Phantom Brave

"Strategy RPG's are about to get another serious kick in the ass!"

Nippon Ichi continues its stellar reputation of making great strategy RPG's with its third game released on American soil. Nippon Ichi has developed another hit with Phantom Brave, which features the stylish 2d graphics and hand drawn sprites from their past games but also improves upon them in every way possible, making them look much better then the other games that NIS has released in America thus far. The game play has been revamped to feature game play experiences that take a mix of Disgaea, and adds a totally new battle system to make the game feel like a completely different experience from any other strategy RPG before.

Story In Phantom Brave you play as a young girl named Marona and she is a very skilled warrior as she can control phantoms. She has a guardian spirit named Ash who fought along side Marona's parents before the trio was killed by a terrible monster. When Ash and Marona's parents died, Ash became a phantom and went back to care for Marona. Marona and Ash continued to live their lives on Phantom Isle, an island they were renting from an old woman named Sienna. To get money Marona became a chroma, which is basically a person who does odd jobs to get money in their world. It is hard for Marona to work though as people are afraid of her thinking she is possessed, but throughout the game she makes friends with people who give her multiple jobs. You meet a lot of interesting characters in this game including villains, rivals and friends but my main beef with the story is that it takes a long time for it to build up and by that time the game is half over. Another problem I had was there was one character that you see throughout the game that is never explained and doesn't really do anything for the plot making you wonder why they put him in the game.

Gameplay: Phantom Brave is one of the only strategy RPG's released that plays without a grid. If you are not familiar with most strategy RPG's then you would like to take note that most strategy RPG's revolve on you playing on a grid with a set amount of blocks you can move and attack on. In Phantom Brave the grid is gone and what you are left with is a vast improvement. When you start playing the game you become familiar with the phantom isle, which is the central hub in the game. On Phantom Isle you control Ash, Marona's phantom guardian and you are able to do many things. You can buy items from your merchants, heal your party with a healer, fuse items together and plenty of other things. There is a mailbox on phantom isle and when you use the action key on it, you can gain access to the mission screen where it basically shows you each world you can play, usually a new island opens up each chapter and you are able to repeat missions from previous chapters.

When you get into battle you must control Marona, with Marona you can move around the battlefield and confine your phantoms to items and have them come into battle with you, but there is a catch. Every phantom you summon can only stay for a pre-determined amount of turns and depending on what you confine them to they may gain or lose stats. When you go to fuse a phantom to an item it will tell you what stats they will gain and lose, such as confining someone to a rock would give them more power but they would lose speed. Deciding which character class goes gets confined with which item can determine if you win or lose the battle. Once you have your phantoms confined you will begin to attack or defend against the other team of opponents. Depending on the speed of your characters shows when they will attack, unlike Disgaea your team does not all attack at once but they attack individually and when you get to attack depends on your speed. For every different class means that they may have different stats and they may fight better with specific weapons (mages use staves, warriors use swords etc) but depending on the weapon they use the different skills they gain. Each weapon has different skills fused to it, but if you fuse two weapons together you can get those skills onto different weapons and if you fuse a weapon to a character you get those skills permanently. The downside of fusing is it costs mana, which you get for defeating foes and beating levels/dungeons, is that its very hard to get since you don't get a lot of it when beating levels. Another downside to fusing items is if you fuse weapons together the weapons become stronger but if you fuse them to yourself the only improvement is you get the skills on the weapon permanently and you are able to go over the level cap of 100, by the level of the weapon. Basically if you fuse yourself with a level 15 weapon you can become level 115, this works up to level 9999. This means you cant just fuse weapons to yourself and become better stat wise, but you gain access to higher levels. Fusing multiple weapons together is key to being a very strong warrior.

