Bravely Phantom
The PS2 generation was a golden age for JRPGs and while people will often bring up titles like Persona 3-4, FFX, Kingdom Hearts and Xenosaga being some of their favorites, it’s a lesser-known fact that NISA was absolutely killing it on that front as well.
Cult classic titles like Ar Tonelico, Mana Khemia, Sakura Wars, Disgaea, just to name a few were published under NISA during the PS2 generation, all of which I remember fondly. Among those, Phantom Brave was a title that I played and enjoyed but did not leave as big of a lasting impression compared to some of the others.
So, it came as quite the surprise when I learned that this game was getting a sequel two decades after the original’s release. The only thing that I can think of is that there’s some really passionate people that wanted to make a sequel, not because they think there’s some great demand for it but because they simply had some great ideas and believed in it enough to make it happen. As such, it piqued my curiosity enough for me to take a look.
Despite it being over 2 decades for me, the game takes place only a short time after the end of the original.
MSRP: $59.99
Price I’d pay: $59.99
Platforms: PC, PS4/5, NSW
Voice Over: JPN/ENG
Length: 30~ Hours and much more if going through the end game content
Having garnered the reputation of a “Legendary Chroma” after saving the world from the forces of evil, Marona and Ash are doing what they do best, helping those in need and encounter a deadly fleet of phantoms. Ash manages to get Marona to safety but the two are unfortunately separated. Having found herself waking up on an unfamiliar island, Marona gets involved with the local Pirates and meets the phantom, Apricot. Together, they strike out to gather the pirates under their banner and find Marona’s lost companion, Ash.
As is often the trend with the NIS developed RPGs, the story and plot presented is rather predictable and uninspired, playing out familiar tropes and going the direction that I expected from the first few chapters. Luckily, the characters are charming and their interactions/growth throughout the story were enjoyable to watch unfold. Apricot was my favorite new character of the bunch as a meek little girl that grows up to be a dependable captain for her pirate crew.
While the story is not really anything to write home about, the cast of characters were just charming enough to make me want to find out what would happen next.
As it’s been entirely too long since the original’s release, I’ll just assume most either haven’t played it or don’t remember it and will avoid making comparisons to the original.
The most interesting hook of Phantom Brave is that all units except for Marona are phantoms and as such, do not have physical bodies. Given that fact, Marona uses her power to confine a phantom into an object to give them physical form. The phantoms are also limited in the number of turns before they’re automatically removed from combat, becoming unable to be summoned again for the duration of that fight.
While Marona can confine as many units as she can deploy at once as long as there are enough items to confine them into, it’s often times smarter to save deploying the more powerful units until you really need them as to avoid a situation where I no longer have any phantoms left after they’ve all been removed due to their turn limits.
The way the items are spread out on the maps also plays a major role in strategy as items often have conditions like buffs/debuffs and the phantoms that are confined into them will carry the conditions with them. Items also often give enemies connected to their line buffs as well so for example, a barrel with an “invincible” condition line buffing a boss will render that enemy and that object immune to all damage. In cases like that, I needed to find creative ways to knock the object out of bounds to destroy it so that I could damage the boss.
At the start of each map, taking stock of all the different types of items I can confine into and the various buffs/debuffs in play was the first step to victory.
Confining into items also gave a chance for me to plunder the item to keep for myself as well, which was important given how powerful some of the items just laying around could be. In fact, in Phantom Brave, using weapons like Swords/Maces/Guns and etc was all fine and dandy but I often found myself using unconventional weapons like a fish or a cactus. While it sounds ridiculous, in this world, every item that could be picked up had its own stat value and skills of its own.
Holding the fish allowed me to use powerful water attacks that made waves to knock enemies around and the cactus let me use a devastating AoE attack that spun the cactus around, spreading its thorns.
The newly added “Confriend” which allows a phantom to merge with Marona for a short time was a great addition and served as a trump card that I could use to turn the tides even in the most dire of circumstances, giving a powerful buff to every phantom on the field along with multiple consecutive turns where I could truly let loose a serious beat down on the enemy.
Confriend was a powerful tool that only got better over time.
The dozens of playable classes/monsters all specialized in different functions and the thief was one of my favorites, which had a much higher chance to plunder any item they were confined into, allowing me a guaranteed plunder on those legendary goodies hidden away on the corner of the map. Some of the classes even opened up brand new facilities to be used, like the chef, who unlocked the Juice Bar, which let me take in all the experience from combat and distribute it to my party as I see fit, improving its effectiveness well past 100% to allow for even more exp gain.
In fact, there are tons of mechanics surrounding the act of getting stronger (too many to list all of in this review) and min-maxing all of them with a bit of creative ingenuity was the most fun I had with the game. I would say that the game benefits from having limited equipment slots compared to Disgaea games and not having to gear out multiple slots for each active party member went a long way in making the process not feel as daunting and more flexible in general.
As is tradition, while the main story does not take too long to get through in the scope of things, the end game is where the real meat of the experience lies as it gave me all the tools I needed to power up my units enough to take on the myriads of challenges and as I am someone who loves to see the numbers go up exponentially, I was in for a good time.
Just to note that while playing the PS5 version, I noticed significant slowdowns in the game while trying to use skills or confine phantoms and it turned out to be an issue with using suspend mode with the game running in the background and just rebooting the game resolved that issue which is a bit of a bother but not a big deal, given the simple workaround. Hopefully they will fix it in an upcoming patch.
As I skipped the most recent Disgaea game, this game really scratched an itch I didn’t know I had.
Given a choice, I’m sure I would pick a different game from NISA’s illustrious PS2 JRPG lineup that I would rather have a sequel of, but all things said, Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero is a great sequel that improves on the original in almost every way, providing a fun, tactically satisfying RPG that I’m very glad made a return.
Fun Tidbit: If I were to choose, it would most likely be Ar Tonelico, the music in that series alone makes it stand out from the rest. Yes, I know it was not developed by NIS, I’m talking about games published by. Gust can surely take some time to make a game that’s not Atelier.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.
