It’s been just over twenty years since the originalPhantom Bravereleased on the PlayStation 2, becoming a cult classic among fans of turn-based strategy games and JRPGs, as well as admirers of the game’s now-iconic developer, Nippon Ichi Software. The game brought a blend of unique and quirky approaches to turn-based combat, as well as a surprisingly bleak and dark story, with themes of death and the afterlife spread across the entire campaign. Cut to now and the game has finally received a full-blown sequel in the form ofPhantom Brave: The Lost Hero, and while the newest installment does succeed in bringing the original game’s formula to the modern era with improvements in quality-of-life features and updated mechanics, it doesn’t manage to make sufficient introductions for new players unfamiliar with the dynamics of an NIS title.
Return to Ivoire
Taking place not too long after the events of the original,The Lost Herotakes a bold stylistic turn for the franchise, honing in on a pirate-themed adventure following the first game’s protagonist, Marona. She is, of course, joined by a lovable cast of recently-deceased ghosts called phantoms, which can take human form for brief periods through Marona’s supernatural “confine” ability. These phantoms serve as the crew of Marona’s pirate ship, as she sets sail to find her lost friend and assist anyone in need of help on the way.
The new installment has jumped from 2D pixel sprites to full 3D chibi-style characters, fully animated attacks and movement during combat (as well as hand-drawn 2D sprites for dialogue sections). These characters are all the exact same kind of adorable and lovable, but are still distinct from one another, making them easy to distinguish in battle. They match well with the small-but-dense battle stages, which are comprised of cute landscapes full of plants and objects that phantoms can confine to.
Cutscenes and dialogue can feel slow at times, and many will likely accept the game’s offer to skip the introduction cutscene for each mission. Those looking for a story, though, will be surprised to find a much lighter tone compared to the first installment, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but does make one yearn for more depth in the plot and character arcs.
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Plundering and Swashbuckling
The combat encounters are straightforward: eliminate the opponents on the other team to win. What makes the game unique (and fun) are the variety of characters you can summon, as well as the new ways in which you can summon them such as two new features in the sequel: the Confriend and Gadget mechanics. Confriend allows a phantom to confine to Marona to create a temporary super-character, capable of taking multiple turns in a row based on the phantom’s level and bond with Marona. Gadgets, meanwhile, serve as high-powered mechanisms found on the map such as cannons, which a phantom can confine to and control adopt the abilities of.
What makes the game unique (and fun) are the variety of characters you can summon, as well as the new ways in which you can summon them
Combat in the game takes a different approach from NIS’s usual grid-based combat, instead opting for a unique radial combat and movement system. Instead of having teams take turns making moves for all of their characters, the game takes theDungeons and Dragonsroute of an individual-character initiative order, as well as heavy use of easy-to-understand areas of effect for attacks and commands. What it doesn’t share with the TTRPG that inspired the smash-hitBaldur’s Gate 3is its freedom in class-based upgrades and proficiencies.
There are literally dozens of different classes, and additional special characters with more evolved storylines and unique moves. The amount of variety inPhantom Brave: The Lost Herois truly staggering, with tons of different moves and objects to utilize in your builds. While there’s a breathtaking amount of variety in these classes, which include Archers, Zombies, Merchants, Chefs and even an “Old Man” class, the actual choice that the player makes with each of these characters is heavily limited to their class’s linear upgrade tree.
These issues are made worse when the game fails to tell you what each class requires to succeed. Only by scouring the help menu in the pause menu can you determine what the actual purpose of each class is, and what their intended equipment and use actually are. This makes experimenting with builds all but impossible (outside of team compositions, which are rarely in need of planning or designing), especially since certain weapons will be rendered completely useless with certain characters, sometimes diminishing their stats in the progress.
A Pirate’s Life
The home base for Marona’s band of misfits, Skullrock Island, serves as a better area to get your bearings and establish more of a strategy in entering fights. There are tons of facilities to unlock and use, which are run by the various character classes that join your crew in a style similar to the recentX-COMgames' facility management mechanics. The shop, run by the merchant character, provides players a place to buy new equipment, as well as sell their goods plundered from battle. Meanwhile, the angler class provides an idle form of resource allocation, going on missions outside of combat to provide a passive income of items to the player.
There are tons of facilities to unlock and use, which are run by the various character classes that join your crew.
There are nods from business management games, idle farmers, and surprisingly, even Animal Crossing. Players can chat to their phantom friends between battles to raise their bond with them, as well as give them gifts to increase the bond even further. Unfortunately, it’s much harder to keep track of your standings among your fellow crewmates, and the interactions provide little-to-no actual effects outside of the ability to perform the Confriend action in battle.
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We’re Gonna Need a Map
Phantom Brave’s weakest link are its interface and tutorials, which are deeply unintuitive and require heavy amounts of reading, researching and grinding to actually achieve comprehension. Upgrading characters is confusing and complicated, requiring a mix of heavy grinding through completed levels and dungeons, as well as using randomly-dropped scrolls, which (irreversibly) provide stat boosts to a character in hyper-specific situations (such as being one of two allied characters on the board).
Phantom Brave’s weakest link are its interface and tutorials, which are deeply unintuitive and require heavy amounts of reading, researching, and grinding to actually achieve comprehension
What makes the grinding more unbearable is the convoluted and complex stat systems, which includes three separate tables of multiple stats for each character that are largely unexplained and hard to decipher. If you’re stuck without a specific weapon for certain characters, they become useless, which is made even more overwhelming when the impossible-to-understand quality and ratings systems for equipment is taken into account. To top it all off, the items you do collect from battle mainly consist of junk, with a gallery of low-value shrubs and plants added to your inventory at the end of an encounter.
Closing Comments:
Phantom Brave is sure to be a fun, but possibly underwhelming, return to the franchise for fans of the original title, as well as of other NIS titles like the Disgaeaseries. For newcomers, however, the game has failed most of its attempts to make gameplay accessible to even well-versed veterans of the turn-based strategy genre. The end result is a niche-interest title that will likely be hit-or-miss with hardcore fans, due to the rough and messy assembly of its multitude of interesting parts.
