If you’re of a certain vintage, you might recall the game Phantom Brave for the PlayStation 2, or the re-release it received on the Wii and PSP later on. I, for one, had definitely HEARD of it. But you see, it was a STRATEGY RPG, so I was deathly afraid of it. Fast forward way more years than I am willing to disclose, and I finally sat down and played the original Phantom Brave via the Switch release. And you know what? It’s actually a really fun and innovative game! That increased my expectations for the sequel.
The original Phantom Brave told the story of a little girl named Marona who can see Phantoms – essentially, ghosts. She has the ability to confine those spirits within physical objects, letting them regain their human form – but only for a short time. This plays into the story, but also the gameplay. Your party is made up of Marona and her team of phantoms, and since they can only be corporeal for a limited time, knowing how and when to dispatch your troops is a huge part of the strategy. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Marona is an orphan who lives on an island with her friend Ash, a phantom who sees it as his duty to protect her. Before the events of the first game, Marona was viewed pretty negatively by the people around her, because of the whole, you know, talking to dead people thing. I mean, I’m a pretty understanding and accepting guy, but I might have at least thrown her a few sideways glances. Anyway, thanks to all the do-gooding that she and Ash did in the first game, Marona is viewed much more positively as this second game begins. Unfortunately, all that good will doesn’t do much to protect her when the Shipwreck Fleet attacks. The Shipwreck Fleet is a bunch of ghost ships and… I really don’t need to explain that, do I? It’s basically in the name.
So Marona finds herself separated from Ash and stranded on an island, where she meets a young Phantom named Apricot. Turns out Apricot is the daughter of a famous pirate who disappeared on a hunt for the Shipwreck Fleet. Marona and Apricot team up to find Ash and Apricot’s dad and put a stop to the Shipwreck Fleet.
Before we get into the gameplay, I want to dwell for a bit longer on the story and the characters. Story scenes are usually presented in a colorful visual novel style, and all these scenes are fully voiced by a team of talented actors. One thing I found pretty cool is the fact that NIS America was able to get the original actors who played Ash and Marona from the first game back to do this one, some twenty years later. The whole presentation feels like a super fun Saturday morning cartoon, and I mean that in the best way. It’s lighthearted, but there is actual HEART to it. There’s just enough mystery to pull you along, and each new chapter brings at least one new and interesting character into the mix.
Still, in a game like this, the combat is king, so let’s get into it. Battles are turn-based and tactical, very similar to the first game, but if you missed that one, I’ll fill you in. When a battle begins, Marona is all by her lonesome. That’s pretty intimidating, considering she’s typically going to be surrounded by a butt-ton of bad guys. Fortunately, there’s always a bunch of inanimate objects around her that she can Confine her Phantoms to. Interestingly, these items often have different stats associated with them – like, a rock might have additional defense, or a mushroom might have extra magic power. It doesn’t ALWAYS make sense, but confining the right Phantom to the right object can give them a needed boost that will help a ton. You can confine as many or as few Phantoms as you want, up to the squad size limit, and Marona is always able to confine more when her turn comes around. Aside from Confining, she can also attack just like any other unit, but her main role is in organizing the troops.
The Lost Hero adds a few new abilities for Marona, as well. Confire allows Marona to confine a Phantom to some sort of large weapon – think a catapult or a cannon, things like that. Essentially, rather than taking their own form, that Phantom then BECOMES that weapon and can trundle around the field as a freaking cannon, shooting at a bunch of bad guys all at once. There’s a decent variety of gadgets that you can Confire your Phantoms to, and it’s fun finding out all the things they can do.
Another new move is Confriend, in which Marona basically has a Phantom confine itself to her, creating a Marona-and-her-friend hybrid that’s super-powered and can act quickly. It’s really useful for getting yourself out of a bind.
Combat itself is grid-free, meaning you have free reign of the map within your movement capacity. You can even jump, which is both fun and irritating, since unfortunately each character only has one line they say every time they jump, and they do say it EVERY time. I can only hear “Up she goes!” so many times before I just need it to stop. But having this amount of freedom in a tactical JRPG is really cool. Your attacks are based largely on the various weapons you can equip. Your Phantoms all belong to different classes, and you can create characters in your home base whenever you want. Basically all the standard classes you’d expect are there – the more standard warrior types, gunners, archers, mages and healers. And a whole bunch of more esoteric ones, too. It’s fun to experiment with all the different types – there’s like 50 of them. But anyway, all that to say, you’ll have access to various abilities based on your weapon, and each ability has its own range and targeting capabilities. Some are strictly aimed at once target, while others will hit anyone in range, including your own party members. The game helpfully points out when you’ve got one of your own people in your sights, so you can typically avoid friendly fire except in the most dire of circumstances.
