Phantom Brave
Dec. 9th, 2011 12:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroAsh and his parents, working as Chromas (monster hunters), got themselves killed and left behind little sister Morona. Ash was left behind as a phantom to watch over her, but her ability to interact with phantoms got her branded “The Possessed” and shunned. Our story picks up eight years later, when 13-year-old Morona is working as a chroma to support herself, and she and Ash start running into the same demons that started this mess.
It’s a Nippon Ichi game. It’s cute and horrifying and heart-wrenching and silly and very, very Japanese.
Apparently trying to break out of the Disgaea mold, the developers came up with a lot of new quirks to the gaming system. Most of them didn’t work very well, honestly.
The story is heavily narrated and a lot is told in voiceover rather than internal monologue. It’s also broken into four chapters and further into twenty episodes, with 3-6 battles each. This should mean you progress through the story very quickly, but it also means you end up learning the random dungeon system very early on, because you don’t have a lot of maps available to grind on. Like other games, you can create new characters pretty much at will, and you unlock new types of characters by defeating enough of that kind of enemy.
Except for Morona, the characters are all “phantoms” and cannot participate in battle unless “confined” to an object in the stage, usually a piece of scenery like a rock or tree. (These items are all also equipable, and you can confine characters into the weapons you bring into stages, too.) Each item has different effects on the character’s stats. This seems like a degree of flexibility and possibly a tactical challenge/advantage, but it mostly just slows battles down because you need to start every battle by positioning Morona and optimally confining the rest of your team. (A lot of the stages have puzzles based around this, where the items that would be convenient to use are disabled or disadvantaged some was, like being unable to move or equip items.) Oh, and they each have a turn limit they can stick around for, so if you don’t end battles fast enough (and some of the battlefields are very spread out) you may not have enough party members to finish it.
The no-grid movement range is wrecked by the problem of bouncy or slippery floors, and the ease of falling (or getting knocked) off the edge of the stage. There’s a “No O.B.” effect that you occasionally have the chance to confine your characters in items with, but more likely it’s only pointing at the enemies when you start the stage and protects them for slipping off edges.
The inventory system is very troublesome—each character can only equip one item, which affects all of their stats and contains most of their abilities. The items each mana and XP separate from your characters and need to be leveled up via grinding and at blacksmiths, and combined by fusionists to increase their level caps and add new abilities. They’re practically characters themselves, and in fact, they count as characters towards the 50-phantom limit on your active roster. So you effectively have a 25-character limit if you want everyone to have equipment, less so you can buy/steal/win fusion fodder.
Along those lines, the equipment system and the lift/toss system were merged, so lifting something is the same as equipping it, and you can only have one item equipped. Plus, some attacks cause you to automatically throw the item you’re using, disarming the character and possibly handing that weapon to the enemy to use.
Corpses remain when characters are knocked out, and if they take more damage, they get semi-permanently removed—rather than just being able to pay the healer to revive them, you need to sacrifice an item (of your very finite stock) to bring them back to a useable form. (Though you can pick them up and use them as equipment, which gives you all access to all of their abilities and stat boosts according to their stats. This is great except when an enemy picks up the corpse of your strongest character.)
I will say, the fact that any item can be a weapon is kinda cool, and they put a lot of effort into coming up with different special moves that come equipped on rocks, trees, cacti, pots, fish, bones, skulls, phonographs…I actually beat the game with Morona equipped with a high-level water pitcher!
Ultimately, though, even the story is disappointing. They set up a plotline where Morona makes a friend named Castille, a bedridden girl whose parents work tirelessly to pay for her medicine. Morona is also set up as trying to protect the Putties, intelligent but mischievous forest creatures. At one point, Bamboo Company tries to build a new medicine plant on the island the Putties live on, and Morona decides straightforwardly to protect the Putties. I thought this was going to become part of a growing-up story when Bamboo Company stopped making Castille’s medicine or raised the price much higher, but no, that was pretty much ignored. Similarly, it looks like you’ll be in for a big plot twist when Chapter 4 / Episode 18 starts and it looks like you’re going into the final battle. There’s no twist—the next three episodes are all really short and they just all lead up to the final battle (with the standard NIS “everyone you ever fought joins in behind you because they love you now” montage).
