Phantom Brave

I've finally gotten around to playing Killzone 2 and am making good progress with it, but I want to finish it before I review it, but I'm long overdue for doing a game review and while talking to Chris earlier we discussed Phantom Brave briefly and figured it would be good for a review.

Phantom Brave

Overall:

Phantom Brave is a strategy RPG by Nippon Ichi of Disgaea fame for the PS2 (with a remake on the Wii that I haven't played). You play as the "Chroma" Marona who is a young girl. A Chroma is their way of trying to be cool as mercenary sounds boring and the image doesn't mesh well with a little girl but that's basically what she does, though she takes on more benign missions then your average mercenary. She was born with the power to summon ghosts onto this plane of existence for brief periods of time by confining them to nearby objects. The ghost of her late parent's friend Ash hangs out with her and serves as a main character. The gameplay is a little different from Disgaea in that there aren't tiles you move around on, but your characters have a radius in decimeters (well it's dm, I assumed it was decimeters) for their movement and characters have a speed value for determining who goes when instead of the "your turn/my turn" Disgaea system.

Pros:

Like most Nippon Ichi games there is a fairly deep combat and leveling system at work here with many different classes of humanoid characters or monsters to pick from(+0.75). You have plenty of ways to construct your party though some are obviously better then others. The game also gets a nod for trying a gridless system when they could have easily stuck with what worked(+0.25). While the actual implication of the gridless system had a few problems (many of which were smoothed out in Makai Kingdom) it wasn't bad and I appreciate them changing up a fairly staple concept in strategy RPGs.

While they don't have the item world they have a random dungeon you can explore via the dungeon monk class. I don't think it's quite as polished or enjoyable as it could be as the benefits besides grinding as are somewhat limited. Still, kudos for having it as an option even if it's not as good or useful as Disgaea's Item World(+0.25).

The familiar pretty sprite graphics return to the game and are used well throughout combining some old school with the new(well, at the time new)(+0.50). The cut scenes use the anime cut scenes you see in previous and later Nippon Ichi games and do the job better then just text boxes. The game is mostly voice acted though in parts that can be a negative due to the painfully sugary sweet story and things they say(+0.25).



The combat itself is rather fun and the things you can use as weapons are humorous (fish, rocks, trees, ect.)(+0.50). Each character has different sword and magic proficiencies and the weapons you find or buy give you several different weapon and class combinations that are workable giving you further variation to your team. Being able to pick up allies and enemies as weapons was a nice touch (even if it's not usually very tactically helpful) as well(+0.25). The protection system where certain objects or enemies give protection to other enemies or items (which you can confine to for the bonuses) is an additional layer added to the combat for some more strategic fun(+0.25).

+3.00

Cons:

The story is waaaaay too sugary sweet(-0.50). Other games made by this company are often light hearted, here they just took it too far. In addition the game has a lot of chapters where nothing happens and they could have probably had half as many chapters without losing any important plot points(-0.25). Later on they get lazy and send you back to some of the previous islands you already went to cause they couldn't really think of any new places for you to go to and it probably saved a little bit on development time(-0.25).

Gameplay-wise one of my biggest annoyances was how all of your units except Marona would disappear after several turns of use because the ghosts couldn't stay in our world very long(-0.50). I think it was designed to try to have you make a large group of character besides just your "A" team. Once your guys started disappearing you could summon in some second stringers to finish off the fight. The reason I wasn't fond of this was that it basically required you to grind more to level up the extra guys or force you to try to rush in to take everyone out as fast as you could with your best guys before they were gone(-0.25). Ironically I tend to have a large group of generics in Nippon Ichi games but my team was relatively small here compared to their other games cause I went with the latter strategy.

A smaller gameplay gripe I have with this game is the stealing system and nerfed throw mechanics. To throw someone they have to not be holding a weapon so the usefulness of throwing one of your characters to reach an enemy is lessened(-0.25). You steal by basically trying to pick up an enemy while they are holding an item and if you're successful you pick up that item. Of course to steal you also have to not have a weapon equipped as a successful steal has you using that weapon(-0.25).

Also Ash needs to get some new lines cause he literally says the same damn thing before every boss battle. I can dig a character having a little motto or saying or something, but it just gets obnoxious here(-0.25).

-2.50

Overall Rating:7.50/10