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''Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective'' is a Nintendo DS video game developed by Shu Takumi in 2010. Like Takumi's other works, ''Ghost Trick'' has a strong emphasis on characters, while the plot's central theme is death and mystery. It stars Sissel, a ghost who is attempting to recover his memories. Other major characters include Lynne, who acts as a sidekick to Sissel, and is seeking to uncover a mystery of 10 years ago; Jowd, a detective who is accused of murdering his wife; Kamila, the daughter of Jowd; Missile, a Pomeranian who, after dying, chooses to stay dead so that he can protect his owner Kamila; Ray, a ghost who inhabits a desk lamp and initiates Sissel's journey; Cabanela, a detective and friend of Jowd who enjoys dancing; The pigeon man, the superintendent of the junkyard where the game begins; The justice minister, a man who the protagonists beseech to stay Jowd's execution; Yomiel, a ghost who seeks revenge for the events of 10 years ago; and the antagonists, an unidentified organization from a foreign country who seek to kill anyone involved in the events of 10 years ago. ''Ghost Trick''s main character Sissel was originally designed to be a spy, and was designed to be a ghost so he could better interact with the other characters. ''Ghost Trick'' features a number of tropes that are found in other video games by Takumi; one such trope is the sidekick to bounce jokes off of each other, namely Lynne. He compared her role to that of Dr. Watson in the ''Sherlock Holmes'' novels. Takumi explains that he was growing tired of 3D animation; as such, he created the style used in the game by creating 3D models and rendering them in 2D afterward, creating what Video Gamer's Martin Gaston describes as "buttery smooth" animation; this was as opposed to using motion capture technology, which Takumi feels would not allow characters to have their own quirks to their design. The cast of ''Ghost Trick'' has received largely positive reception since appearing in ''Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective'', both for their dialogue and design. In particular, Missile was called the most popular character in the game among fans by Takumi. The characters also received praise for most of them not being shoehorned into the plot, and for their unique personalities and attire. The characters have been compared to the cast from the ''Ace Attorney'' series, with 1UP.com's Justin Haywald calling them "over-the-top". The animation has been described as resembling that of a cartoon, and has been praised as having "some of the most impressive presentation work in the whole graphic adventure genre" by PALGN's Jarrod Mawson, "some of the most brilliant and unique visuals the DS has seen" by GameZone's Brian Rowe, and for being good enough to still be impressive if the animation was done on the technologically superior Wii and Nintendo 3DS by ''NGamer UK''. ==Concept and creation== The characters in large part were created by Shu Takumi, who also created the game itself. The protagonist, Sissel, was originally conceived as a spy. The idea of making him a ghost came from unfulfilled ideas that the team could not accomplish in the ''Ace Attorney'' series; namely, the difficulty in delving into peoples' personal lives due to the format of the series being episodic. As such, he designed ''Ghost Trick'' to be one continuous story with a focus on characters, designing Sissel as a ghost to make it easier for him to interact with a large number of characters, arguing that a living character would have difficulty accomplishing this. One point made is the difficulty in entering a person's house as a living person, whereas as a ghost he can both interact and observe other characters. When asked of the creation of the game's characters, Takumi explains that he made them "weird and quirky" because he is curious, him giving examples of him wondering what a certain character he is writing will turn out like. He also used the ghost gimmick to allow him to go deeper into the characters, as opposed to his original plan to write back stories for every one of them. Takumi designed the writing to combine a serious story with humorous elements, specifically citing Lynne as a character he enjoys in the game due to how many times she dies yet still finds humour in her situation. In an interview with Gamasutra, Takumi noted that when designing his games, he writes the stories before writing the characters. After the basic story is created, he creates characters to fill roles in the story. He adds that once he begins to write the scenarios for the game, the characters begin to take shape. When writing characters, he describes himself as writing a bit of himself into them, using this to accomplish his goal of making characters who fit the situation they are in but also feeling realistic. When designing the main character, Takumi desires to make said character identifiable to players, commenting that they can often act as the player, while the sidekick can drive the main character and by proxy the players to do something else. In particular, he likes to include sidekicks in his games to give the main character someone to talk to, explaining that in Japan, humour is often derived from dialogue. Specifically, such dialogue between the two characters is often jokes going back and forth to each other. He also attributes his interest in sidekicks to his love of mystery novels, specifically citing the character Dr. Watson, who acts as a sidekick to the character Sherlock Holmes in the series of mystery novels of the same name.〔 Takumi explains that the 2D style used in the game was used as a result of his boredom with three dimensional graphics. He adds that it was only "by chance" that he was able to succeed in creating such visuals, due to finding the right staff for the job. The first thing made as a sample with this style was "a scene of a girl eating a doughnut while a dog is running around beside her", which was what fully convinced him to use this style.〔 When designing characters, Takumi ensures that the character presents a good silhouette, feeling that if the silhouette isn't memorable, the character's design will not leave an impression on players. He felt that this was particularly true for ''Ghost Trick'', since it was about "small figures moving around".〔 While discussing the process of creating this style, Takumi noted the limitations that become apparent when trying to do this style in 3D. However, because he wanted to give it a smooth animation, he did a process wherein he made the 3D polygons and rendered them and the motions of the characters to 2D sprites. He additionally noted that instead of doing motion capture, all of the character designs were done by hand, discussing how each character is both realistic and yet features their own quirks, which could not have been accomplished as well with motion capture.〔 Another advantage Takumi noted was having full control over the characters' actions, such as a scene mentioned by Joystiq of a girl backing into a fence and "glancing quickly" at it. He also gave criticism to some Western games' visual styles, describing them as broad versus what he describes as a level of sensitivity for nuances that Japanese people have according to Takumi.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Characters in Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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