Phantom Brave

"Quite simply, one of the best and deepest Strategy RPGs ever"

Ah, Phantom Brave. The game that introduced me to the great company known as Nippon Ichi. I had been meaning to check out one of their games for a while, but other games had always prevented me from doing so. However, as I was browsing through EB Games one day, I saw this sitting on the shelf for the low price tag of $20. Man, was I in for a treat. I've always had a fondness for the Strategy RPG genre, but this game caught me completely off-guard. With that out of the way, on to the review.

Graphics

Yes, this game has 2D graphics. One common complaint about the graphics is that "they look like a SNES game." I'm sorry, but this could not be more false. Even the best looking games on the SNES featured limited color palettes and few animation frames. The sprites in this game aren't the best 2D graphics ever, but they're still much better than a SNES would be capable of. Also, the game is not completely 2D; only the characters and items are. The battlefields are completely 3D. While not overly detailed, it's easy to see what's what, which is all that matters. In addition, since the items are in 2D, you can tell at a glance whether or not you can interact with an object. All in all, the graphics work for the game; they're not particularly good or bad, but they work.

Story

The opening scene shows one of the main characters, Ash, and two of his companions, Haze and Jazmine, killed by demons. In Haze's dying breath, he casts a spell in an attempt to keep Ash alive. While it doesn't give him life, it keeps him from death; Ash becomes a phantom. Now, fast forward 8 years. Ash, in honor of Haze and Jazmine, has devoted himself to protecting their daughter, Marona. Marona has the power to speak with phantoms, and also to summon them to fight for her. Despite being only 13 years old, she has a job as a Chroma - the demon hunters of the game's world. Like any girl with strange powers, the common people reject her; they have nicknamed her "The Possessed."

Unfortunately, this is where my biggest complaint with the story comes in: you spend the first three-fourths of the game doing jobs for miscellaneous characters and trying to earn your respect back. The story doesn't really start to come together until late in the game, although it's quite awesome once it does pick up. The only other complaint I have with the story is the incredibly generic and cliche characters. With the exception of Ash, Walnut, and Sprout, all of the characters can be summed up in a line or two. "Guy that claims to love monsters but instantly hates them when they don't do what he wants." "Extremely compassionate and nice girl that likes everybody even though they hate her." Of course, I would hope story isn't the reason you play these games, so this shouldn't bother you too much.

Gameplay

Here we go, the meat of the game. First of all, this game does things a lot differently from other SRPGs. For starters, the gird system seen in most of these games is completely done away with. Each character has a set distance they can move, and a red circle around the character shows just how far this reaches. In addition to this, your movement is affected by how slippery or bouncy the terrain is. On slippery terrain, your character will slide a bit once he's finished moving. On bouncy terrain, you can expect your character to bounce a little farther out when you drop off a ledge or similar obstacle. While this may seem like a drastic change, it really isn't; you just have to plan your movements a bit more carefully. The only real problem with this system is that there's really no way to protect your characters other than moving them far away from any enemies. Since there's no grid, enemies can move right past your frontline characters and attack Marona and your mages. Fortunately, this also works in reverse; you don't have to slash away at lesser enemies while getting beaten into the ground by a boss. It just takes some getting used to, that's all.

The other big change is the confining system. You only have one "living" unit, that unit being Marona. All of your other characters are phantoms. Now, you start each battle with only Marona on the field. To get your other characters onto the field, you have to confine them to various objects laying around. These could be rocks, trees, weapons, bones, anything. Now, the catch is that your phantom's stats are affected when they're confined to something. For example, rocks raise attack and defense, but drop intelligence and speed. Flowers lower HP and attack, but they raise intelligence, magic resistance, and speed. Because of this, you have to be careful of what you confine your phantoms to, as they're stuck with they're modified stats until they leave the field. Speaking of which, each phantom you get has a Remove stat. Phantoms don't just hang around forever; after an amount of turns equal to their Remove, they vanish, and you can't re-confine them for the remainder of the battle. How high or low the remove stat is depends on the class. Weak fighters get 8 turns, standard fighters get 5 turns, mages get 3 turns, a certain exploding monster gets 1 turn...you get the idea. I personally like this concept as it forces you to use strategy. You could have the strongest phantoms in the world, but it won't mean anything if you plan the battle poorly and they all vanish before you can kill the enemies. In fact, there's one extremely difficult battle near the end of the game that is based on this concept. You have an extremely small number of confine points and a large amount of enemies, so it's nearly impossible to win by brute force. You have to come up with a good strategy to win.