Overall: It’s got a lot of tactical elements and attempts at innovation that Makai Kingdom cleaned up and made fun to play. Play that instead.
It’s a Nippon Ichi game. It’s cute and horrifying and heart-wrenching and silly and very, very Japanese.
Apparently trying to break out of the Disgaea mold, the developers came up with a lot of new quirks to the gaming system. Most of them didn’t work very well, honestly.
The story is heavily narrated and a lot is told in voiceover rather than internal monologue. It’s also broken into four chapters and further into twenty episodes, with 3-6 battles each. This should mean you progress through the story very quickly, but it also means you end up learning the random dungeon system very early on, because you don’t have a lot of maps available to grind on. Like other games, you can create new characters pretty much at will, and you unlock new types of characters by defeating enough of that kind of enemy.
Except for Morona, the characters are all “phantoms” and cannot participate in battle unless “confined” to an object in the stage, usually a piece of scenery like a rock or tree. (These items are all also equipable, and you can confine characters into the weapons you bring into stages, too.) Each item has different effects on the character’s stats. This seems like a degree of flexibility and possibly a tactical challenge/advantage, but it mostly just slows battles down because you need to start every battle by positioning Morona and optimally confining the rest of your team. (A lot of the stages have puzzles based around this, where the items that would be convenient to use are disabled or disadvantaged some was, like being unable to move or equip items.) Oh, and they each have a turn limit they can stick around for, so if you don’t end battles fast enough (and some of the battlefields are very spread out) you may not have enough party members to finish it.
The no-grid movement range is wrecked by the problem of bouncy or slippery floors, and the ease of falling (or getting knocked) off the edge of the stage. There’s a “No O.B.” effect that you occasionally have the chance to confine your characters in items with, but more likely it’s only pointing at the enemies when you start the stage and protects them for slipping off edges.
The inventory system is very troublesome—each character can only equip one item, which affects all of their stats and contains most of their abilities. The items each mana and XP separate from your characters and need to be leveled up via grinding and at blacksmiths, and combined by fusionists to increase their level caps and add new abilities. They’re practically characters themselves, and in fact, they count as characters towards the 50-phantom limit on your active roster. So you effectively have a 25-character limit if you want everyone to have equipment, less so you can buy/steal/win fusion fodder.
Along those lines, the equipment system and the lift/toss system were merged, so lifting something is the same as equipping it, and you can only have one item equipped. Plus, some attacks cause you to automatically throw the item you’re using, disarming the character and possibly handing that weapon to the enemy to use.
Corpses remain when characters are knocked out, and if they take more damage, they get semi-permanently removed—rather than just being able to pay the healer to revive them, you need to sacrifice an item (of your very finite stock) to bring them back to a useable form. (Though you can pick them up and use them as equipment, which gives you all access to all of their abilities and stat boosts according to their stats. This is great except when an enemy picks up the corpse of your strongest character.)
I will say, the fact that any item can be a weapon is kinda cool, and they put a lot of effort into coming up with different special moves that come equipped on rocks, trees, cacti, pots, fish, bones, skulls, phonographs…I actually beat the game with Morona equipped with a high-level water pitcher!
Ultimately, though, even the story is disappointing. They set up a plotline where Morona makes a friend named Castille, a bedridden girl whose parents work tirelessly to pay for her medicine. Morona is also set up as trying to protect the Putties, intelligent but mischievous forest creatures. At one point, Bamboo Company tries to build a new medicine plant on the island the Putties live on, and Morona decides straightforwardly to protect the Putties. I thought this was going to become part of a growing-up story when Bamboo Company stopped making Castille’s medicine or raised the price much higher, but no, that was pretty much ignored. Similarly, it looks like you’ll be in for a big plot twist when Chapter 4 / Episode 18 starts and it looks like you’re going into the final battle. There’s no twist—the next three episodes are all really short and they just all lead up to the final battle (with the standard NIS “everyone you ever fought joins in behind you because they love you now” montage).
Overall: It’s got a lot of tactical elements and attempts at innovation that Makai Kingdom cleaned up and made fun to play. Play that instead.
