her
directly in the path of oncoming planetary oblivion.
The
real question, though, is by the time she gets there, will she help save a world
that hates her?
That's Phantom Brave's entire setup. If you've
played, seen, or even heard of essentially any Japanese game involving Little
Girl X who has Mysterious Power Y, chances are you can fill in pretty much everything
that happens from there on out, story-wise. Really, the plot, though clever much
of the time, is just there to provide a reason to keep fighting. It seems weird
to find a similarity between this game and Doom 3, but, well, there you
go. It's the same idea: It's nice to have a reason why you're shooting zombies,
but at the end of the day, you don't really need one. Ditto for any genre that
isn't reliant on a story. As the entire idea of a Strategy RPG is to partake in
the battles as opposed to any of the other usual RPG elements, the plot isn't
particularly necessary (though it's still expected to be there).
Under
normal circumstances, this could be considered a bad thing, but when it's done
properly there's absolutely nothing wrong with a little re-treading of the
established stereotypes, provided the rest of the game is fresh enough to carry
the gameplay on its own -- a scenario that, when you're dealing with Nippon Ichi
Software titles (like this one), is very much expected by this point.
Much like their spiritual Western counterpart Blizzard Entertainment, Nippon Ichi
have established a common theme than runs through all their games that their fans
have grown to love. Like Blizzard, they have a sole artist responsible for all
character design and artwork, and instead of reinventing themselves with every
game, generally stick to a nearly identical look. After playing a single NIS title,
it's not a stretch to say that you could pick out every one of their games by
looking at a single screenshot. They all share a near-identical (and thoroughly
Japanese) sense of humor as well, so if this is your first experience with NIS,
you may find their games to be something of an acquired taste, to say the least.
There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of middle ground with Western audiences as
far as these titles go. You either "get it" and wind up immensely enjoying yourself,
or you're left mystified as to why anybody would ever buy these things.
That's a blanket statement: if you like (or hate) one NIS game, then you're likely
to feel the same way about all of them. They all maintain the same feel, and given
their substantial fan base by this point, it's pretty much a given that they're
going to continue to do so. The one, and sometimes only, thing that changes consistently
between their games is the math applied behind the system. For all their surface
similarities, the core battle mechanic will be wildly different from game to game,
which prevents the recycled aesthetics from getting stale.
Half of the
fun of these games is wrapping your head around whatever main combat element the
developers have concocted. Their first PS2s title to reach America, Disgaea:
Hour of Darkness, was actually quite conventional; it was essentially the
same grid/ turn/stat-based system from Final Fantasy Tactics cranked up
to truly insane proportions. This made it easy to swallow for newcomers while
still coming across as warped enough that SRPG vets found it fresh. "Final
Fantasy Tactics on crack" is probably the most-used phrase I've heard to describe
it. It was a surprise hit stateside, catching everyone (particularly its creators)
off guard. Plugs
from the likes of Penny Arcade rocketed the game quite high into the collective
gaming consciousness despite a low initial pressing, which in turn made it quite
rare for a while. To this day it remains fairly sought-after, though additional
releases have eased the demand a bit. Coincidentally, it's also still the best
starting point for NIS games.
Things got a little trickier when La
Pucelle: Tactics landed here. Unlike Disgaea, La Pucelle
was less about raw stat management and more about amassing a gigantic army and
equipping them with custom-made items as a way to keep them powerful. Often, it
wasn't the actual soldiers in your army that were crucial to your war effort,
but the gear they were equipped with. Tack on an initially very confusing system
of fusing items together to create better ones, a required enemy conversion tactic
as the only way to beef up your army, and an ultra-cute plot (even by Japanese
standards), and La Pucelle alienated some of the fans NIS had won over
with Disgaea.
If you were one of those people, you might want
to give Phantom Brave a rental before making a $50 commitment right away.
Brave's combat system is, in some ways, a surprisingly radical
departure from its two sister games'. Centering around the concept of Marona's
ability to "confine" Phantoms within everyday mundane objects, the battles here
are strategically quite removed from anything I've ever come across before. Veterans
should toss out their Disgaea playbook; those strategies will get you killed
in short order here.
The primary thing people will immediately notice
is that there is no grid system. Movement rates and attack ranges are all displayed
via a series of circles overlaid on the map, and characters are free to stand
wherever without being ordered by row and column. It's something that many purists
made a big deal about when it was first announced, but truth be told, I found
it to be a pretty minor change to the overall flow of the game, particularly in
light of how the battles themselves are actually fought.
Here's how it
works. When a battle begins, you'll start with just Marona, the only truly living
member of your party. The Phantoms you've convinced to join you so far will act
as your troops, but since they're incorporeal, you need to provide them with a
physical body to inhabit before they can partake in any fighting. Literally anything
can be used as a body: Rocks, plants, bones, pillars, weeds, swords, starfish,
or whatever other bric-a-brac is lying around on the map can all be used to contain
a Phantom. The trick is that each item will affect the base statistics of whichever
Phantom you chose to confine within it, so a stone will, sensibly enough, offer
a higher defense rating but a lower intelligence rating. This allows for some
tricky maps later in the game where your choices of confinable objects are limited,
and it's the game's way of encouraging a well-rounded army. If you're on a map
full of rocks and all you've got are magic-users, then you're pretty much screwed.
