Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective/Fridge

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Fridge Brilliance

  • Throughout the game, Sissel finds text that he believes that he cannot read because he recently died. The game justifies this by stating that when someone is newly dead, they lose their memories. However, when the game reveals Sissel was a cat all along, it explains exactly why he wouldn't know how to read.
    • Still doesn't explain how he knew what a gun was.
      • He knows what a lot of objects are, but in a conversation with Missile he reveals: he knows what a gun is, he knows what a gun does, but he simply doesn't know why it does what it does until it is explained a bit further down the line.
  • There are a lot of hidden references to cats and things cats do, such as sadistically playing with mice, being able to see in the dark, and crawling into small, narrow places. You just don't notice them until a second playthrough.
    • Sissel saves nine lives over the course of the game: Lynne, Missile, the Justice Minister, Detective Rindge, Detective Jowd, Inspector Cabanela, the Guardian of the Park, the Pigeon Man and Yomiel.
    • Don't know if this is demo-exclusive but he also found it amusing to punt Missile, a reference to the cat/dog rivalry.
  • Cabanela wears a spotless white coat to signify his spotless reputation. However, he also wears a blood-red scarf. One could see this as subtley referencing his great failure. There is a major blot on his record, but he keeps it hidden to advance his career.
  • In the first chapter, after killing Lynne, an assassin kicks your body down into the lower area of the junkyard the game starts in. When I found out that "you're" working with the person who hired the assassin, it didn't make sense to me why he would kick you out of his way. Then I remembered that the assassin was named "Nearsighted Jeego".
  • No one notices anything odd about the black cat near the beginning of the game, even though it had been shot only an hour or so before. This could be put down to Bloodless Carnage... or to the fact that "a black coat wouldn't show the stains."
  • At no point in the game can you use a corpse or living body to go from one place to another. Either it's used for speech and not transport, or it doesn't have a core. However, in the junkyard in the very beginning of the game, Yomiel's corpse has a core. It seems odd, but you're not using the body as a core; you're using the Temsik fragment inside it.
  • This narration in Chapter 1:

"[[spoiler:This has gotta be me. No question about that.
After all, do you see any other dead bodies around here?]]"

  • At one point, Cabanela says that he recognized that the supposed doctor doing the autopsy on the corpse was a phony because he wasn't doing his job right. How did Cabanela know he wasn't doing his job right? Think about what we learn about Yomiel's body later, and it's obvious that it's because he didn't remark at all on the fact that Yomiel's body had no injuries at all, something Cabanela would know to be the case from prior experience.
  • Sissel saves many lives over the course of the evening. Nine of them, in fact: Lynne, Missile, the Justice Minister, Detective Rindge, Detective Jowd, Inspector Cabanela, the Park Hippie, the Pigeon Man and Yomiel. Of course, everybody knows how many lives cats are said to have...
  • The name of the park (and the meteor that "killed" Yomiel and started all of this Ghost Trick business) is Temsik -- Kismet backwards, an Urdu word for fate. In other words, "reversed fate", what Sissel does best.
  • Sissel has amnesia, it happens to nearly everyone when they die. But did anyone else "lose" their literacy? Or believe that guns kill by sound instead of bullets? The only other character like that was Missile. Missile and Sissel are intellectual equals throughout the game. It's just that they act like opposites-like a dog and cat.
  • The reason Missile is far more powerful than Sissel or his previous-timeline self, and has reach on par with Yomiel? He died right above the main Temsik meteor. Yomiel was directly hit, but with a small fragment. Sissel, though, was a foot or two from said fragment, and Missile-Prime/Ray was barely in range at all.

Fridge Logic

  • At the end of the game, "Eyebrowed Villain" launches the room Yomiel's body is in so Yomiel will never be able to rewind time and undo them stealing the Temsik fragment. Okay. However, Yomiel can't rewind time, and the only ones who can are Sissel and Missile, who didn't get their powers until the blue people were already nearly in... wherever the hell Springfield is. Besides, Yomiel managed to figure out the time travel was a Ghost Trick because he could sense Sissel's powers, but to the rest of the world, reality itself changes, so the non-Ghost characters wouldn't even know some ghosts could do that. Where did that come from?
    • He tells Yomiel that he's done his research on the source of his powers -- Yomiel didn't seem to expect him to know about the Tamsik fragment at all. So it's likely he discovered that some ghosts have the ability to rewind time from that, and didn't actually know whether Yomiel specifically could or not -- or he reasoned that Yomiel could based on the number of people who had survived near-death experiences after he ordered them killed, probably concluding that Yomiel was using that capability to save them.
  • One question that raises a lot more is about the very beginning of the game. You want to go into your body. Fair enough. It doesn't work. That's okay. Until you play the game a second time, you realise that that can't happen. It turns out that your body never was your own, as it was Yomiel's. So what was that thing that Ray said?

Ray: When you use your powers on a corpse...you can go back to the past, to a time four minutes
before that person's death.

    • Now, think about it for a minute... Sissel could have gone back to ten years ago at the very start!
    • No, he actually couldn't, because The Temsik fragment was still in Yomiel's body, keeping him between life and death. If I remember correctly, that is.
      • Exactly right. So long as the Temsik fragment was in Yomiel's body, he was not quite "dead". At least, he wasn't anything like an ordinary corpse. Not until the fragment was removed.
    • He couldn't, he wouldn't have changed it much on his own and he had no idea what to do there at all and what is happening and for what reasons. So... no.

Fridge Horror

  • If you wonder how old Missile could come up with such an elaborate plan over the course of one night that is because he must have tried and tried and tried to save Camila hundreds of times. He probably did the same with Lynne, Jowd and the rest of the cast too untill he finally figured out how things worked. By the time he set his plan in motion by going back in time using Yomiel's corpse he must have spend YEARS trying out every possibility, desperately researching the powers of the dead. Poor guy!
  • The Justice Minister has a very severe case of denial regarding the existence of ghosts. This is Played for Laughs and it's genuinely funny until you play the game again and you realise the minister was manipulated by Yomiel, a ghost. The minister was in denial about ghosts because if he admitted they were real, he would also have to admit that he had been forced to sign the execution order by one, which by his own admission would have caused the entire system to collapse.
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