I’m going to start this article with a list of games:

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
Mario Kart 8
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
Paper Mario and the Thousand-Year Door
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Super Mario Odyssey
Meteos
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Metroid Prime
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

Don’t worry about the choice of games: if you know, you know. Instead, given these games, can you guess what order they’re in? Answer at the end.

NGamer Sycophantom

I played Ghost Trick close to release in 2011. While I was trying all sorts of odd stuff on the DS, this was by no means an obvious buy for me. I’ve always been focussed on exploration and gameplay in my games, and Ghost Trick was not those things. At the time I hadn’t played the Ace Attorney games, had no attachment to writer Shu Takumi, and had little interest in a game that was focussed on story alone.

It was, as so often in those days, NGamer that swayed me. The great magazine-as-was gave it 90% and a glowing review, that I can’t find anywhere nowadays because life isn’t fair. I duly picked it up, was blown away, and awarded it the highly sought after* Balladeer 10/10. I loved the characters, the plot, and the buttery-smooth eminently giffable animation. My only criticisms were the short length and the underdeveloped villains.

That was then. This is now.

Sissel reacts to learning that the UK voted for Brexit, not once but effectively twice.

I don’t really replay games. I don’t see the point. There are so many tremendous titles offering new experiences out there: I don’t have time to play all those, let alone wallow in nostalgia. It takes a special game, or a specially barren period, to make me replay games.

Or love.

Girlfiend

A couple of months ago, my girlfriend and I were casting around for a point-and-click to play together. As we cast around in vain on the eShop, she pointed out that Ghost Trick was the dog’s danglies and suggested that we replay it.

I expressed my concerns. Ghost Trick’s strength was in its strong story and plot twists, which I already knew. Its buttery-smooth eminently giffable animation was less buttery-smooth in the light of modern day 60fps graphics. Its short length and underdeveloped villains presumably hadn’t gone anywhere in the meanwhile. And there were so many tremendous titles offering new experiences out there - if only I could think of some…

That said, I loved Ghost Trick, and I loved the woman who suggested the replay, and I didn’t love the relative paucity of point-and-clicks on Switch. In due course, we picked this point-and-trick game up again. That was the easy part.

The hard part was putting it down.

Apologies for the inconsistent image styles. That’s what happens when you search for pictures of an underappreciated game online.

Haunt-and-Click

Coming back to Ghost Trick as a working adult, rather than the student of 2011, lent me a new perspective on certain elements of the game. Its graphics were no longer so smooth, although they were still full of expression, giving even minor characters life and personality not seen in other games. Its soundtrack, not so well suited to YouTube listenings, worked perfectly in context: the tension of time running out, the cheer of Missile, the triumph of a fate averted. Its short length no longer seemed so short, stretched out as it was over the working evenings.

There was also the comparison to other point-and-click games that I could finally make. Since its first playthrough I can count such notables as Grim Fandango, Detective Grimoire, Thimbleweed Park, and Simon the Sorcerer among my memories. I’d recognised that Another Code, the Hotel Dusks, and Ghost Trick itself all belonged to the genre. Since then I can add Machinarium and Sam & Max Save the World to the list. I even tried making one myself. Ghost Trick is still the only point-and-click I’d say I love.

The trick’s in the interface. Too many point-and-clicks combine convoluted puzzling with large environments and slow backtracking. In Ghost Trick, Sissel’s spirit leaps around the world nimbly and quickly. The puzzle rooms are small and self-contained, limiting possible confusion. There’s no inventory, no combining things with other things, just Sissel and his many varied environmental interactions. Through this, the player can do a variety of things, quickly, with only a few touch-sensitive prompts. The ‘Trick’ button serves the same purpose as the ‘Action’ button in Ocarina of Time, and at times feels almost as revolutionary. (More on that later.)

Ghost Trick joins games like The World Ends With You and Phantom Hourglass as tours de force for the capabilities of the DS. While the magic of such games may have dimmed with time (personal opinion please do not @ me), Ghost Trick has a fundamentally stronger core idea. The gimmick may have gone, but the quality remains.

Plotergeist

The other key area where the game hasn’t dulled over time is in the plot. Knowing that the twists are coming makes them less shocking, but no less appreciable. Instead, I could enjoy the way the game led up to them: the subtle hints laid that I missed completely the first time around. Sissel’s true identity seeps subtly into various elements of his interactions, and spotting them led to some laugh-out-loud moments. In short: the twists are just as enjoyable the second time, just in different ways.

The plot itself, and the characters, are as strong as ever. From the devil-may-care attitude of Lynn to the slinking of Cabanela to everything about Missile, this is Shu Takumi on top of his game. On a second playthrough it’s clear that bemoaning the underdeveloped villains misses the point: they’re developed as much as they need to be to serve their purpose, no more and no less than the other minor characters, while the main cast shine brightly.

And then everything’s concluded so neatly, so impressively, and so comprehensively, that even this pedant couldn’t poke holes in it. There was a moment I was sure would be a plothole, that of course wasn’t. I was grinning like the Cheshire Cat when it was tied up.

I’m not saying this is one of the best characters in gaming. I’m specifically not saying that.

The Wight Stuff

Ghost Trick is pretty much perfection. A second playthrough only cemented that. My previous complaints were swept aside: my only remaining one (the less smooth animation) is purely due to the game’s age.

What’s more incredible is that this was done with a new idea. This is a completely new IP that felt, and still feels, completely fresh. It’s a point-and-click game, sure, but a completely new kind with new ideas, almost all of which work almost perfectly and gel supremely with the writing. It’s a completely new plot that’s completely developed and completely wrapped up in one self-contained no-sequel-necessary title. Ghost Trick accomplishes what would be impressive for the fiftieth game in a franchise in its one and only entry. Completely.

The list of games at the start of this article? That’s my top ten of all time, when allowed for with their remakes. The ordering is in increasing order of innovation, as I see it. While Smash Bros. Ultimate only built on existing games, entries such as Ocarina of Time introduced completely new elements to their franchise’s recipe, like the aforementioned ‘Action’ button and the small matter of 3D. There are two new IPs in there, of which one (Meteos) is just an evolution of the existing idea of a match-three puzzler. The other, the most novel and in some ways the most flawless of the games on that list, the only one of the top three that isn’t a franchise’s first move into 3D, is of course Ghost Trick.

That it didn’t sell well enough (with Capcom blaming it in part for the company’s 2010 performance) to demand a sequel is a reminder that travesties aren’t unique to 2020. Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective needs no sequel, natch: it is entirely its own thing, and a replay is better than any spin-off or successor could be. What it does need, what it thoroughly deserves, is some more love.

It’s Christmas Eve as I type this, so here’s your tenuous Christmas link. Merry Christmas and a ghostly New Year!