Phantom Brave: Nippon Ichi Goes Another Round
After the success of Disgaea and La Pucelle: Tactics, Nippon Ichi have released yet another tactics-based SRPG into the market, and it might make you wonder if they're in danger of flooding their own niche. Except Phantom Brave might be their best and most sophisticated game yet.
We'll start with the things that haven't changed. The graphics are still crap. In a way, the excellent 2-D art the game uses just shows up how poor the graphics in the actual game-play are. There are plenty of games in the same cutesy anime style that do better than this. Obviously graphics aren't as important as gameplay, but there are times, like when you're tossing corpses and trees around, that the blobby visuals really let the gameplay down. But it's a Nippon Ichi game, and if you've played either of its predecessors, you know what you're getting visually: more of exactly the same. The music is nice, rather mournful if a bit repetitive. Voice acting is good enough that really only purists will feel compelled to switch to the original Japanese. Again, plot is not a top priority.
What has changed is aspects of the gameplay. The heroine of this game is a young girl called Marona, orphaned and spurned by society because of her ability to summon phantoms. It is this ability that shapes the gameplay of Phantom Brave: Marona summons phantoms to inhabit objects and fight for her. It's a lot more complicated than it sounds at first. There are many different types of phantoms, and different objects give different stat bonuses. So you want to summon a warrior into something like a bone or a rock that gives bonuses to HP and ATK, whereas a magic user needs INT and RES. Anything you can see on a battlefield can be used to house a phantom, so it's a matter of choosing intelligently.
But it's more complicated than that, too, because each phantom can only stay on the field for a set number of turns. Those you start a battle with may well not be there by the time you get to the end. So you need to ration your phantoms intelligently as well.
Like the previous games, your characters' stats are also largely determined by what weapons they're holding. While anything on the field, including the bodies of the fallen, can be used as a weapon, the weapons you buy and upgrade give bonuses that can turn anyone, even Marona, into a fighter.
This time round, though, there's an added dimension: titles. Just like weapons and abilities, titles have levels, can be upgraded, and stronger titles confer greater benefits. Then you add in the fusionist phantom. The fusionist can meld two things together to give you something pretty mighty. They can fuse items, titles, and characters in any combinations you can come up with. Because each phantom has a limited time on the field, concentrating all your best stuff on one incredibly strong character suddenly isn't such a hot idea. Titles also affect what color your weapon is, oddly.
Combat is still turn-based, but this time based on initiative. Faster characters go first. Sometimes this is going to mean one side has five or six turns in a row before the other gets to do anything. Slower characters may be dead before they get their turns. So it really is worth speeding that mage up. However, it's also going to be worth buffing him up a bit too, because this time enemies can jump, so you can't just stick your weaker characters at the back.
The grid is missing from previous games, which certainly makes the field look better, and movement and attacks are, theoretically, less constrained. Only, without the grid, it's sometimes hard to tell how far you can move or who's in range of an attack, and with characters often congregating together, accidental 'friendly fire' isn't uncommon.
With all these additions, Phantom Brave is certainly tactical. You'll still spend most of your time running through random dungeons power-levelling, though, or you'll get toasted in the main storyline. The game-play changes are interesting and make the game more challenging, and certainly no-one is going to be complaining that it's too easy. Nippon Ichi certainly knows how to design good game-play. It's just disappointing that they've decided to stick with their "retro" look and not clean up the graphics a little to improve the experience.
Overall Rating: 7.7
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