Phantom Brave PC Reviews

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Good game

If you want to try one of the NIS SRPGs other than Disgaea, either play this or Soul Nomad. Maybe La Pucelle as well, although that's a harder recommend. I actually did not like this game at first. It did not make a good first impression for me, and I dropped it, only to come back to it a few years later. Most of my playtime has since been on the Switch version, which I recommend over this one, same as with every other NIS SRPG. I'll get into some of the problems I had with the game at first later. Phantom Brave is certainly a unique SRPG, even compared to the other NIS games. The game it's most similar to is Makai Kingdom, but it doesn't actually play much like Makai Kingdom other than superficial similarities like both being gridless turn based games. The general gameplay involves Marona summoning phantoms by confining them into objects. The phantoms last a few turns before disappearing, which means Marona is the only player character who doesn't have a turn limit. Phantoms are effectively player units, spread into different classes whose stats are further modified by the object you confine them to. This, combined with the gridless gameplay, leads to a lot of strategic implications the player needs to consider. On top of that, everything can be used as a weapon. This includes the objects you can confine phantoms to, as well as the phantoms themselves if they are unarmed. Nothing stops you from using a crate as a weapon, or grabbing an enemy and using them to hit another enemy. That said... There are downsides to this system. Since every item is usable as a weapon, every character can only have one item equipped. There is no equipable armor in this game, nor are there consumable items. You also sometimes take home a confined item if a phantom runs out of turns, which means you'll have to go through your inventory to occasionally prune out unwanted items before you hit the rather low inventory cap. Phantom Brave did start a few trends that spread to a few other NIS games. For example, all the "out of battle" utility services such as shops and healing are actually done by the same phantoms you can use, and their skills with these services improve as they level. So you might want to actually level up your blacksmith, merchant, fusionist, etc even if you have better units. Phantom Brave is also the first game to feature the Saber Kitty/Slumber cat/Deathsaber monster which inexplicably appears in almost every NIS game after this came out, including the re-release of Disgaea 2. This is a pretty cool game, but there's some issues with it. Every one of the main stats is occasionally used to calculate damage for certain attacks, which sounds neat at first as you can have high defense characters use their defense stat to attack when equipped with rocks. However since the speed stat also dictates how quick your next turn is, having that stat high and using attacks based on that stat is vastly better than trying to raise both speed and another stat to use to attack. There's also the issue in that there's surprisingly no "ranged" weapons in this game, in spite of the fact that the Archer class from Disgaea is here. There's no bow, no gun, and even spells have fairly low range limits compared to other NIS games. There's also the same high level issue every NIS game before Disgaea 5 has, in that damage calculations tend to result in defensive stats not being able to keep up, making high level combat a oneshotfest. Granted you WANT combat in Phantom Brave to be quick due to the turn limit on phantoms, so it's not as big of a deal in this game. Anyway, problems aside, this is a cool game. It's the only non-Disgaea NIS SRPG I'd consider better than some of the Disgaea games. There's a bunch of tinkering mechanics to it such as "titles" which give stat boosts to items, characters and dungeons. There's fusion, which lets you combine 2 characters/items to adjust their stats. Looking forward to getting the sequel on Switch soon.

I've been playing this game on and off for years. I plan on playing it for many more. It's fairly unique (in my eyes) due to the system it uses for making characters (phantoms) and the level of customization you can do is immense. There's also a game after the main game if you haven't gotten enough yet.