Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: soundtrack album, emulated audio (includes 12 unused tracks)
Info
Because a remaster just came out, I decided to reach into my DS drawer and replay the original version of Shu Takumi’s magnum opus. Game’s still just as excellent as it was when it came out 13 years ago.
Masakazu Sugimori first composed for Takumi on the original GBA version of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, and in the same way that Ghost Trick feels to me like an evolution of that game, in terms of having many of the same bones but being a step forward in character development and story construction and so on, Sugimori’s soundtrack for Ghost Trick feels like an evolution of his work for Phoenix Wright. You’ll once again get some chiptuney music with a healthy amount of odd time and other rhythmic shenanigans for characters, places, types of events, and emotional scenes/flashbacks, with the general moods being mystery, trauma, and determination. The major stylistic difference between the two is that Ghost Trick has a noticeable increase in the jazz influence in the soundtrack, which makes sense given the game has a bit of a noir thing going on. That and the way the music in this game feels a bit more fleshed out to me in terms of the way it develops and evokes the world and emotions of the game has always made it feel to me more “actualized” than his earlier work, if you will. It’s him, but better. It’s nice.
There are also twelve unused tracks found in the game data without an official release. Some of them aren’t too shabby but they all feel a bit underbaked compared to what actually ended up being used in-game, both in terms of development and sequencing. My favorites were probably the five second jingles.
Recommended tracks:
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“<<4 Minutes Before Death>>” has some tricky syncopation where it feels like every other measure is displaced by a sixteenth, making it really hard to keep track of the downbeat
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“COUNT DOWN” is an odd time tension loop with quartal runs, the best kind of tension loop (also the electronic sound used in it is pretty nice, reminds me of the bass sample in the first Brinstar theme in Super Metroid)
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“COMPLICATION” has a bunch of keyboard soloing over a nice synth ostinato
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“Missile ~A Courageous Little Animal” is a cute character theme with some whole tone planing at 0:13 that always catches me off guard
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“The Imprisoned” is the song that taught me many years ago, through my looping its B section at 0:54 a bunch, that transposing a chord up and down a bunch is inherently cool
(track titles are unofficial translations from VGMdb)
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