Phantom Brave

"Two steps forward, one step back."

I got my sea-legs for Tactical/Strategy RPGs playing Final Fantasy Tactics. I was enthralled at the level of customizability, at how many different character builds and combinations of skills and classes an enterprising player could make, and how many characters I could command. No other Tactical/Strategy RPG captivated me until last year I played a cult hit at my friend's house: Disgaea.
One word: wow. It was reasonably challenging without being viciously so, had randomly-generated dungeons to capture the imagination for hours and hours, long after the story had ended, scalable enemy difficulties, and a New Game + mode. The sheer volume of classes and equipment was staggering, and stat caps were set so high that it was a powergamer's/completionist's dream come true.

When Phantom Brave came out, I approached it with a healthy degree of skepticism. My girlfriend (a saint... read on if you don't believe me) bought me not only Disgaea, but a PS2 and memory card to go with it! Could Phantom Brave win my heart (and more importantly, a venerable place in the PS2's disc tray) over the game that redefined the contemporary Tactical/Strategy RPG? Well, yes and no. In many ways, Phantom Brave improved vastly on the rather formulaic Tactical/Strategy RPG design, but not without losing some of the lessons that should have been old hat, thanks to Disgaea's success.

Graphics: 7/10
Don't get me wrong with the 7 here. The graphics are very colorful, and everything looks the way it should. Knights look like Knights, Wolfmen like Wolfmen, etc. But these graphics didn't improve on some of the issues in Disgaea, like attacks causing the character to pass directly through an adjacent obstacle. Moreover, many of the sprites look to be recycled, or only scantly improved upon, over Disgaea. Bad form. Very bad form.
Not to be a graphics nut, because they fall just behind sound (which is dead last) in my personal hierarchy of important aspects of a game, but the graphics here hardly look as though they tap into the PS2's potential. I like sprites, and wouldn't want to see them done away with in favor of polygons, but they need more polish! Environments look cookie-cutter, and need flavor. Details like bridges and similar layering techniques are not only visually interesting, but provide tactical advantages, allowing casters to bombard enemy formations below with relative safety. However, such layering is underused, providing the same valley- or plains-like battlefield time and time again.

Story: 6/10
The story is cute, but not very thought-provoking. There are no massive value-judgements, difficult moral decisions, or even characters that really grab the spotlight the way Laharl, Etna, and Flonne did in Disgaea. The story is a tool for more action, and that's fine. I didn't buy this game for the story, but for the gameplay, so I wasn't disappointed when the story turned out to be less-than-stellar.
The main thrust of the story is that Ash is a Phantom, deceased friend of Marona's also-deceased parents. He basically raised her since her parents' deaths, and has done his best to protect her from a world hostile toward her and her gift of speaking to and conjuring Phantoms. Throughout the story, Marona, through the same kindness and patience that was both doubted and exploited by the world at large, gains the acceptance and friendship of the outside world. Of course, being the only one capable of saving the world from Sulpher, the evil entity responsible for the deaths of Ash and Marona's parents, doesn't hurt when trying to make friends, either.
Like the back of the box says, the story unfolds over 20 heart-warming chapters, but it's primarily fluff that's there to keep the gameplay going.

Audio: 7/10
Tunes sound reminiscent of Disgaea, but not in a bad way. The music goes a long way to build atmosphere for different battlegrounds, but wears thin in Random Dungeons (more on this later), where you'll be hearing the same background music for up to 99 battles in a row.
Voice acting is improved almost everywhere but where it really counts. Minor characters, those that have no impact on the story whatsoever, have much better voice clips for their attacks as compared to those in Disgaea. The main characters, however, do not live up the standard of voice acting set by Disgaea. The one exception being Raphael the Invicible, whom I believe is voiced by Crispin Freeman, an amazing voice talent who has lent his skills to animes like Slayers and Witch Hunter Robin. Even if he isn't, he sounds strikingly similar, and really captures the essence of his character.
Without spoiling too much, the voice acting also comes up short in its failure to re-recruit voice actors from previous games whose characters have cameos in Phantom Brave. This totally ruins much of the charm these cameos were supposed to have, in my opinion.
All in all, the sound is hardly groundbreaking, but it's what you would expect, considering video game voice acting is still a relatively new art, and that RPG dialogue is, by nature, not conducive to being spoken aloud. I really wish one of these game companies would figure out that when someone's line is supposed to be cut off, or when two people are speaking at once, it's okay to have their voice tracks overlap instead of having to hit the X button to confirm sending the dialogue into the next phrase. It sounds unnatural and goofy.

