YMMV / Ghost Trick

• Abandon Shipping: It's not uncommon for people playing for the first time to ship Sissel and Lynne. But it's even less uncommon for people to jump ship after it's revealed at the end that Sissel is a cat. Even Sissel's actual "human" identity Yomiel isn't viable as an option since he was already in love with his fiancee.
• Angst? What Angst?:
  • Sissel says several times he's not upset that he's dead. Then there's Missile, who turns it up to eleven...
  • Almost nobody in the game regrets their own death after they die — it seems to be a property of the realm of the dead (or maybe just the fact that, well, they still exist, so much of the fear is gone. But Sissel explicitly notes that he's not worried even when he's told that he'll disappear at dawn). Those people who express regret always express it over their inability to protect others, not themselves.
  • Kamila. An assassin bursts into her apartment? Dad's in jail for the murder of her mother? Mother is dead and she thinks it's all her fault? Crushed to death by a gigantic stone monument and then brought back to life? Kidnapped, shoved into a suitcase, and dragged back to the house where her mother was shot to death in front of her? Trapped in a sinking submarine with death imminent? No biggie, who needs counselling? Hey, Lynne, how does spaghetti sound for dinner?
    • It's implied that she's a huge Stepford Smiler and doesn't want people to worry about her. And maybe Missile is her therapy dog, after all does he call her his mistress.
• Awesome Music: All of the music in this game is epic. Take a look at the list here.
• Cult Classic: While not an outright obscure title, Ghost Trick didn't become as enormous as the smash hit series Ace Attorney and didn't receive as much recognition at the late stages of DS game library. However, those who played the game agree that it's an enormously underappreciated gem with a very unique structure, gameplay and storyline. The cult status has become so dedicated that the eventual re-release was extremely hyped in the social media several months before being actually announced, and was generally welcomed with open arms.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Yomiel. After his Heel–Face Turn he is given a tragic backstory and is portrayed as fully sympathetic, the last image of the game being a Tear Jerker image of him. He expresses regret for taking Lynne hostage and he loves his cat, sure, but lest we forget some of the unsympathetic things he did: he murders a 5 year old girl's mother in front of her and makes her think she did it, he possesses said girl five years later and tries to make her kill her own father and he actually succeeds in cold-bloodedly killing her in her own apartment as we see in the alternate timeline. And this is just what he does to Kamila! What's more, he shows no remorse until he's been stabbed in the back. Yomiel confesses that the loneliness corrupted him and that he had more or less lost his marbles, he's sympathetic because his pain caused him to do those things after Lynne reaches out to him he snaps back and works to fix what he did. Contributing to this perception may be the fact that he has the appearance of the protagonist, who we've spent the entire game with and become sympathetic to. So even knowing he's not the same person, he still looks like the character you've been playing and connecting to for 15+ chapters now. Also, even if you don't buy into the redemption, it's hard not to wince a bit in sympathy when watching him get crunched by the Mino statue after he manipulates himself to throw Lynne out of the way. Ouch.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Jeego and Tengo, the oneshot villains from the beginning who show up for about five minutes each.
  • Bailey, thanks to his Panic Dance.
  • Missile is the single most popular character, despite not being present for about two thirds of the game.
• Fan Nickname: Ray, the ghost inside the desk lamp, is commonly called Pixar before he properly introduces himself.
• Faux Symbolism: The three, or four if you include Ray's true name characters that can do Ghost Tricks all have an el at the end of their name, albeit with a minor variation in spelling with one of them so it sounds proper. El is a Semitic word meaning deity, and can be seen today with Christianity's archangels^note Michael, Gabriel, so on and so forth. The technicality is obviously Missile, but is excusable due to being a real word with similar enough pronunciation and being named after Shu's actual dog of the same name.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • Taken up to eleven with the Ace Attorney fandom. It was created by the same guy who directed the first three games in that series, and contains a few references to those games, with the Ace Attorney localizations sometimes giving back. For all intents and purposes, the Ace Attorney fandom has adopted the Ghost Trick fandom into itself.
  • Thanks to the February 8th 2023 Nintendo Direct, an influx of Professor Layton fans mingled with fans of Ghost Trick since Ghost Trick HD Remaster and Professor Layton and the New World of Steam were announced, and both of them are quirky games of detectives who use puzzles to solve mysteries.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Remember the curry-loving prisoner who was trying to break out with a spoon? Apparently someone took his advice, and succeeded.
• Memetic Loser: Lynne. Highest death count in the game, and dies almost immediately after starting.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • WELCOME!
  • It seems to have become a custom in the fandom to make jokes about how Lynne keeps dying.
  • Bailey's humorous "panic dance".
  • The waitress at the Chicken Kitchen, Memry, has quite the reputation as an "Odd girl."
  — "I agree."
  — "Me too."
  • Sissel's pose on the cover has been parodied since the game was first announced.
  • Play Ghost Trick. ^ExplanationAs this game is difficult to talk about without spoiling something due to its many twists and turns, fans asking people to play it can only tell others this phrase and nothing more.
• Moe: Kamila; Amelie; Lynne, especially when she was a kid.
• Moral Event Horizon: Commander Sith backstabs Yomiel by tricking his spirit into leaving his body for another part of the sub, removing the Temsik meteorite, and sinking the sub. This would condemn Yomiel to an eternity in crushing darkness, completely alone without even a body to move with. And his only reasoning is that he outlived his usefulness. Since we feel a little sorry for Yomiel by this point, it doesn't feel like karmic justice.
