A look back at: Phantom Brave

Glad to have finally beat the main campaign of Phantom Brave. A very interesting story-driven tactical RPG, where you can just customize almost everything about not just characters, but items too.

It's so weird, with all the customization options, all the random dungeons you can create and go through, all the mana you can collect to forge and fuse items, all the skills you can learn, all the titles you can gain, and so much more. Perhaps the reason I didn't give this the same score as Soul Nomad may be because in all honesty, the amount of customization drowned out all the story due to loads of level grinding and interesting random dungeons and I forgot where I was going. Oh well. One good thing this game does is allow you to replay story battles, although sometimes you fight different enemies on story stages. Like you're not gonna fight Raphael again on a stage that has him. With that in mind, some of the storyline battles tend to have one-time only items. Combine this with certain phantoms with certain obtain rates as well as tough enemies, and actually getting the items is one of the game's biggest challenges apart from the post-game stuff, which I've decided not to do yet.

Characters, well, it's all centered on Marona, the kind, charming, loving, little Chroma girl who tries to be friendly and positive about everything. Yet she's basically a Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer kind of character, basically nobody likes her because she's considered possessed because of Ash being her guardian. Marona seems like a static character, meanwhile as the game's episodes go by, the rest of the characters start to warm up to her good deeds, one by one. One especially notable side character is Walnut, who actually is Endorph from Soul Nomad, except here he's a huge jerk doing the jobs for the money. Beating him multiple times shows that he himself has it much harder, then he makes an ultimate sacrifice at the end (or so you think since he DOES come back in Soul Nomad) for his sister and her new friend. The Putties are cute little mutes who also play a role in the whole "sealing of the evil demon plot". To be frank, while this plot isn't THAT cliche, I kinda get the feel that despite the warming of the characters, it just seemed to drag. Especially at the end since Sulphur just wouldn't die, not after Sprout slays the demon, not after the demon possesses Sprout and Marona has to fight the cursed knight, not after Sprout commits suicide, and not even after Marona defeats Sulphur a second time. It's just one of those moments where it just keeps going.

But overall I liked this Nippon Ichi title, and I can guarantee there's plenty more where it came from. Pretty addicting.