Ghost Trick / Fridge

As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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.
Ray tells Sissel in the very first chapter, "If that guy pulls the trigger, the girl dies." It sounds like a throw-away Captain Obvious comment, but Sissel actually needed that information. And it becomes absurdly cute when you realize it's a dog explaining to a cat the strange magic of a gun, to the best of both of their understanding. Seeing that Ray/Older Missile/Alternate Timeline Missile was shot by a gun (i.e. Tengo's), he knows what a gun is that way.
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. In a sense, Sissel was giving his 9 lives to save others, so to speak. After all, he will cease to exist the next day... until it was revealed that Ray/Older Missile lied to Sissel.
Don't know if this is demo-exclusive but Sissel also found it amusing to punt Missile, a reference to the cat/dog rivalry.
The first thing Sissel says in chapter one is "My head feels 'fuzzy', kind of like I'm swimming through darkness" which takes on a new meaning once you learn that Sissel is a cat.
Cabanela wears a spotless white coat to signify his spotless reputation. However, he also wears a blood-red scarf. One could see this as subtly 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".
- He's helping Yomiel to escape without being seen reanimating himself by the security camera, although that plan doesn't end up panning out. When the strangeness of the fact that his body ended up down there anyway is remarked on later, they make sure to check the tape and show that it was the black cat's doing, and that version of events is shown once again even later to illustrate that that was Yomiel making it happen himself by possessing Sissel's body.
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."
This narration in Chapter 1:
"This has gotta be me. No question about that.
After all, do you see any other dead bodies around here?"
In Chapter 2, when Sissel heads to Commander Sith's submarine, Sith is sent into a panic by a number of things like a projector turning on its own or a file opening up on its own. Considering he's planning on betraying someone with the power to manipulate objects, it makes sense that he'd be unnerved. It also explains Beauty's presence in his group, given her ability to sense the presence of people empowered by Temsik.
When you see the video that shows Lynne shooting Sissel, Cabanela seems more concerned by the fact that she fled the crime scene, than the fact that she committed murder. His reaction is rather odd, until you remember that he already knows about the manipulator and that "Sissel" can't really be killed. Furthermore, he is more concerned about Lynne willingly doing something illegal and getting in trouble for it, than her appearing to do something illegal which he can get her off the hook for.
- Even better or worse, however you want to look at it. Not long after Lynne shot Yomiel's "shell", Jeego appeared. Makes you wonder why the CCTV did not catch this moment. Did Inspector Cabanela purposely leave that part out via video editing? Or did the CCTV stopped recording which does not make sense? It could not be Yomiel's doing because he left the scene with a dead Sissel's body.
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. It also probably helped that if you look closely in both the scene where he's examining Yomiel's body and after Lynne's second death, he puts his stethoscope against their head and arms. It doesn't take much knowledge of medicine to realize that's not what you do with it.
- In chapter 3, the fake doctor declares that they can "pretty safely assume" that the murder weapon was the same model the detectives carry around. But that's a bit quick to judge just from one gunshot wound with no bullet recovered yet, isn't it? Unless, of course, you were specifically instructed to pin the blame on that detective.
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 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.
At the end of the game, in the altered timeline, Sissel is the one who's hit by a fragment of the Temsik meteorite, with his body trapped in a state between life and death. This makes him, very literally, a Schrödinger's Cat.
The guardian of the park's initial reaction to Mino being dropped on him is to happily declare it a manifestation of the power of the Rock of the Gods. While it's actually a certain dead Pomeranian, he is still entirely correct. Ghost tricks are granted by the Temsik meteorite- the "Rock of the Gods."
Calling the powers of the dead "Ghost Tricks" seems like it's there just to be a blatant title tie in, until you realize that Missile Prime is the one who names them that, and dogs perform tricks.
The fact that ghosts "disappear" when the sun comes up doesn't make sense when you realize there's no way Ray could know that or be so knowledgeable about the Ghost Tricks if he's only been a ghost a dozen hours at most. At the time it can be dismissed as a necessary failing to give the player a tutorial. It all comes together when it's revealed that Ray/Missile was lying.
- Remember how many times Sissel lets slip something in the Ghost World since thinking things is enough for them to be "said"? And Ray/Missile lets no indication of his lies through? Fridge Awesome: that is an impressive poker face that the doggie with No Indoor Voice managed to learn... Took a Level in Badass doesn't even begin to cover it...