On top of that, confined Phantoms aren't permanent. When they're brought
into play, each Phantom will display a "remove count", which is the number of
turns they can remain within the item they've inhabited. At the end of their remove
count, the Phantom in question is booted from play and the item they had taken
up residence in reverts back to normal. What this means in the most basic sense
is that you can no longer rely on having one or two über-characters to mop up
every enemy on the map. Even the most powerful Phantom isn't going to be able
to do a whole lot if it only has three turns to act.
All this piles up
to something that's actually fairly rare in Strategy RPGs: A genuine requirement
to use strategy! While you'll want to keep your party in tip-top shape via the
dizzying customization options, Brave takes the pretty remarkable step
of removing the emphasis on brute force. With some clever thinking, it's entirely
possible to make it through the game without ever having to replay a map in order
to level up, something hardly any other SRPG can claim.
However,
you might want to take that detour anyway. Playing Brave through in a straight
line is certainly feasible, but it would be a terrible waste given the insane
amount of peripheral content the game has. In addition to between-battle customization,
the game sports a hefty chunk of item management, character creation, and, most
notably, random dungeon generation. Similar to the Item World in Disgaea,
unwanted Phantoms can be used to create randomly-generated dungeons to fight through,
many of which are far longer than anything ever encountered in the game proper.
This is the only way to get some of the best items in the game, and on top of
that, it means you could effectively continue playing the game forever. Seeing
as both characters and items can go from level 1 to level 9,999, there's an awfully
huge amount of content in here should you have the obsessive-compulsiveness to
spend the requisite hours to see it all.
As for what the game offers
up aesthetically, it's standard NIS fare the entire way. Depending on how you
want to look at it, this can be something of a bad thing.
Brave
follows the same "2D on 3D" style used by La Pucelle and Disgaea.
Every character in the game is a hand-drawn sprite superimposed over a 3D battlefield.
For cutscenes in-game, everything switches to a completely 2D layout and the scenes
are acted out from there. It's effectively the same engine NIS has used since
day one. That's fine, but where we run into problems is that they've been using
the same technology to power that engine since day one as well.
Strictly
from a technological perspective, Phantom Brave would be only mildly impressive
looking for a GBA game. For a PS2 title, the visuals are inexcusably poor and
are by far the worst thing about the game. Now, I know it seems like a cheap shot
to bitch about the graphics, particularly on a game that was clearly never intended
to be graphically impressive in the first place, but come on. This is getting
ridiculous. Phantom Brave wouldn't even cut it as a mid-generational Sega
Saturn game, let alone a PS2 title released in the tail-end of the console's lifespan.
As games like Guilty
Gear Isuka have shown, you can achieve some gorgeous 2D graphics on the
PS2, and I'm not even asking for that; I just want to see a basic level of technological
parity between the game I'm playing and the console I'm playing it on.
Now, to be fair, the actual use of the graphical elements themselves within the
game is quite good, which is why I'm not actually going to dock any points for
it. It doesn't hinder the game in any way, and the art style itself is wonderful
and vibrant. The characters are all distinctive looking and well animated, and
generally speaking the game is quite pleasant to look at once you forget that
it isn't 1996 anymore. If only they had quadruple the resolution of every sprite
in the game and maybe added something besides the most basic of textures to the
3D maps, then the game would look superb. Here's hoping the next game gets a serious
overhaul.
Things fare significantly better on the sound front. All the
voices are in English by default, and never once was I groping for an option to
flip them back to Japanese. Surprisingly enough, NIS's games have gotten the star
treatment in terms of English localization, and Brave might be the best
of the bunch. The English voices are uniformly excellent, and now (unlike Disgaea)
the bit characters have far better vocalizations attached. In effect, the English
in the game, both of the vocal and written variety, is essentially so well done
that you never notice it, which is exactly how it should be. That is a tricky
enough thing to accomplish for games that were originally written in English,
nevermind one that has had to go through a lengthy translation process. Good stuff.
One quick caveat - and it comes with a minor spoiler, so skip this paragraph
if you absolutely cannot know anything about this game's secrets. Ready? Alright.
At various points in the hidden dungeons of the game, you stumble across Laharl,
Flonne, and Etna, all of whom had starring roles in Disgaea. These cameos
are a running gag within all NIS games, but the effect is shot dead here by a
glaring oversight. The developers neglected to hire the same English voice actors
to reprise their roles (or, if they did, the actors have completely forgotten
what they were supposed to sound like), so you wind up with a "Hey! It's Laharl!...And
he sounds like crap!" moment, which takes a lot of the fun out of seeing these
characters again. I understand the logic of not paying through the nose for the
same guy to do a few lines of dialogue, but I was really bummed by this. Ah, well.
That out of the way, we've got the music, which is along the same lines
as the voice acting in that it's perfectly matched to the game it's in. Ultimately
it's fairly forgettable, but it makes for great background tunes and fits the
atmosphere of the rest of the game well. Probably the most notable thing about
the soundtrack is that you actually get it on CD for free with the game, which
I found kind of pointless as I have no real intention of ever listening to it
by itself, but then again, I've never really been into that kind of thing so your
mileage may vary. A neat little bonus nonetheless.
Overall:
8/10
With a great translation, a clever
combat system, and an ungodly amount of content to barrel through, Phantom
Brave is essentially exactly what its fans were hoping it was going to be:
A classic Nippon Ichi game. The company has yet to really craft their true magnum
opus, but they're working towards it with each successive game, and this one is
perhaps the best so far. Newcomers might want to track down the slightly more
grounded Disgaea before jumping headlong into Brave, but if you're
a fan of any of the other games, or just looking for an offbeat Strategy RPG you
can really sink your teeth into, definitely give Phantom Brave a whirl.
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