Reviewed by Buzz
Release details
Developer: Nippon Ichi Software
Publisher: Nippon Ichi Software
Release date: January 30th, 2025
Available on: Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, and Steam (planned for Spring 2025)
Reviewed on: PS5 Pro, Deluxe edition
It's a combination of surreal and exciting to get to talk about a new Phantom Brave game. After all, it's been almost 21 years to the day since the launch of the original Phantom Brave on the PS2.
Almost immediately, I feel the need to frame this review within the context of Disgaea, Nippon Ichi Software's flagship Strategy RPG series, which is practically infamous for it's insanely high level caps, completely ignoring the fourth wall, and the deep complexity of its mechanics and systems. Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero (PB:TLH) takes measured cues from both Phantom Brave and the Disgaea series to craft a more balanced and streamlined experience that encourages you to enjoy the story and learn the game play before breaking off your power limiters.
If you're just here to glean whether you can jump in without playing the first Phantom Brave, the answer is yes. In fact, I would argue this is one of the most approachable Nippon Ichi Software SRPGs given the inclusion of flexible difficulty settings and extraordinarily helpful tutorials.
If you're just here to glean whether you can jump in without playing the first Phantom Brave, the answer is yes.
PB:TLH follows the story of Marona, a young girl working as a Chroma (think mercenary), whose unique ability allows her to interact with the spirits of the dead who have yet to move on. One such phantom is her longtime compatriot Ash, who died alongside Marona's parents fighting a terrible evil and has vowed to protect her in their place. The plot kicks off with Marona and Ash traveling across the ocean, which is interrupted by the appearance of a powerful masked enemy. Ash uses his abilities to spirit Marona away from the ship, which results in Marona waking up on a desert island.
There she meets Apricot, the phantom of the daughter of the captain of the famed Argento pirate crew. Unfortunately, not only does Apricot have no clue where her father is, but the power balance left in his wake has let various other pirate crews move in and scoop up territories that were under his protection. With Marona acting as Apricot's bridge to the material world, they devise a plan: build up the Argento pirate fleet by bringing islands back under their protection, which will allow them to expand their reach and eventually find both Ash and Apricot's father.
Marona and Apricot sail with their crew of phantoms across an archipelago of various themed islands, including a frozen tundra, a literal desert island ruled by a Cleopatra inspired queen, and even a "Basic Beach". And yes, that is definitely the pun you think it is. The game's overall tone manages to strike a charming balance of being both goofy and heartfelt, almost to the point of offering some somber reflection on life and death. The levity certainly helps considering the majority of the cast is deceased and dealing with their lingering regrets. I couldn't help but smile as my scrawny mage shouted out "Do you even read bro?" as he obliterated an enemy unit.
Each of the islands contains a series of map encounters, and each encounter is often paired with a small story skit before or after the first time you run it. While the plotting of these skits can be somewhat predictable (the well designed character who is getting a lot of screen-time might be the new party member you say?), the character cut-in art and voice acting is all nicely done. I often found myself setting the dialogue progression to auto and just enjoying the hammy cut scenes.
The twist is that unlike most SRPGs, you only have one unit: Marona. However, Marona has the power to confine her phantom allies into objects, temporarily granting them a physical form on the field of battle. Phantoms can only act for a limited number of turns and the objects they are confined to adjusts their stats on the field, which adds a layer of complexity and nuance to each encounter. For example, a boulder might offer a strategic advantage given its location, but the rock's natural proclivity to boost defense instead of intelligence may not make for a great spot to confine your Witch character.
Combat encounters offer exciting skirmishes that make use of creative map designs that emphasize movement and verticality. Foregoing any kind of tile or grid system, your units are instead given a ring around them at the start of their turn that creates a radius of maximum movement in any direction. Rather than slowly selecting a point and watching your unit try to navigate to their destination, you're free to manually move your unit around as much as you need to within their movement ring. Better yet, jumping is tied to a button during movement, and you're given the freedom to attempt to jump up on objects, enemies, and allies as often as needed. It's an incredibly freeing sensation to be able to interact with the environment so viscerally rather than relying on point and click movement and hoping for the best.
Each encounter starts with Marona alone on the field facing an overwhelming number of enemy units, but with conveniently placed objects just ripe for confining nearby. Oftentimes, I found that my first move was to confine some units to help add turns for my team to the turn order bar, and then try to position Marona in interesting ways to get the more tantalizing items within range for confinement on a following turn.
Combat itself is a fairly standard affair on the surface, each unit can move and make a single attack per turn, with attacks coming from a list of skills that cost varying amounts of SP to use or cast. However, within this simplicity lies a range of options for creativity and ingenuity. For example, units can also steal weapons from other units, throw allied units across the map for increased maneuverability, and even possess gadgets, such as cannons or giant fans, to bring them to life and make use of a whole new skill set.
One particular gadget I came to love was a pirate barrel mecha unit that Apricot could deploy on the field. It gained new moves the more often it was piloted, and let's just say, it got piloted a lot.
Encounters often provide a nice balance of strategic combat paired with puzzle solving, often asking you to take into account all elements of the map and do some planning before you dive in. One early example that exemplifies this was a map where most of the enemies were fairly bog standard, except for two zombies that had the invincibility buff. Upon inspecting them, it was obvious the buff was being cast from an old bone that was off on a floating bit of land on one end of the map. The bone would have to be thrown out of bounds to be able to take out the zombies, and yet the approach was open to my interpretation. I could have my units band together and toss someone to the floating island and toss the bone off the map entirely or have a unit possess a giant fan and suck the object toward my larger party and have them deal with it there. Simple but open-ended layouts like this helped make so many of the encounters feel memorable.
