Phantom Brave the Lost Hero [Review]
Phantom Brave, a tactical RPG that I adored on the PlayStation 2, possessed a promising character roster, engaging gameplay, and a fantastic story that went on to be a cult classic, Now Nis America has released a new Phantom Brave game called The Lost Hero and is once again taking a crack at this wonderful Tactical RPG world. The overall narrative is pretty good, and the inclusion of voice acting is very appreciated. Often games come to America without an English dub and I personally tire of reading and will most of the time stay away from a game if its voice acted and not dubbed. The gameplay has a lot of strategic depth, an interesting map design, and character development, while also allowing players to over level characters and grind as much as you’d like. This is the standard anime style RPG and fans of Nis America or Disgaea should know what they are getting themselves into.
While I like the Phantom Brave the Lost Hero a lot, there are some glaring issues. Unfortunately, this game became very repetitive and boring midway through. The new gameplay system felt restrictive, featuring simplified mechanics compared to the more versatile attribute scaling of past titles by (to my knowledge ) the same dev team. Several softlock bugs were encountered on the Nintendo Switch version requiring me to restart my game. The narrative quality is pretty good, although inferior to the original Phantom Brave, potentially due to nostalgia and modern-day writing tropes. Phantom Brave offers a lot of downloadable content at nearly the price of the game, which is excessive. The season pass is 50$ with individual DLC purchase at 13$
Despite similarities to the Disgaea series, a personal favorite, it was hard for me to stay fully invested. Often I found myself skipping nonsensical dialogue, that often deviated from the actual story or topic at hand. Like many anime games and Japanese games nowadays they seem to forget this is a video game and not a TV show. Some types of dialog are unnecessary. For example we are in the heat of battle and you want to talk about how to bake the perfect pie? Thats not in this game but its a perfect example. That example is from the Sword Art Online Games. The equipment merging and leveling system is convoluted. Phantom Brave Lacks quality-of-life features that are present in other Nis America games, such as skippable animations and combat speed adjustments, which is regrettable. Nevertheless, the game retains a similar atmosphere to the original Phantom Brave.
The user interface is subpar, lacking necessary information. For instance, viewing learnable skills without navigating multiple menus is impractical, I often times needed to look things up online. As stated earlier, I do love this game. It was necessary to point out all of these flaws because unfortunately fans of this series and the Disgea series will be looking for anything negative they can latch on to, to know what they are getting themselves into. Nis America fans are fantastic and super loyal and will always get every game that comes out. They just aren’t fans of surprises. Fans of the original Phantom Brave and the Disgaea series may find this title enjoyable; it is currently available for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Steam platforms.
