances end pretty quickly. The game stars Sisel, a flashy-looking guy in red who's just been shot to death for reasons unknown. He's currently in soul form, robbed of his memories, and he has to reconstruct his life and death in the few hours he's allotted before his soul disappears for good.
"I first thought of this idea about five years ago," Takumi told Famitsu magazine. "We were working on the third Ace Attorney and figured it was time to start thinking about the next thing. So I came up with a plan to make a new type of mystery, something different in style from Ace Attorney. I chose a portable platform because it matches well with the style of my games -- the close range between you and the small screen creates this in-the-game-world effect which I like."
Dying has given Sisel a remarkable amount of detective tools to work with. For one, he's allowed to go back and forth in the general timeframe around his death, witnessing previous events and reuniting with both his old friends and the hitman that ultimately killed him. He's no passive observer, though -- use the touch pen to drag his soul on top of other objects (umbrellas, ladders, bicycles, whatever), and his soul can possess the object, taking it over and moving it around. Combined with the time-jumping, this allows Sisel to rewrite his own history and even save the lives of others.