Gameplay: 9/10
This is the best part of Phantom Brave. If they cut out every other facet of the game and left us only with Phantom Brave's gameplay, it would still be worth plunking down the $40. Yes, it's that good.
On the other hand, I have to question some of the mechanical decisions they made. For example, each character has one equipment slot to fill. I understand to a certain degree why they did this. There is a limit to how many characters can be summoned into battle, and weapons count as characters, so it's a strategic choice as to whether you'll send a horde of unarmed soldiers, or an elite group of armed ones, into battle. Fine. But this also makes nearly every character alarmingly fragile, because weapons typically only raise one or two stats. If you want to raise these stats higher, you must either level the weapon up (rather ineffective, unless raised en masse), or fuse it with another weapon and add a fraction of that weapon's statistical bonuses to the original. Don't worry, it's not as confusing as it sounds. However, it can be frustrating seeing your character get felled by an enemy 20 levels lower than you simply because you had to decide whether or not Speed or Defense was more important, and you chose Speed.
The difficulty seems stepped-up from Disgaea, also. Gone are the geo-panels you used to be able to rely on to let you beat bosses far stronger than yourself. However, in many ways, the difficulty is also artificially lowered by a preposterously bad AI, which will sometimes stop right in front of one of your Phantoms without bothering to attack, or hop around like an idiot due to a poor movement mapping system, burning up all its movement points and leaving it too far out of range to do anything. Boss characters seem completely oblivious for the first turn, and will not so much as move, even when a Phantom standing right next to them just pounded away 75% of their health. Oh well, in this case, you just have to take the good with the bad, and trust me that in spite of these oversights, the game can still be quite challenging.
In Disgaea terms, Marona is a walking, fighting (albeit not well, without considerable work), base panel. She confines Phantoms into anything and everything--trees, flower pots, bricks, starfish, swords, books--almost anything on the battlefield, and each object provides different statistical bonuses and penalties. Rocks, for example, provide a rock-solid 50% Defense increase, but at the expense of a great deal of Speed and Intelligence (ergo, dumb as a rock). But where Phantom Brave really shines, where it surpasses even the versatility of Disgaea's weapon-based skill system, is that any of these objects can also be used as weapons! Not only are your characters able to use their environment as vessels for manifesting in the physical world, but they can grab a nearby rock, tree, even a dead friend or foe, and turn a battle into an all-out hardcore match! Even better, as weapons accumulate Mana from use, they can learn new skills that can be used in battle. Flower pots have different skills from rocks, which have different skills from trees, which have different skills from books, etc. But you need to act quickly; your Phantoms can only stick around on the battlefield for about 3-6 turns before reverting into the object they were confined into, and cannot come back into battle. Will you go for an all-out offensive and hope you can win before your last Phantom reverts, leaving Marona to fend for herself, or will you play conservatively, using the fewest number of Phantoms you need to get by, saving some for a desperate situation?
Much like Disgaea, the sheer quantity of classes is staggering. You start with an already hefty number of classes to choose from, and the list grows from there. Killing 20 of a certain type of monster allows that monster to be created as a member of your party, and killing only one of a new humanoid class allows for the creation of that class.
Where this game also succeeds in a place that I felt Disgaea came up short, is that different weapons use different statistics for their attacks, whereas Disgaea used only two: Hit and Attack (and Intelligence for casters). Classes that did not excel in these fields had to either join in combo attacks or get left in the dust in terms of levels. Now, Healers can get their fair share of licks in with Resistance-based attacks from eggs (Resistance being the statistic tied to the strength of healing spells). Speedy characters can use starfish, which have a bevy of Speed-based attacks, and so on. Characters also get bonus experience points simply for participating in a battle, which keeps even the weakest of characters from lagging too far behind.