After each encounter, you are encouraged to head back to your home base. Just like in the original Phantom Brave, many of your created units pull double-duty by also functioning as interfaces for a variety of facilities, such as merchants offering a shop to buy new equipment or anglers who can salvage randomized items.
The difference in PB:TLH is that everything is much more streamlined and organized. To offer a comparison, in Phantom Brave, adding crucial facilities involved a bit of guess work. You would create a phantom, have to locate them in the sea of phantoms you already summoned, and find out if they offered any additional menu interfaces (which was tricky, because units like the Old Man class did actually offer a unique bonus, it just wasn't apparent based on interacting with them). Even if a Phantom did offer a service, it wasn't always clear how all the pieces fit together. This often necessitated a trip to an online guide that fully explained the complex interactions at play in systems such as titles or fusion.
Whereas in PB:TLH, you can immediately access your active facilities from a centralized menu accessible anywhere on your home base and each new facility provides a detailed tutorial on exactly how they function. You're even encouraged to try making one of every new phantom you unlock to ensure you have access to all the facilities as soon as they become available.
All of this is to say, that elements of the ever-evolving Disgaea series, along with two decades of game development experience, have helped PB:TLH feel approachable while maintaining opportunities for complexity and customization.
For example, the Juice Bar, a facility that has become a staple in recent Disgaea titles, allows you to stockpile a percentage of the experience points earned in battle. By stockpiling the experience points you can not only receive a bonus to the stashed point total, but you can then manually allocate those points to units when back at your home base. This is incredibly handy for leveling up units who are too weak to deploy or who just need to play a little catch-up to your main party.
I mention the Juice Bar because it's emblematic of the approach PB:TLH takes to player engagement. This facility, like so many mechanics, feels like an opportunity to cut out the potential grind and keep the plot progressing forward. At the same time, you're given the option to not use the facility at all and limit experience points to units who participate in battle.
You are offered constant progress in some form at every return to your base, whether it be fusing weapons to upgrade them, powering up a new character class to unlock skills, or upgrading your facilities. All of this fuels the central loop of completing an encounter, heading back to base, using your various facilities, and then heading out to another encounter even more prepared. This kept me engaged to the point where I often just found myself replaying old levels to rack up experience points and bring back random items to try to complete side requests without progressing the main plot for hours at a time.
While that central game play loop exists, I have always considered the Disgaea series and Phantom Brave to actually be an endless spiral. Across these series and returning in PB:TLH is the dungeon mechanic. In the Disgaea series these took the form of "item dungeons," in which you could present an NPC with an item, inside which an entire world would be randomly generated. Your team would crawl through this dungeon, racking up experience points, encountering strange enemies and events, and bring back new items. From there, you could take one of the items spawned from the internal world of the original item, make a new even tougher item world dungeon, and continue on down that spiral, potentially endlessly.
The mechanic is slightly different in PB:TLH, as you are awarded maps to dungeons as you complete encounters and side quests. The procedural and random generation elements are still present, but not to the degree where just anything can create a dungeon. But that spiral shape still exists. As I crawled through the dungeons, often marathon experiences teeming with enemies, I continued to find new maps that would lead to stronger dungeons. I am excited to see how ingenious players exploit this system in the future.
One wholly new mechanic is the "confriend" system, which allows Marona to fuse with one of her phantom allies for a turn. Each of the plot relevant phantoms gets a unique fusion with Marona along with a handful of generic fusions for the different class groupings, such as the physical fighters or magic users. While seemingly gimmicky at first, this can allow you to shift the tide of battle in exciting ways, and as your bond with the unit deepens, so does the potential to rack up multiple turns in a row.
While I found most of the updates to be positive, there is one mechanical update that I could foresee as being polarizing for longtime fans. The major change is that PB:TLH provides experience points to all units deployed to a map regardless of how they contributed to an encounter. For example, Apricot might take out a high level unit and your level 2 Archer will gain a level up on that same turn from the other side of the map. An apt metaphor is the always-on experience share mechanic in more recent Pokemon entries. While I found that this saved on grinding significantly and helped character classes not suited for landing final blows on enemy units stay around the same level as the rest of the team, I could see how some fans would prefer the more specific style of experience allotment.
It would be unforgivable not to mention the excellent soundtrack, especially the memorable home base theme. One slight annoyance in the sound design is the repetition with which characters will say things when you are making decisions in the various shop menus. There is only one line per each action, such as purchasing or canceling, and you will hear them too frequently across your play through ("My powers boiling over!").
While a System Priority Mode allows you to select Graphics or Performance, the mode didn't seem to make a significant difference when played on the PS5 Pro. There was the occasional slowdown, such as when Apricot swung her weapon during an encounter, but overall a stable experience both graphically and mechanically.
If you've ever had the desire to jump into either the Phantom Brave or Disgaea series but were overwhelmed by their inherent complexities, Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero is the best entry point you could ask for. By offering a tightly constructed and carefully executed central game play loop that simultaneously has options to increase or decrease the difficulty to suit your play style, Nippon Ichi Software has confined life into what could well become their new flagship series...that has ships with flags in it....
9/10
Comentários