Phantom Brave

[Dracos]

Nippon Ichi.

Japan One.

A company, that through the merits of Disgaea, came to almost national prominance, leaping from virtually unknown.  The expectations placed on their next offering, simply gigantic.

And unfortunately, they did not deliver.

Phantom Brave is the latest of Nippon Ichi's tactical strategy games.  The story of a young brave and overly optimisitic young girl and the phantoms she can see and talk to and the fairy tale story of how she changed the world with her bright and cheery nature.

Truthfully, it's nice to see the fairy tale setup.  I'm a fan of it.  I like it.  It's cheesy, sure, but it's nice to see.  I think though they could've done it better.  The writing overall could be a fair bit tighter, some characters could've gotten a bit more meat on them.  I feel a whole sideplot they used was just delivered weak without reason when it really could've been an awesome minigame or side story, playing the other end of the tale a bit.  They had interesting characters, but took for granted a bit too much the fairy tale like setup, and failed to do any real transitions at points from folks being utter bastards, to suddenly being family, which even if cool kind of came across as week.

Particularly there was a little trouble created by their main plot device for starting it of virtually everyone thinking of the main character as a devil girl, which in context of some of the other characters (Necromancer guy, looking at you) really kind of comes off as unbalanced.  The whole delivery just sort of underwhlemed me.  Particularly when I got to the 'special parts' which all felt heavily tacked on, a sad contrast to the extra storyline and some of the disgaea add ons had and really could've easily been stretched into a nice little 'bonus chapter' had they put some effort behind it.

Basically, the story is okay.  But it doesn't provide the hook in my opinion to really draw you into the experience.  It comes off in the end as flat, instead of encompassing.

The gameplay, on the same hand, also sort of fell short for me.  Some improvements from Disgaea, which were really nice to see and they deserve applause for them, but primarily I feel that they moved on the wrong side of 'really really nifty stuff' to 'too much, tedious to work with'.  To those who like tons of stuff, this is great.  You can sit there for months working on this.  To me, it just felt like too much.  Sure, it was easier to level folks, but having everything working on the same system just became nutsy.  Probably this is more my tastes, never really being a tactical strategy fan, but I could sit there for a half hour just organizing my crew.  The whole interface they put to interact with the stuff could have arguably been streamlined a whole lot better and provided an easier organization of the whole deal.  Basically, I often didn't want to do the intermediary levels between the stuff.  Whether this was simple overflow from too many tact strats in too short a time or just the fact that a lot of the levels felt boring or unintuitive, I'm not entirely sure.

The graphics were...pretty nice.  They delivered the feel of the game very well, even if the battle graphics really would break it (the shrunken to fit on one square for everybody pretty much didn't work for me).  For the story scenes though, they were awesome.

The game is okay, in other words.  But nothing that should be leapt out to buy.  Not their best showing, even with the improvements off of Disgaea.

Dracos