Gone are the square-by-square movements and attacks of Disgaea, which is now replaced by the ability to move nearly anywhere. Now attacks can be aimed in circular and conical patterns, allowing you to catch an unprecedented number of enemies in your attack radius. Additionally, throwing has been vastly improved upon. Throwing diagonally is no longer the hassle it used to be, because you can throw anywhere inside a clearly defined throwing radius. You can throw enemies out of bounds (which risks leveling up the remaining enemies, but ensures that particular enemy will not be a problem). Thanks to these improvements, almost every character has a chance to shine.
I say "almost," because there are also a host of utility characters, who function best outside of battle, which seems a bit of an oversight, since many of their abilities are better executed at higher levels, but are generally too weak to have much use even in the revamped battle system. Blacksmiths level your weapons up, Merchants sell weapons, Fusionists fuse together two weapons, characters, titles (even titles with characters, weapons with characters, and so on), etc. One of the nicest parts of this game is the Dungeon Monk, who creates random dungeons, which can more-or-less be tweaked to your liking, and add a degree of replayability to the game. Inside random dungeons, you can fight powerful monsters, find high-level items, rare items, and perhaps most importantly, build up "titles."
Titles are new in this game, and can be assigned to both Phantoms and weapons, and confer statistical bonuses and penalties, and occasionally skills, as well as change the color palette of the sprite.
However, with all these new additions to the genre, there have been a few steps back of note. First of all, the new movement and attacking system is not perfect. Occasionally, you'll direct a Phantom to move to a place that the game says he can go, only to get caught on an often invisible "snag" on the battlefield, and burn up all of his remaining movement points. Similarly, you may aim an attack at an enemy that is close to, or standing on top of, another enemy (or worse yet, a friend), only to have your attack hit the undesired target, rather than the one the game said you were aiming for. Unbelieveably annoying, because at least you could take back a poorly mapped move, but when your character hits a corpse rather than the enemy you were supposedly aiming for, that character cannot take back the action.
Transmigration is back in this game, but in a much diluted and over-complicated form. Now, in order to transmigrate characters you must have either a Changebook or Egg item. As far as I know, only two Changebooks and one Egg can be found over the course of the story. If you want more, you'll have to look through random dungeons, but don't hold your breath. They can only be found at the last level of said dungeon, and even then, it's not a guarantee. Also, whereas in Disgaea transmigration was integral to getting the most out of your character, equipment now dictates an even larger percentage of a character's potential than it did in Disgaea, so transmigration is really only of interest to the most die-hard of completionists.
Finally, and perhaps most frustratingly, is the absence of any sort of level scaling and/or New Game + options. I cannot overstate how critical both of these options are to a game that allows for such character growth, and although weapons and characters can hit level 9999, you'll never really have much of a use for it, because there are only 9 extra story-oriented maps following the completion of the main story.

Replayability: 7/10
In spite of all of the things I said hurt the game, there is still much replayability to be had. With so many different classes, so many different weapons, and so much fun to be had inside random dungeons, there is plenty to see and do even after a full completion of the game. The three full points taken off this score are as follows: two for lack of a New Game + (which they did very well in Disgaea), and one for no enemy level scaling (a feature that was done poorly in Disgaea, but at least it was in there). Unacceptable. Lazy.

Verdict: 8/10
Gameplay gets weighted heavily, since that's Phantom Brave's real selling point as a game by the same company that made Disgaea. It's an incredibly fun game that does not lie when it boasts 400+ unique skills. There are so many different party compositions, weapon options, and different ways to play the game that you can virtually set your own degree of challenge throughout. Do yourself a favor and buy or rent this game, especially you liked the stat-intensive, lighthearted nature of Disgaea. If you preferred the more serious, story-oriented, number-crunching/precise style of FFT, still give it a try, but you may decide to stick with FFT, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/28/04