Phantom Brave

"I See Dead People... And They Look Cute!"

This is brought to you by the people who brought us Disgaea, that crazy little RPG that jumpstarted the grid-based-battle system that we remember from Ogre Tactics and Final Fantasy Tactics. In this game, you play as a little girl named Marona who at the age of 5 lost her parents and now at the age of 13 struggles to make a living without them. Her parents were Chroma, or special individuals who are hired to do different jobs such as finding people, fighting monsters and phantoms, and other tasks that are too difficult or complex for average bounty hunters or mercenaries. Her parents were doing a job that require they go to the ‘Island of Evil', or an island that was the spawning place for a creature called Sulphur, a horrible being that appeared 30 years ago on the island and existed only to cause pain and suffering to people around the world, only to be beaten by a warrior baring the title ‘The Brave'. While there they were ambushed by a spawn of Sulphur and killed, leaving Marona to continue on without them. The only problem is that, like her parents, she has special powers that let her see, communicate with, and control spirits, or ‘phantoms' as they are known in the game. This would be a good thing if not for the fact that this earns her the hatred of those she tries to protect, everyone seeing her as a demon girl who steals souls and causes bad luck since Sulphur used the same kind of power to control and use phantoms to attack people and cause havoc 30 years ago. Still, this little girl continues to have an extremely optimistic view on life and help those in need, even if her rewards are often taken by those who take advantage of her. She only has her friend, a man Ash, to help her. He is not so much a man as he is a phantom, left in an undead state because he was there with Marona's parents to act as their body guard, failing obviously. Before Marona's parents died, they used the last of their power to attempt to revive Ash, but being weakened and dying, they were only able to bind his spirit to the earth as a phantom. They then asked him to guard their daughter, which he did to make up for his inability to protect Marona's parents.

The game is a little different from Disgaea. You start with just Marona, who is relatively weak, and infuse your characters into objects. This means you can only summon allies if there are items on the map near by to summon them into. Doing so alters their stats, so fighters do best in rocks which ups their attack and defense but lowers their speed and intelligence, and spell casters do better in plants which up their intelligence and spell points but lower their hit points and defense. Once summoned, you characters can only stay on the map for a few turns before they lose their grasp on the mortal world and return to spirit form. This means you have to act quickly and cannot wait for your opponents to come to you. Your characters can pick up almost any item and use it to attack an opponent, from using weapons like swords and spell books which they can be equipped with before a battle so they come into the fight already loaded with weapons, to whacking your opponent with a tree or a rock, or even learning special attacks from said items. Some characters provide special bonuses, like shop keepers increase the money you gain at the end of a fight if they are present by the end. You also move around in a free system, no more grids, so you can move in a radius from your starting point. But this also means you can be tossed out of bounds if you get to close to the edge of the map. After a fight you have a chance of taking an item or two back home with you that you possessed. When possessing items there are percentages for each character relative to each item. If the percentage is high and you are lucky, if the character runs out of turns before the battle is over, they will take the item back with them to the spirit world. This can be good and bad at the same time, as you get free items to take back but also have less items to summon phantoms into for that particular fight. After a fight you go back to your home island where you can talk to your phantoms (they will usually spout random lines) and perform actions based on what characters you have. You can create phantoms (which ones are determined by the story or by which ones you have defeated before in a large enough number), store and dispatch phantoms and items to or from your island. You can do many other actions depending if you have the right phantoms. If you have a healer and you can heal all your damage after battle. Have a merchant and you can buy and sell items. If you have a dungeon master, you can buy random dungeons to delve. The list goes on, including blacksmiths, witches, titlists, and fusionists. Beating random dungeons gives you special titles that alter your stats, increasing or decreasing stats by percentages, and sometimes granting skills. The game uses Mana as a second currency for building up your items and characters. Your characters gain mana by participating in battles, and items get mana when you use them to finish off enemies. You can use a blacksmith to spend mana to level up weapons (making them more effective as equipment) and also buy extra attacks you can use with that weapon. Fusionists combine items and characters to make them stronger. Characters have a level cap of 100 and items usually have level caps at around 12 or so, but combining them increases the level caps and can improve them. Combining items lets you add attacks and spells from one item to another, and you can increase their bonus when equipped and also increase the stat boosts when they are used to confine phantoms. Characters can be combined to increase their stats and learn skills. Characters can also be fused with items and vice versa. All of the fusion bonuses (learning skills, increased stats) however require mana, but mana can be gained quickly as combining two items or characters adds the mana up.

There are a few problems with this game. The free system and lack of grid makes it easy to get bunched up together and end up standing on each other's heads. One tactic the enemy will do is attack you and then jump on each other's heads to form a tower so that you cannot hit anyone except the ones on the bottom, allowing spell casters on the top to fling attacks at you without being counterattacked. It also makes it hard to make use of skills as some have a set radius, a blast radius, a cone of effect, or so forth. This does add a special form of strategy into the mix but can sometimes be a pain to do something like heal two allies that are standing just enough apart that you can heal one but not both. The worst times this happens is when you move close to attack an enemy, and then realize that melee attacks have to be at a short distance away, but you lack the movement points to move backwards and end up easy pickings for the enemy. Worst yet is when you set yourself to attack an enemy, and your character automatically moves to attack, but for some reason takes an awkward rout that requires they jump over a lot of stuff, making them use up movement points and making them stop short of their target and leaving them unable to attack. Also the enemy will sometimes avoid fighting until your units have run out of time and return to objects, then charge your main character. They also have a very annoying habit of grabbing your items and weapons and tossing them out of bounds where you loose them for good. This annoyance is also compounded by the fact that they seem to usually steal your items about 70% of the time, meanwhile stealing your items back from them will usually only have 22% to 2% success rate. Another problem that is linked to this is that when your enemy cannot win a fight, they will often grab your phantoms and throw them out of bounds, which puts them out of that fight. At the least they made it so being thrown out of bounds is not fatal as it is in Disgaea, but they did not solve how the enemy gets bonuses if you do the same to them. If you knock an enemy out of bounds all the other enemies go up in level based on the level of the opponent you knocked out. This can be a drag because some maps are incredibly small and filled with enemies and I've played some maps where if the enemy was out matched, they would throw each other out of bounds just so the remaining fighters would be 5 to 10 levels higher then my strongest phantom, making them almost invincible, more so when they can just take your strongest phantom and throw him out of bounds with no repercussions.

Still, this game has a fun little story, very good sprite designs (Not so good in the battle field graphic department), a very large array of items, spells, characters, and combinations to use, and can be very time consuming if you need a game to keep you from getting bored. It's worth a try for any good RPG lover with time on their hands and a good knack for strategy.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 12/02/08

Game Release: Phantom Brave (US, 08/31/04)