Phantom Brave Review

Platform: PS2

Once upon a time, the creators of Disgaea decided to fuck their proven grid-based formula in favor of something completely different for their next game. While Nippon Ichi gets points for trying something new, Phantom Brave is a bloody mess. Before I get too far ahead of myself, some background is necessary.

Phantom Brave takes place in the world of Ivoire across a large series of islands and is about a little, green-haired girl named Marona. Don’t expect Yotsubato, though; this is anything but a feel-good, slice-of-life story. With this game, it’s all about death, tragedy, and people being assholes to you. When she was a wee lass, Marona’s parents were something along the lines of ghostbusters and had a bodyguard named Ash. Unfortunately for them, Ash was a shit guard and they all died. In a desperate bid to not go out like a punk, the dad tried to revive Ash but failed, turning Ash into a phantom. Cut to a few years later where Marona essentially works as a mercenary to pay the rent on her island. Having the ability to communicate with and confine ghosts to inanimate objects makes her decent at this, but people aren’t exactly charmed by how she’s basically a necromancer. Thus, the first half of the game has you doing odd jobs for really nice people . . . well, they’re nice until they find out that you’re a freak at which point they don’t give you your due reward and kick your off their property. Watching this is painful and is an interesting attempt to make you genuinely sympathetic toward Marona, but only served to infuriate me. I hate nice guys, and her infinite tolerance for abuse made me foam at the mouth on more than one occasion.

You might think I’m exaggerating when I say everyone in this game is an absolute douche to you. (Un?)fortunately for you, I’m not exaggerating in the least. Clients will refuse to pay you, people will throw rocks at you and chase you out of town . . . hell, one guy even bothers to follow you around and steal credit for jobs you do. I actually thought this could have been pretty interesting, seeing the cruel and merciless world turn this little girl into a heartless killer. Unfortunately, the exact opposite thing happens: through the power of being able to take it like a champ and appealing to everyone’s inner pedophile, Marona eventually turns the populace of Ivoire into kind, civil beings. Aww, how sickeningly trite. A strong plot could have salvaged this game’s score, but Phantom Brave just decides to throw that all away.

Could strong enough gameplay mechanics save this sinking ship of a title from my fury? It certainly could, but it doesn’t. Where Phantom Brave stumbles with its characters and plot, it bites the dust when you actually try playing it. First of all, you yourself can’t fight for shit. Unless you’re particularly fond of bitch-slapping enemies for zero damage, don’t even bother trying. Instead, what you have to do is confine your phantoms to the local landscape at which point they absorb the item’s characteristics and are ready to rumble. Apparently, I’m the only one who thinks that possessing the enemies and having them jump off a cliff would be a good idea. Regardless, I can work with this. What I can’t work with is the strict time limit placed on your summoned characters. After a certain amount of turns, your characters disappear and stay that way for the rest of the battle. This doesn’t come off as an attempt to add depth to the game by forcing you to manage your troops and turns well so much as it appears to be fucking annoying. Alright then, let’s say you haven’t had enough punishment and have created an army of high-level troops to last through the time limits. Realizing your defiance, the game then proceeds to kick your ass. Remember the throwing feature from Disgaea? Well, it’s back, except now your enemies can use it too, and boy do they use it. There are no stage boundaries in Phantom Brave, which means that characters can be thrown off-screen and killed. If this happens to your enemies, the surviving enemies (up to the last one, which can’t be thrown away) gain the monster’s levels. If this happens to one of your guys, you get jack shit. When the enemies aren’t screwing you, though, you have other problems to deal with. For one, the physics in Phantom Brave is completely irrational. Sure, everything is dandy when you’re walking, but God help you if you so much as dare to pick something up. Either gravity’s out of style or steroids are all the rage because when you throw someone, you don’t just throw them. No, you fucking catapult them across the screen and usually out of bounds. See that little indicator that tells you where the object will land? Don’t bother with it. It might tell you where the point of impact is, but you’ll just keep going, and going, and going, and going . . . Alright then, since flying is out of the question, how about walking? No dice. Get too close to a corner and your character will begin to clip and act like it’s having an epileptic fit until either the game decides it’s had enough and ends your turn automatically or you drop off the stage and out of bounds. Lovely, just lovely.

Phantom Brave isn’t a game so much as it is an experience in undeserved frustration. Lacking both an incentive for the player (the plot) and the means to accomplish it with (the gameplay), it’s almost entirely worthless. I say almost because the post-game extras are actually somewhat nice with characters like Laharl, Etna, Flonne, Mid-Boss, Baal, and Pringer X making appearances. Aside from that, though, you have an unpolished, buggy-ass game that seems insistent on torturing you. Don’t bother with this one, folks.

Rating: 1/5