While Disgaea has gone from strength to strength in terms of
releases, Phantom Brave has remained fairly dormant aside from a PSP and Japanese
only Wii release since it first arrived on the PS2 back in 2004. With Nippon
Ichi looking to test its franchises in the PC market the game has been given
another lease of life and if anything it’s even more complex and hardcore than
Disgaea.
It follows the story of a 13 year old girl named Marona who
is protected by a phantom named Ash after losing both her parents to an evil
spirit some years before. Marona is a young Chroma – a sort of sword for hire,
and your initial goal is for her to earn enough money to buy the island she
lives on.
The humour and art style is very much in keeping with other Nippon
Ichi games though it is perhaps a little less full on than when Etna appears in
Disgaea. This is a PS2 game at heart and there is little chance of disguising
that. There is a blurring filter and the menus now look lovely and HD but you
are still going to be stretching and scaling the picture with effects to fit modern
displays rather than the game being rebuilt from the ground up. Level textures
look decidedly muddy, Sprites are pixelated and it is hardly a graphical tour
de force.
The interface is also clunky. If you’re not using a controller
there is a quite counter initiative mouse and keyboard system in place. You may
be able to move characters with the mouse but you can’t for instance then use a
scroll wheel to cycle through options. It took a while to get used to. Save
yourself the hassle and just use a controller.
Clunkyiness aside there is a really good game here and the
depth of the thing begins to come to light quite early on. It shares a fair bit
with Disgaea in terms of it being a turn based RPG and in terms of classes and
skills levelling but there are key differences that the game is built around.
The most obvious is the fact that you no longer have the grid system and
instead everything is done with range circles. This really took us some time to
get used to and to be honest it seems an odd design decision that doesn’t
really add anything.
A more significant and important difference is the summoning
system which is the games whole ‘thing’. Instead of lining up characters to
take into battle your game will revolve around Marona summoning phantoms to aid
her. Marona confines phantoms to objects which then come to life for a set
period of time. For instance, if you want a tough fighter then confine them to
a rock to give them strength and defence bonuses. Mages are best confined to
plants as that boosts their magic ability. The options are long, complex and
incredibly deep. The catch is that after a set number of turns the phantom will
turn back into the original object and not be summonable again. This means that
if you aren’t careful you won’t be strong enough to down the enemies and
complete the level.
The range of classes you can summon is huge and then you can
give them all sorts of weapons and objects as well. You can also give phantoms
bonuses by confining them to objects which are receiving environmental bonuses.
There’s the whole being able to pick up and throw things off the map as well
but we suspect your head is already spinning enough.
Overall, Phantom Brave is showing a bit of age in its presentation
and its mechanics in terms of controls are a little clunky. That aside this has
got to be one of the deepest and most rewarding games out there. It’s a massive
level grinding dream which is easy enough to get into but will take hundreds of
hours to master. There is also a stupid amount of secrets in here and if you
had this and Disgaea PC you’ll probably not have time to play anything else in
your lifetime (You get all the PSP and Wii content as well so get ready for the
long haul). Even if a lifetime of grinding doesn’t sound like you it’s well
worth giving this a try as it remains unique and how many games can say that?
Overall 9/10