• Narm Charm: The game constantly plays the line between silly and dramatic, but at the end, Missile-Prime says that he protected Lynne over a ten year period because "That's what doggies do!" It easily could be Narm, but it ends up as a Heartwarming Moment.
• One True Threesome: For fans who make note of Jowd and Cabanela's strong partnership but don't want to break up Jowd and Alma, it's common to ship all three as a happy throuple.
• Polished Port: The 2023 re-release has much higher resolution artwork and character models compared to the DS original, and features a newly re-arranged soundtrack (with the option to use the old one if you prefer).
• Squick: The toilet pipe system that is used by some prisoners to communicate with each other is a brilliant idea. Then again, they must also use and flush their toilets after more... mundane acts, and the bell of the receiver prisoner presumably jingles then too...
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The iOS port of the game very slightly changes the Happy Birthday to You! melody of the deadly Rube Goldberg Device. This, despite the fact that the melody itself is not copyrighted. The HD remaster returns the melody to the DS original.
• That One Achievement: In the HD remaster, any of the five achievements can require succession with no mistakes and can be tricky ("Mystery of the Secret Room", "Careful of the Crimson Light", "Too Much Medicine", "Captive on the Roof", "Red Light! Green Light!"), and some of them require that you fail on one special occasion ("Extraordinary Failure", "First Appearance of Life"), but the worst offender has to be the "Careful of the Crimson Light" achievement, which requires that you guide Jowd out of prison without him getting spotted once.
• That One Boss: While this game doesn't have conventional bosses, Chapter 15 is made very complicated by the presence of The Manipulator. Because the Manipulator is also a ghost, he'll catch on if you use your Ghost Tricks in front of him by immediately killing the person you're trying to save. So instead you have to work with Missile and figure out ways to use your Ghost Tricks when he's not looking.
• That One Level:
  • The prison break is infuriating. It's carried out in near-darkness (unless you're in the ghost world, where time stands still) and is both a stealth and escort mission, made doubly annoying due to the fact that it portrays a three-dimensional cutaway of the building in a two-dimensional perspective. It's hard to know, in one area, that you need to have Jowd hide behind the stairs because you can't even tell that area is accessible. If you don't know that Jowd can hide behind the stairs, try figuring out without a guide that Jowd isn't supposed to go up the stairs normally, but has to jump up and go through a grate that one of the guards would be hiding in had you not opened it and made him fall by this point.
  • Even worse is the heart attack level, notably the one time in the game where you can pass a checkpoint after the situation becomes unwinnable, forcing you to start from the beginning.
  • On the non-DS versions, the level where you need to save Cabanela from the Manipulator falls under this. You need to find an item with the same shape as a bullet—only, unlike the DS version, you're not shown what the correct shape is. A player might incorrectly assume the bullet has an elongated shape (like the book or the knit hat when on the ground), whereas it's actually closer to a hemisphere (like the hard hat or knit hat when on the hook).
• That One Puzzle:
  • Chapter 9 has the escape sequence. An instant-fail stealth sequence in a puzzle game. And those stairs... It's even harder still in the HD remaster when you're trying to get the "Careful of the Crimson Light" challenge/trophy/achievement.
  • Chapter 14's umbrella has stumped many people. Made even worse by the fact that the hint that you get when you miss the critical point (namely when the park guardian jumps upon the seesaw) is misleading; it implies you have to stop him from running, which you couldn't really do. You do have to delay him, but it doesn't have anything to do with making him stop running.
  • Chapter 15, made more complicated by the presence of the Manipulator, as detailed in That One Boss.
  • The HD remaster makes any puzzle involving swapping a gun's fired round a bit more unintuitive, since the average player might not assume that Ghost Trick's concept of how a round looks relates to the actual bullet at the tip, separate from the shell casing and primer; the DS version accounted for this with the preview image of how possessed objects look, a feature not brought over into the remaster.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • The animations are incredibly good, especially for a DS game.
  • The underlying animation is incredibly good, which is to say the character models and movements are fantastic. However, their translation into a few pixels on a DS screen doesn't do the animation anywhere near the amount of justice it deserves. In other words, it looks great in motion, but makes for awful magazine screenshots. A very common thing with DS games. Future re-releases, like the 2023 remaster, upgrade the quality of the models so they look a whole lot cleaner.
  • The Temsik meteorite, when we finally see it fall in the final chapter. Spectacular.
  • The animation won the game an award.
• The Woobie:
  • It's impossible not to feel for Kamila considering all she goes through. On her mother's birthday, she decides to surprise her by making an elaborate Rube Goldberg contraption that would end up popping partypoppers. But it is instead rigged by a ghost wanting revenge on her father so that it would instead pull the trigger of a decorative gun, killing her mother. On her own birthday. As if the irony wasn't enough, her father decides to take the blame and is sentenced to death. So now she carries the guilt of being responsible for not only for her mother's death, but also her father's. Bad enough? It gets worse. She's also kidnapped as a bargaining chip to assure that her dad is executed. When her father comes to rescue her, the same ghost who killed her mother decides to possess her and have the girl shoot her own dad. Luckily that doesn't happen... because her dad was already killed elsewhere. Instead, she gets to see the woman who's been raising her as an adoptive little sister die hit by falling rubble and float face down. Oh, and she also witnesses her little dog being shot dead. Ouch. Thankfully, everything gets reverted in the end.
  • Same goes for Yomiel, too, for that matter, after his Heel–Face Turn.

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