The sheer amount of freedom you have to both move around and move the camera occasionally cause some problems that are worth mentioning. Specifically, depending on how you have your camera angled when it becomes an enemy’s turn, it’s possible that their attack might hit one of your characters off screen, so that you can’t even tell how much damage it’s done to you. It’s a pretty minor nitpick, all things considered, but one that could have maybe been mitigated by allowing you to control the camera during enemy turns, as well, or at least moving the camera back to a default position at those moments.
Another issue that comes up is attacking inanimate objects. See, for attacks that can only target one enemy at a time, you have to be ABSOLUTELY SURE nothing is between you and that enemy. If a fallen enemy’s dagger is lying on the ground between you, and you haven’t finessed the targeting grid just right, you’ll end up attacking the dagger and wasting your turn. Now, the identity of what you’re targeting does show up in the upper left corner of the screen, it’s true, but it’s easy to accidentally slip off the target you intend and waste a turn, which induced a bit of rage in me on a few occasions.
Those are really my only gripes on the combat side. Honestly, given how big and open the combat feels, the fact that there are really only a couple of issues that bugged me is great. Now, taking a step beyond the combat, let’s talk for a minute about all the stuff you can do outside of battle.
Phantom Brave The Lost Hero looks at first glance to be the most complicated game you’ve ever played. Just looking at the list of facilities on your home base island is enough to make your eyes glaze over. I’m not the biggest micromanager of stats and whatnot, so when I see systems that look as complicated as this game’s, I tend to shy away. But for what it’s worth, I have two things to say about all this stuff: A) it’s actually not quite as complex as it initially seems, and B) even the parts that ARE a bit more complex, you don’t HAVE to engage with it and you’ll still have a great time with the game. Let me get into some examples.
You’ll gain access to the Marina pretty early on, which lets you choose a ship and upgrade it to give you bonuses in combat, like extra experience or more money when you win. Those bonuses are nice, but if you don’t feel like hunting down the items necessary for the upgrade, you can absolutely do without. You also gain the ability to create randomly generated dungeons to battle your way through – it’s a great way to gain experience if you feel like you’re a bit behind, and you can get some cool stuff by doing it, but again, you can entirely skip it if you aren’t feeling it. Same with the Titles – items will come with titles like Generic or Breezy. The title grants that item various perks in different stats. You can use those items and grant titles to your characters, as well, granting them different stat boosts based on the title you choose for them. Or, say it with me, you can skip it if you don’t want to do it. I found it actually super refreshing to have access to so many different systems while at the same time not feeling like I HAD to do anything in particular in order to advance. I played the game on Normal mode and didn’t run into too many difficulties – not to say I never died and had to retry – but there’s also an Easy mode if you’re really only here for the story and battles and aren’t looking to min-max your characters in any particular way.
The game also has a system for dividing experience up that I wish more games would steal. It’s called the Juice Bar, and it works like this. You can go in and set how much of the experience gained in battle goes to the characters and how much of it goes to the juice bar, in terms of percentages. In between battles, you can distribute that spare experience to any character you want, which makes catching new characters you’ve created up to the rest of the team so much easier. You have total control over the division of experience, too, and once again, it’s completely optional if you’d rather not mess with it.
I could go on, but I don’t want to spend an hour getting into the nitty-gritty of all the systems. Suffice to say, there’s a lot of options available to you, but the greatest thing about them is that they’re just that – options. You can pretty much choose how you want to play this game.
I will say, too, that The Lost Hero is significantly easier to play than the original game. I don’t necessarily mean in terms of difficulty, just in terms of ease of use. Everything feels faster and more fluid, and it’s one of those games that makes me eager to get into the next battle. Yeah, even as a huge story nerd, I think I prefer the battles over the story here. Not to say the story isn’t good – I kind of view it as a nice palette cleanser between darker, heavier stories. And the combat is just so innovative and fun that the story feels like a cool bonus that we get to experience along with the real star of the show, the battles.
So, who is this game for? Tactical JRPG fans, that’s a no-brainer. If you’re at all tired of the same old sort of dour and serious political stories that most people think are what tactical RPGs need to be, this is the remedy. It’s lighthearted and goofy and sometimes downright bizarre, and it’s fun the whole time. Now, if you’re into a heavier JRPG story, something with truly complex characters and deep lore and subplots, well, you might find this lacking a bit. That’s not what it’s going for. I described it earlier as Saturday morning cartoon-esque, and I want to reiterate that. It’s a fun adventure with a bunch of lovable characters. That might not be what you’re looking for, and if so, that’s fine. But if you’re into cool tactical combat, then go ahead, skip the story scenes and just play the heck out of this game. Yes, I’m advocating that you go ahead and skip the story if you don’t like it. The game is just about fun.
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