I certainly felt a lot of pressure when making Ghost Trick, as it was a brand new IP and I had just left the Ace Attorney series, but I was grateful for the chance to take on a new challenge.

MC: Ghost Trick featured some incredibly gruesome murder concepts - death by giant roast chicken is my favourite. From where did you draw inspiration for such a huge variety of deaths? Did any not make the cut?

ST: I feel that the most violent way of murdering someone is by directly shooting, stabbing or strangling them, so for Ghost Trick I wanted to have more indirect ways of killing someone, with a darkly comical, more symbolic feeling to them.

Combining this approach with the fact that the Nintendo DS screens are not the largest, or most high-resolution displays out there, it became important to make sure that whatever death we were presenting to the player was visually easy to comprehend. So being crushed to death by some giant object was a perfect fit for our requirements, whether it was under a big rock or a huge roast chicken.

As far as cut ideas, there was going to be a stage where the victim had been crushed by a huge safe that fell from the ceiling, but time restrictions meant the whole stage was cut. I do love having giant objects fall on people, don't I? That's probably the influence of Tom and Jerry on the young Shu Takumi showing through.

MC: More importantly, how did your team react as you presented these death ideas to them. Was anyone worried for your sanity?

ST: Yes, and not only that, but I also made it my goal to cause the team to worry for my sanity whenever I presented an idea, because if they were, it meant it was a good one. I would hear a little voice in my head saying, "You win!" at times like that. The more "You win!" moments one can have in life, the better.

MC: There were nods in Ghost Trick to Ace Attorney - Missile the dog, for example; a character who looked like Wright - do you see the two games as existing in the same universe?

ST: Those are really just coincidences: the guy who looks like Phoenix actually only has the same colour suit on and the dog is not the same breed as Missile, which, coincidentally, is the name of my pet Pomeranian.

Ghost Trick takes place in what is obviously a much more fantastical world than Ace Attorney. You may have noticed that the level backgrounds in Ghost Trick never have any kind of writing in them. This was an intentional design choice to prevent the game's setting from being identifiable as taking place in any particular country or era from the real world.

MC: Could you imagine an Ace Attorney/Ghost Trick crossover? Any deaths that we couldn't prevent by way of possession could then go to trial in a courtroom...

ST: ...or Phoenix Wright could be killed and Sissel could prosecute his killer in court! Whatever form it might take, a crossover between these games is something I would love to see happen.

MC: When you return to Ace Attorney after a period of absence - whether it was to write Apollo Justice or Professor Layton Vs. Ace Attorney - how easy do you find it to slip back into that world and that writing voice?