How does Bailey's partner always know when the memos are going to fall? He's always facing the window between the guard room and the telephone room and he can use that as a mirror to look behind him.
Why is Cabanela so adamant that Jowd not follow the Great Escape trope? Because the last time he tried to invoke a police-related trope (Perp Sweating) it backfired badly. He's since realized that rules are there for a reason and it's better to work within them to get what he wants. Also, Cabanela didn't spend five years trying to prove Jowd's innocence just to let him commit the crime of escaping from prison.
The security video Cabanela shows to the police chief conspicuously has Sissel not react to Lynne pulling out a gun and shooting him. It's unusual that a seasoned investigator like Cabanela doesn't point this out when he described the video to the chief. It turns out that he knew exactly what was going on. On that note, Cabanela doesn't arrest Lynne when he brings Jowd to the Justice Minister. Strange for a guy who doesn't want to have a black spot on his record. Of course, he knew Lynne was innocent.
Throughout the game, many men appear to have the hots for Lynne, but Sissel usually points out that they have no taste whatsoever, implying he's not attracted to her at all, which may seem weird to some players. However, it all makes sense at the end of the game, as Sissel is a cat and cats shouldn't be attracted by human women.
Why does the rule that prevents Sissel from going back in time on corpses older than a day exist? So he can't go back and save Alma.
The rocker still has his jail jumpsuit even after the good ending when he never went to jail... Doing some Jailhouse Rock maybe?
Now remember our crazy character in white's fashion sense? A white lab coat and his red muffler or so? The red muffler symbolizes his blot in his record. Now let's look at Sissel. A black cat with a red scarf. It is definitely visible to the naked eye. Sure, maybe it is Yomiel's fashion sense for his black feline companion. However, Sissel still has the red scarf even in the "new" timeline. Why is that? Did Yomiel give it to Jowd at some point? Maybe. But let's think about this. Now, the color of black can hide blots but not this red scarf. Perhaps, in a sense, the red scarf probably represents Sissel ignoring Old Missile's request for help the first time around. Sissel was even ashamed of himself when Old Missile revealed this fact. So, perhaps, to remind himself of his apathy the first time around and never to ignore others who need help in the future (if there is a Ghost Trick 2), this red scarf is there to symbolize that.
Something minor to note. During the final Ghost Trick, 10 years in the past for the party involved. Dog and Cat, Detective and Criminal. Their initials? "D" and "C". Additionally, Missile is too nice to a fault, even greeting a hitman who was out to kill Lynne. Jowd? He is too protective of Kamila to a fault, even asking for an execution which everyone including the Justice Minister was reluctant to do. Sissel? Apathetic at first only to have a change of heart as the story progressed. Yomiel? Simply just tags along (the same way Sissel did towards Old Missile's request when Sissel was "searching for himself"), even suggesting Sissel to let young Lynne die as they can just redo the 4 minutes anyway which shows apathy only to have a change of heart after seeing Sissel adamantly refusing to let the huge lump of concrete named Mino crush young Lynne to death.
After Missile gains Ghost Tricks, he refuses Sissel's offer to undo his death since he now has the means to protect Kamilla. It's also likely that he knows that undoing his death would also redo Kamilla's since his Ghost Tricks are the reason she's alive.
In the good timeline, Temsik Park hasn't been closed off by the government and the Guardian of the Park now protests them charging admission for entry. Since no one knows what the Temsik Meteor does in this timeline, (at least until the Pigeon-Headed Man finishes his research) the meteor has probably become a popular tourist attraction.

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 Temsik 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.
  - Alternatively, it might have been not been due to the time rewind power. He wants Yomiel to be out of the picture, because Yomiel could backstab them later. Yomiel can possess living things and cannot die so the only way to get rid of him is to put his body where it cannot reach another living body. A deep sea prison was probably the only thing that could hold Yomiel at all because even if he came into contact with fish they would be deep sea fish and unable to survive in (let alone escape to) higher levels of the ocean. It was the only way to guarantee that they would never have to worry about Yomiel enacting revenge in some way.
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.
- Well, all of that and the fact that the corpse had no core. While there is a core in the body to possess, what you actually possessed the Temsik fragment.
