Nippon Ichi (NIS) is known for making stories full of comedy and parody, for their marvelous spritework, for their over-the-top skill animations and for making mainly strategy RPGs. Phantom Brave has all of these elements, except for the first: comedy. The story is as dark as the game is colorful.
The colorful and bright world is noticeable right on the title screen, it even has a very soothing background music, making the first couple of hours a complete shock for those who pick up the game without knowing anything about it or simply expecting a Disgaea-like story.
While you won't find much comedy in Phantom Brave's story, the drama is quite believable and wasn't made with the aim of provoking cheap emotions on the player. You'll feel attached to Marona and Ash as they try to solve their inner conflicts: Marona simply wants to live in peace with everyone and Ash is constantly tormented with thoughts of vengeance and if he's being overprotective of Marona. And there's also the other secondary characters, each with their own personal struggles.
One thing is for sure: expect an emotional ride. Not from the story itself, since it's a rather basic (but still nicely done) "ancient sealed evil is going to return to destroy the world and you must stop it" story but from the characters, both main and secondary, antagonistic or not.
With such a nice rooster of characters and a nice story, the gameplay can only also be good, right? Wrong.
NIS used the free roaming system (no square-based movement) of Makai Kingdom and the absurd levels of customization and grinding of Disgaea and then added some unique mechanics to make the game fresh. But these mechanics are very hit-or-miss.
First and foremost, we have the Confinement system. You always start the battle with just Marona and then she has to confine the spirits of your units into whatever objects exist on the map (trees, rocks, flowers, pots, crates, weapons, etc.) and that are in the range of confinement. However, this confinement is temporary: each unit has X turns to act and then disappears, blocking you from confining them again in that battle. These turns vary from 3 to 8, depending on the class or the unique character. Also, you have to be careful with what object you use for confinement for each character as they alter the confined character's stats (rocks, for instance, increase DEF by 130% but reduce INT to 80%).
Another mechanic added to Phantom Brave is the Fusion of characters and weapons. Initially, each character has the level cap of 100 which can be increased by fusing a character into that one. Let's say I fuse a Lv100 Marona with a Lv50 witch. Marona now has the level cap of 150 and, if Marona has the required Mana, learns the skills of the witch. There's no limit to this, you can even fuse your monster units into human units so the latter can learn the monster's skills and passives. However, this whole fusion thing is going to cost you useful characters and the game is really stingy with EXP gain, so fusing is also going to force you into grinding for hours.
Thankfully, you won't really need to use Fusion a whole lot, you can even finish the game with the initial cap of Lv100. Just get some decent weapons. Oh, right. Because you only have one equipment slot for weapons. No armor nor accessories, just weapons.
All in all, my only problem with Phantom Brave is the turn limit for the characters. A problem that made me quit the game more times than I wanted. In retrospect, I should have just used cheats to level the characters and enjoy the story without interruptions.
Oh, and the PSP exclusive content forces you into restarting from level 1. Needless to say, I gave up after the first cutscenes. Maybe I'll try finishing it another day. Or year.
By the way, I forgot to mention this but Phantom Brave is available for the PS2, for the Wii and for the PSP. The PS2 version being the original (with less content) and the PSP version being the most recent port (having more content).
