Phantom Brave

"Nippon Ichi sets the bar with Phantom Brave"

Nippon Ichi is the underdog in the up and coming world of RPGs. They have to compete with the 1000 pound gorillas like Namco and Square-Enix.

Despite their position in the industry, they have managed to create yet another solid SRPG, and yet again set the bar higher for all Strategy RPGs that come after Phantom Brave.

Strategically speaking, Phantom Brave is about two or three times deeper than it's predecessor, Disgaea. You can do literally to almost anything to your weapons and characters. Power leveling returns, if so do desire to rampage through a map with a level 9999 character.

All the customization though, makes the learning curve pretty steep. Learning what character classes are best in what attack catagory, or figuring out what fusing characters or items can be confusing. However, taking some time toying around with all the little systems can make anyone master it within a few hours of playing.

Gone are the spawn point and the grid from Disgaea. Battles are not turn based anymore. Introduced in Phantom Brave, are the confinement system, a gridless battle system, and turns based on the speed of a character.

Confining only adds to the strategy. The main character, Marona, has the ability to confine her legions of Phantoms from a slew of objects on the map. Confining a Phantom to a rock yields more attack power, but at the sacrifice to speed. Confining to a plant, however, does the opposite, and even raises your magic attack power. Phantoms have a "remove" turn meter, when it goes down, the said Phantom disappears from the field. This can be a bit tricky, and forces the player to play many maps more strategically than before, since their most powerful character(s) can only stay on a map for a certain amount of turns.

Movement without a grid really isn't too much of a problem. It allows the freedom to move nearly anywhere on the map. The only problem that I've run into is sometimes all the enemies clump together making it hard to target what enemy you want to attack.

The story itself has no relation to Disgaea. Sorry fanboys/girls. It's a little bit more serious, but well scripted nonetheless. It is set up almost like an Anime series. There are 20 episodes, each deals with something different, yet adding to the main plot as a whole.

There is no New Game + as there was in Disgaea, but there are some extra maps after you beat the game that you can play. You can unlock some of your favorite characters from Disgaea to play as, as well as fighting the super hard bosses like Baal, and Myao. Everything you've come to expect from an Nippon Ichi RPG.

There are a few nitpicky things I don't like about Phantom Brave. The story is lighthearted, yet never really gets too deep. There is not as much humor as found in Disgaea, or not a deep plot found in La Pucelle. The battle system can get a little quirky sometimes, which gets annoying. Not to mention this game is EXTREMELY hard. Other than that, I really like this game.

Bottom Line: Phantom Brave is a must pick-up RPG for most veterans out there. Newcomers to the genre may not like it at first since the steep difficulty, but will find that the game has boundless rewards the longer you play it.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/13/04