Phantom Brave is a strategy RPG which takes place in the world of Ivoire. Ivoire consists of vast seas and numerous islands; it used to be a peaceful place, but an ancient (and powerful) force is now threatening life in the various lands. The character you control in the game is Marona, a 13 year old orphaned girl. Marona has the ability to communicate with phantoms, an ability that brings a lot of resentment from other people but will help her to head out into the world and solve the problems that are occurring. A phantom known as Ash acts as Marona's guardian; as the game progresses, other phantoms will join your party, each of which have different capabilities. The game features a turn based combat system. During battles, Marona is able to attack enemies by herself, and she can also summon phantoms in her party to help out. To summon phantoms, you will need to confine them to an object on the screen (such as a rock or tree). Once confined to an object, you will then be able to control the phantom in battle, though phantoms only remain controllable for a limited number of turns. The object you confine a phantom to will affect it's abilities; for example, a rock may make a phantom stronger but move slower. By defeating enemies in battle you earn experience points allowing to level up and become more powerful.
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This review contains spoilers
An enjoyable but very flawed game.
-Story and the villains feel extremely rushed? Underbaked? Not sure how to even describe it. It's not BAD, but there's so many plot points that aren't expanded on much, if at all. Walnut's motives past being jealous of Marona's money and spending it on herself are kinda confusing. The whole plotline with Castile, Walnut, and Bamboo Co. is kinda underbaked. There was some good commentary to be had here about big pharma, or some ethical issues with how Bamboo Co. was destroying the Putty's homes, but it just kinda….never gets addressed again. Similar problems with the plotlines of Mocha escaping from the circus. Sprout also just feels like he's just....there until the very end of the game.
-The game does a horrible job explaining it's mechanics past the first tutorial fights. I didn’t figure out how titles actually work until about 3/4 into the game.
-I know it’s silly to say this about a NIS SRPG but the difficulty scaling is so, so bad. Even by NIS standards. Which wouldn’t be an issue normally, but there’s not really a good place to grind like other NIS SPRGS, and randomized dungeons are a huge gamble.
-Some weird inconsistencies. Why can Putty Mages not reorganize specials on the island while normal mages can? Other Putty-versions of classes can do the same island functions that their human counterparts can.
Despite all this though, I don't think it's a bad game. I had a lot of fun once I got a good grasp of the mechanics and building my units.
I loved all the interactions between Ash and Marona. They play off each other really well in both personality and design. A lot of the chapter endings left me smiling. The game has probably some of the best art direction I've seen and I really like Ivoire as a world. It's also a very stark contrast from mostly all of NIS's other big SPRGS, which was nice.
I really enjoyed my time with this game! I can't recommend it though except to already-existing NIS fans or diehard SPRG fans because of the gameplay.