Phantom BraveNippon Ichi Software
Anthony: Even though we beat Phantom Brave a while ago, it feels more timely than ever to have a review of it now that a Wii remake is coming out. But I’m not a collection freak, so it’s unlikely I’ll pick that up anytime soon, if ever. I’ll say straight up, we tend to love Nippon Ichi games. Sure, they take formulae, rarely deviate from them, and barely make any attempt to utilize a game’s hardware. But the fact is, they put out addictive games with storylines and characters we generally love. And with so many games these days trying to be ultra-serious and out-badassing each other, I’d much rather see a story about our feeble heroine Marona, than some dude named “Zephyr” doing cartwheels off a gravity-bike, wearing an impossible costume and using a gun-hammer-sword-grenade that can manipulate the space-time continuum. High five, Square-Enix!
And it’s just with that analogy that I wish to heap some praise on Phantom Brave. It had one of the most enjoyable storylines I’ve seen in an RPG in recent times. It was at times sad, at times frustrating, at times happy, at times funny, and really had an excellent knack for bringing the story to its conclusion. While the gameplay wasn’t much to go nuts for, the music, story, and supporting cast made it a very memorable game.
What’s good:
- Oh right, I already said the story. Well as I said, the story is a definite strong point. No, it’s not full of crazy twists, and it won’t try to blow your mind with a million different scenes of characters being stabbed by traitors... but it’s very, very charming, and has many scenes that are well ingrained in my memory for all the right reasons.
- The music by Nippon Ichi’s resident composer Tenpei Sato is fantastic. In fact, it has some of my favorite work to date. The song “Earth’s Step” that plays in some jungle-themed levels is just awesome.
- The variety of things you can do with your characters throughout the game is well appreciated. As with many NIS games, you can take the most basic, cruddy characters in the game and make world-beaters out of them, or you can use them as stepping stones to make universe-beaters if you want. From fusing abilities from random objects onto characters, or stats and abilities onto weapons, to transferring beneficial stat-raising “titles” onto anything and everything... you can really spend a lot of time making your party into exactly what you want them to be.
- I rather liked the Dungeon Monk system of creating random dungeons for you to explore, and also liked it more than say, the Item World in Disgaea or the Dark World of La Pucelle. You get to have a pretty good say over the type of world you’ll see, meaning you can make a clear distinction of whether you’re going in to collect a certain monster, level up, gather mana, or whatever your purpose. I spent a lot of time doing this and had fun in the process.
What’s neutral:
- The grid-less tactical system they put forth got them both praise and revile. The truth is somewhere between the two. On the good side, it makes perfect sense.. why would you need to restrict character movement? Using this, you can carefully line up attacks to do hit-and-runs or slam a group of enemies with a well placed attack without going an inch too far. On the other hand, they pretty much did away with the idea of ranged vs. direct combat, as mages and melee fighters alike will have to get right up in enemies’ faces to do damage early on, until they all get strong enough abilities where they don’t need to be close at all.
- The Confine system got similar reactions, and again the reality is somewhere between the two. You can definitely use strategically timed Confining to keep your long-lasting characters doing work steadily and your short-lasting characters coming in for short bursts of serious damage. But having later monsters that can have as few as two turns, and a system that can favor weaponry over character stats, while fighting enemies that never have to Confine, it can feel like somewhat of a shaft at times.
- I found it strange that characters could hold items that instantly changed their stats, yet holding an item that increases HP still meant they had to be healed that amount at the start of a battle.
What’s bad:
- I hate to put on my reviewer hat here, but the graphics are fairly meh. I don’t like criticizing this aspect since I know it’s not the real focus of the game, but the “this could almost be done on PS1” nature of the graphics is often apparent. It’s not without personality or prettiness, and I certainly don’t need pointless 60-second CG cutscenes, but it’s pretty raw even as NIS games go.
- With all the decisions related to the confine system, no movement map, character development, attacks available, etc... the game has a surprising lack of strategy for what’s described as a strategy RPG. With the lack of varied attack ranges, and with tons of abilities in the game that focus on doing damage to different ranges and areas, the idea of using defensive maneuvers or strategic character placement is nil. Characters can readily climb over whoever and attack whomever at will, so aside from some strategic throwing of objects (making a high defense enemy carry a defense-lowering item perhaps), most battles just come down to finding the shortest route to utter mayhem on the enemy. Fire Emblem, this is not.
- The game shows you an active list of turn order for the next several characters that’s very helpful. However, it’s a bit flawed; because the tossing and picking up of items can alter the Speed stat (higher speed means turns come much faster), sometimes it can give you a very incorrect reading of the turn order. Granted, I’m sure this is complex to program, but it can make an enormous difference in victory or defeat. If I’m holding a godly weapon against stronger enemies and it says I have the next turn, but then suddenly switches to an enemy... well then the enemy steals the weapon and I lose the battle. That leads to a few curse-inducing situations.
That means in the end, Phantom Brave is the kind of game I want to recommend to everyone, but know I have to caveat that. Many folks will not like this game. Graphics are very simple, the storyline is a simple story (told very well, though), and the game barely qualifies as a strategy RPG. So my best question is, have you tried other NIS games? If you like their style of innocuous, silly games with extremely open-ended gameplay, I imagine this will be right up your alley. But if you see “Strategy” all over the box and think, “Oh hey cool, I like games like Fire Emblem”... yee. Be cautious.
Otherwise, sit back, enjoy the story, enjoy the music, and enjoy making your little sprites into whatever kind of demigods you decide to focus them into.
Lauren: I'll keep my thoughts on this one brief, since Anthony did a great job of summing up its pros and cons already. He played it while I observed, so I'll leave the gameplay comments to him.
I really can't compliment Nippon Ichi enough for the personality they put into their games. Their RPGs have been consistently cute, hilarious, and very well localized. Phantom Brave is much more innocent in nature than the diabolical characters of Disgaea and Makai Kingdom, but it has the sort of story and dialogue that just about anyone can enjoy. It's rare that we get emotionally involved in the plot of a game, but we really were glued to the screen during some scenes, hoping that something awful wouldn't happen to our poor main character. It's a beautiful little story, and the dialogue is sure to make you chuckle, at least.
The music deserves yet another special mention. It is truly an excellent score overall. Tenpei Sato is a wonderful composer, and he gave Phantom Brave a very unique feel. The voice actors did a fantastic job as well.
Here's hoping that they do a good job with porting the game over to the Wii. It was a fun and unique RPG experience that deserves to become more well-known.
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