There are other features to Phantom Brave also, the battle system as I mentioned before doesn't work like most other RPG's because it does not feature a grid, rather when you go to move your characters around you get a circle and you can move within the circle and attack enemies. The main fault with this is lining up attacks is much harder then it is in other strategy RPG's and you will constantly find yourself re-doing a movement to try to line yourself up with the enemies correctly. This error is sometimes fixed with basics attacks where it will move for you and attack but ranged attacks don't work as well. You don't just have to play the levels in Phantom Brave, Marona can create phantoms, on phantom isle, to be permanently on your team and if you make her create a dungeon monk you can have him create a randomly generated dungeon with many floors with increasing difficulty levels as you move down them. By using these dungeon and other features in the game you can make leveling easy and quick compared to some other games where you must spend countless boring hours fighting the same enemies in the same area over and over again. Overall with the inclusion of features such as the Dungeon Monk, leveling in this game is actually fun and since the game play features a solid experience this game should be fun to play for most gamers that enjoy the genre. If the strategy RPG genre is something your hesitant about, I suggest trying a strategy RPG before thinking about buying one as some people may find them boring, while I however find them seemingly addictive.

Graphics: If you thought when you were buying this game that the graphics where going to be amazing with great backgrounds and amazing 3d character models you are going to be in for a disappointment. The graphics in this game are still superb though with fantastic hand drawn sprites and semi 3d battle fields. The game's camera still does not rotate in the full 3d that I would have preferred to the four-angle system used in the other Nippon Ichi games and games like the original Sims for PC. This being said only being able to rotate the camera around the battlefield and only at four different angles is not a bad thing but sometimes you have a hard time seeing your characters on the field. One big improvement I saw in this game to graphics was the cut scenes, if you ever played Disgaea you would note that all the cut scenes in that game except for a handful were done with the characters art that didn't move and only changed the odd time. In Phantom Brave most of the cut scenes take place on a 2d plain where the characters actually interact with each other and you can see it. This makes the cut scenes much better then the ones in Disgaea.

Sound: If any of you have played the other Nippon Ichi games you would notice that they have amazing music, and this game is no exception. While not exactly on par with Disgaea with over all amazing music some of the songs in the game I prefer over the themes in Disgaea. The voices in this game were all well done except for the occasional character that only shows up once in the game. My main beef though is that Marona's voice actor may want you to beat your face into a wall after you here some of her constant whining that doesn't further then plot at all. Another instance in the game I am not found of is that Ash has a tag line, and tag lines are fine in most games but after you hear him say “You will go no further, for her sake I will not fail,” before almost any major battle gets annoying quick. Despite these two problems I believe the sound in Phantom Brave is superb, having a cast that all sounds good and a soundtrack that is amazing this game has some of the finest sound I have ever heard. Another plus is if you buy the limited edition version of this game, which is the same price as the normal edition you get a mini-soundtrack including 16 songs.

Replay Value: This game has by far one of the highest amount of replay value I have ever experienced in any game. This game is loaded with tons of optional bosses to fight, and these aren't just any random optional bosses that you would experience in other games but in fact they are cameos from other Nippon Ichi games. I am not going to spoil the main ones but I will tell you that it is extremely fun to beat down a whiny, egotistical overlord. These bosses are much stronger then the last boss and take lots of leveling to fight, but leveling in this game is not a chore and its actually fun. In Phantom Brave you can level extremely high, as I mentioned in the game play section you can become level 9999, which would take an extremely long time, but by using dungeons and fusing weapons you can have uber characters in no time and if you are planning beating the hardest optional boss you will be leveling for hours.

Overall Phantom Brave has become one of my favourite games I have played this generation. It may have minor faults in certain categories but it's got some of the best game play and replay value in most of the games I have ever played. The game will keep you hooked until you beat and even after you beat it until you have defeated those optional bosses. If you are into strategy RPG's check this game out, if you have never played a strategy RPG you may want to rent this game or another SRPG to figure out if you like them or not.

Overall score: 8.9/10 (not an average)

Rounded Score: 9/10

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 09/06/05