How the hell does Sissel know what a Rube Goldberg device is? He calls it by name, and is the first to do so, so he didn't pick it up from anyone else. I can buy a cat understanding what a gun is and/or what a gun does, but a Rube Goldberg device? And by name? Really?
- Yomiel probably called it by name when he altered it to kill Alma. so he remembers it from that time.
- I also assume a lot of human knowledge came with being a ghost, seeing as he can speak in a way humans understand perfectly and seems to be more knowledgeable than Missile, as cats have a rep for being smart.
- Lynne probably supplied the name since he was saving her from dying at the time. Either that, or whatever you call it (and there are humans who don't know the name), it won't tell us anything we don't know it saves three lines of dialogue that do nothing but tell us Sissel doesn't know a word that you can find humans who also don't know it and breaks the natural flow of dialogue without adding anything to the plot.
On the character info page, Sissel lists everyone by a basic description even after learning their name. (Ex: "The Green Detective" rather than "Detective McCaw") We later learn Sissel is a cat. Cats are colorblind. How does Sissel know what colors are?
- Cats aren't completely colorblind. They actually are able to see green, in fact.
- Sissel can also "speak" in a way humans and dogs can understand, so I suspect that he gained a lot of human-related knowledge.
- Considering that Sissel also comments that he can't see in the dark during the prison escape scene, it seems that Sissel's eyesight more closely resembles human eyesight than cat eyesight, at least during the course of the game. Perhaps a side effect of being in human shape due to his amnesia?
Why, exactly, can't ghosts go back to 4 minutes before their own death? Most likely because if they used their Ghost Tricks in the past, then saved their life, they would have never become ghosts to begin with, so there would have been nobody to save their lives - an instantaneous Time Paradox. Either that or they could go back in time to prevent their own deaths and Ray just lied like he did with the time limit, and the reason why Sissel couldn't posses "his" own body was because the body wasn't even his and not truly dead.
- While we're on this note, the entire finale is either impossible or includes an alternate-dimension explanation. Since the future was changed, none of these characters were dead, so none of them could have possibly performed any ghost tricks.
  - They repeatedly say "go back to our future" and all ghosts retain memories of what they did as ghosts. They don't so much stop a timeline from existing, but change its direction. Ray disappears because he took The Slow Path, rather than jumping from the past to the present. So the ghosts that did make the jump- Missile, Jowd, Sissel, and Yomiel- do still exist and remember the timeline. For them, the timeline where they all died really did happen, and their existence keeps everything in a stable time loop. Lynne also turns out to remember, but it's possible that thanks to Sissel, she is able to remember because he spent the most time with her. She doesn't remember until she holds him close, after all, letting the Temsik fragment near her own soul. As to the four-minute limit, there's no point in going back too far to prevent a death. If you go back, say, half an hour, you have a lot of wait time. Four minutes puts you right in the crux of things with just enough time to prevent the death. It's not too much time, and it's not too little. It also could be just a time Ray made up, (but I can't see why, as what matters is when the job is done by), or it could be as far as he knows correct because four minutes is how far he jumped back in his attempts to save Kamila. Possibly because being a dog he might only be able to count to four, as he has four paws, four legs, and four toes.
  - Why specifically 4 minutes? No one knows. But in Asian belief, especially for Chinese, Japanese and Koreans, the number 4 means death.
At the end of the game, Yomiel is seen painting a picture in the prison cell - apparently the exact same one Detective Jowd was in, from appearance. However, that prison should have never been built, considering that the Manipulator cases never came to occur, so there would be no need for such a special facility to exist.
- It might be another, regular prison that he was locked up in for taking Lynne hostage, that just happened to use the same design as the "special" one. Ooor the developers didn't want to create entirely new backgrounds for two scenes.
- Considering Sith is shown to have a new deal underway and still has the sub, which was built special to be Yomiel's grave, there COULD be a different manipulator. They just didn't use the same subjects.
- Alternatively, The research on the Manipulator still went on because of what happened in the park that day. For starters, Mino somehow moved from it's spot to crush Yomiel, who just threw himself off a spike to save Lynne! There's no way the government won't research into that.
When Sissel and Missile arrive at the sinking room where Jowd's corpse is, they soon realize that Yomiel was following them all along. At first glance, it sounds all right for a smart guy like him... but then you notice something's wrong: how on earth did he follow them? The torpedo only has two cores, and they were occupied by Sissel and Missile all the time. There was no room for Yomiel. He came out of nowhere.
