Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective devs on the challenge of adapting the game for consoles

Ghost Trick first launched on Nintendo DS with dual-screens, and then came to iOS, with touch-screen controls. With that in mind, were there any unexpected challenges in bringing Ghost Trick to a controller-driven platform? What kind of work did you do to adapt the gameplay, if so?

Atsushi Maruyama: The biggest challenge was adjusting the user interface (UI) of the game. In this game, “where” and ”how” information is displayed has a large impact on the gameplay. Within that, a particularly difficult element was displaying information relating to the “trick” action. It’s very important to understand whether you can trick an item after possessing it, and what you can do. We approached the design with the player’s point of view in mind to create the UI that you see in the game.

What were your goals for remastering Ghost Trick? How faithful did you want to stay to the original when updating aspects like the resolution?

Shingo Izumi: I really wanted to preserve that universal appeal that I previously mentioned. Since we are re-releasing the game on multiple platforms, I wanted to make sure that we achieved the same level of quality regardless of which hardware you play it on.

Atsushi Maruyama: My goal was to have the game converted to high definition so that a player would feel completely natural playing it today.