Including Marona and any items you bring into battle, you can have 16 characters on the field at a time. Once a phantom vanishes, you can confine a different phantom if you so wish. Of course, there's a catch. Like I said, that 16 includes any items you bring into battle. Each character can be equipped with a single item that they will enter the battle equipped with; if you confine a phantom with an item equipped, it counts as confining 2 characters. Since your characters really start to suck later on without decent weapons, you're probably only going to have 7-8 characters on the field at any given time. Considering that it's very possible to go through the game with Marona and 4 well-trained phantoms, this isn't a problem. Now, speaking of items...the item system is so incredibly deep it would be impossible to cover in this review. I will try to summarize it, however. First of all, your characters can equip any item as a weapon. I must say, it's quite satisfying to beat down the final boss with a tree or a dead fish. Because of the massive amount of customization available, you can make literally any item into an "uber weapon." Very early in the game, you'll gain access to the ability to create a Fusionist. Fusion in a nutshell: You can fuse a stronger item to a weaker item to raise it's stats and give it new abilities. You can also fuse characters, which isn't really necessary but still useful on certain occasions.

Finally, the title system. Each character and item you have, excluding a handful of unique items, is assigned a title. You don't get to choose what title a character/item comes with, although you can change titles with a Titlist. To get new titles, you either have to banish a character/item to get its title or put a different title on it. When you put a title on something, the old title gets added to your collection of titles. You'll want to pay attention to your titles, as they can make a big difference in stats. There are a few junk titles that have no positive effects whatsoever, but most of the higher ranked titles have varying ups and downs. Some titles even add abilities and increase EXP gains. Speaking of EXP, gone is the level cap of 99 that you see in most standard RPGs. Though the level cap starts at a measly 100 for characters (it varies for items), you can raise it all the way up to 9999 through fusion. 9999. That is just insane. Of course, you don't really need to get that high for any reason; even the strongest boss in the game is beatable with levels around 3000. If it makes you happy to make your characters stronger than they'll ever need to be, you'll absolutely love this game. Actually, if you like this kind of game at all, you'll absolutely love it.

Music/Sound

The music in this game is a mixed bag. Some songs absolutely rock (the final boss's theme) and some are just annoying (the theme that plays during half of the game's cutscenes). Overall, though, the soundtrack is fairly nice. Everything sounds like it should sound. Sword slashes sound like sword slashes, jumps sound like jumps, grunts sound like grunts...all is good. Now, the voice acting is surprisingly good. Usually the American voice acting absolutely sucks compared to the Japanese voice acting in these games, but in this case it's almost as good. Of course, if you so wish, you can change the voices to Japanese if that's the way you swing. Overall, the sound is good.

Length/Replayability

The game is fairly long, about 30 hours for a first playthrough. Now if you want to do the 10 extra battles that this game offers, you can double that. Seriously, the battles get exponentially harder. The first extra battle is actually easier than the final boss, but they get a heck of a lot harder from there on out. There's also quite a few secret characters to unlock, most of which are from Disgaea. My only complaint here is that since there's no New Game+ option, the only unique characters you can use in the main game are Ash and Marona. It would have been nice to be able to use some of the secret characters in the main game.

Final Score: 10/10

Yes, this game is that good. It's apparently not as good as Disgaea (I can't comment on that as I've never played it), but it's still a damn fine game. If you enjoy Strategy RPGs at all, do yourself a huge favor and shell out $20 for Phantom Brave. Believe me, it will be well worth it.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 08/03/05