- In Chapter 16, we've seen the inside components of a torpedo from the same submarine, and we know that there are more cores to it than meets the eye. The developers probably decided to omit showing to the player Yomiel using one of the other torpedo cores to join Sissel & Missle during the scene for dramatic surprise in the next scene.

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 until 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 spent 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.
The removal of Yomiel's Temsik fragment from his "shell". Considering that the shard was buried in his chest, and his body would no longer be frozen at the moment before his death upon the shard's removal, that robotic arm should have left a pretty nasty wound in his corpse, possibly on top of the wound from the shard going in catching up to him.
In the new timeline Sissel is now immortal. So what happens when everyone he cares about dies of old age?
- They hang out in the afterlife?
  - He could be in their presence as they die of old age...which means that they die within the presence of Temsik radiation! Do you know what this means?
  - Phantom Detectives, assemble!
- What he says at the end of the game does imply that as a cat, he's not as bothered by people going in and out of his life as a human would be.
  - Yomiel's "life" quite clearly sucked for him during the Prime and Game timelines, and Sissel says outright as happy as he was to have a companion, he recognized Yomiel was miserable. Maybe he'll miss his friends when they die, but it's kinder that way. And hey, they'll probably have 'kittens' of their own to inherit him.
  - That and cats don't live nearly as long as humans, anyway. Sissel was only a kitten when the Temsik incident happened, but by the time we catch up to him in the present, he'd be pushing at least 11 years, leaving him with only about a decade at most with his new family before he dies of old age. In that regard, the Temsik meteor is a huge plus for Sissel even more than it was for Yomiel.
  - The irony is that due to Sissel not able to age anymore, while it is true that he can be with Lynne, Jowd, Kamila, etc., for a long time, they will grow old and pass away of old age, leaving Sissel alone all over again, something we learned about Sissel unless he requested the meteor fragment to be removed before the gang pass away so he can join them in the land of the dead or maybe move on and make new friends. Literally a "Who wants to live forever?" kind of situation.
  - Again, Sissel himself more or less says in the ending that being a cat makes him react differently to loss beyond his control than a human like Yomiel. Yomiel got himself into the mess he did by not just refusing to move on from his losses but actively trying to avenge them. Sissel would know from both his experiences in the game's story and his nature as a cat to see how dangerous clinging to the past is (especially with his abilities), never sinking to his owner's level. He'll mourn his losses, but won't become a monster from trying to get revenge for them.
- The Pigeon man is researching the meteorite, and characters like Jowd know the fragment is in Sissel. It's likely that they'll find a way to safely remove it and restore his normal lifespan, or at the very least, have someone ready to remove it when Sissel is ready to die for real.
When saving the leaflet man, he says his rushing to help Kamila is because he doesn't want to "repeat his previous mistakes," that one should always help people in need. It turns out that he was a witness to Yomiel taking Lynne hostage, and he was paralyzed by fear, unable to help.
In addition to his fiancée's suicide, another big factor in Yomiel's Start of Darkness was probably that even after he managed to revive himself, just about everyone in the country would still know and remember him as being very dead, due to press coverage of the inciting incident. So he wouldn't have been able to get a job, make friends or rejoin society in any meaningful way, despite his exoneration. No wonder he went mad from the isolation.
Many of the plot points come down to negligent gun handling. The Manipulator, AKA Yomiel, was a normal civilian before the events took place, so he may genuinely not have known better than not to open fire on his own body with his beloved cat right next to him. Inspector Cabanela is a police officer who engages in Gun Twirling and left his service gun unattended in a room with a suspect, and Detective Jowd, another police officer, fired a warning shot that resulted in a suspect panicking and results in a preventable death. The last two characters were police officers who should have been trained better. The entire game's events would have been avoided with proper police training in firearm discipline. Not just firearm discipline but also attitude. More so for Inspector Cabanela than Detective Jowd.
The Temsik meteorite is still buried under the park. What would happen if a homeless person died over it? Is it how the coroner was involved in studying it In Spite of a Nail?
- It would probably be removed at some point. Our "Pigeon Man" is researching that spot.

Fridge / Ghost Trick

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