Phantom Brave is another game in developer Nippon Ichi's line of unique strategy RPGs, and their first self-published title. For anyone that has played Nippon Ichi's other games (such as Disgaea and La Pucelle: Tactics), the art direction and presentation of Phantom Brave will be instantly familiar... perhaps a little too familiar at times. Fortunately, both the story and gameplay are quite unique and refreshing, saving the game from becoming a been-there-done-that experience.

In the opening scene one of the main characters, Ash, and two of his companions, Haze and Jazmine, are killed by demons. In Haze's dying breath, he casts a spell in an attempt to keep Ash alive. While it doesn't give him life as such, it keeps him from death, and Ash becomes a phantom. Now, fast forward eight years and Ash, in honour of Haze and Jazmine, has devoted himself to protecting their daughter, Marona, who has the power to speak with phantoms and also to summon them to fight for her. Despite being only thirteen years old, she has a job as a Chroma - the demon hunters of the world she lives in. Like any girl with strange powers, the common people reject her; but she lives in the hope that if she is kind and compassionate, she will be liked. I won't go into the rest in any detail, save to say that you'll always want to keep battling just to see what happens next, though things can move along slowly sometimes with cut scenes where dialogue only continues when the X button is pressed and when battles become harder and take longer to win.

For those unfamiliar with strategy RPGs, they represent a very specific type of game in which you participate in an ongoing string of turn-based battles, played in an isometric view, broken up with story segments and in some cases minor exploration. Phantom Brave changes up the usual conventions of a strategy RPG's battles, though. For example, rather than your party members moving a certain number of steps on a set grid, characters in Phantom Brave are allowed to move anywhere within a circle, sized proportionally to their speed stat. Once in range of an enemy, allies have the common choices of attacking, defending or using items, plus special abilities depending on what character class they belong to (warrior, rogue, mage and so on). While this is a nice change of pace from the usual system and makes the experience more logical, it does loosen up the usually tight and methodical gameplay, where you always know what will happen when your allies are positioned in a certain way. This time around, it can sometimes be difficult knowing exactly where to place your allies because of their relative freedom of movement. Another quirk with the movement in Phantom Brave is the fact that bumping into an enemy can send them off the battlefield, killing them instantly, but this grants a level up bonus to all other enemies. Likewise, an enemy can do the same to one of your own, but your allies do not get the bonus. Why this odd balance conflict was included is hard to discern.

In another unique turn, rather than party members being summoned into battle, they have to be 'confined' from objects in the environment by Marona. She can confine as many times as she likes in a turn, with a maximum of sixteen characters (plus herself) in one battle, and which object Marona confines an ally from affects their stats, too, so if she confines an ally to say, a rock, their power and defence stats go up, while their speed goes down. The opposite effect is achieved with say, a small shrub. Once a character is confined, they can be controlled just like Marona, but after a certain number of turns they disappear from the battlefield and can't be confined for the remainder of the battle. All these factors make sure that a fair amount of strategy becomes involved with battling, although a lot of the strategy takes a backseat to frantic levelling-up in the later portions of the game.

To obtain more party members in the game, they must be created by Marona. As the game progresses, more and more character classes become available and higher starting levels can be chosen (for a fee). Each character can equip only one item at a time, be it a sword, book, tree or anything you find along the way, and they can all be used as weapons. Plus, you can fuse a stronger item to a weaker item to raise its stats and give it new abilities. You can also fuse characters, which isn't really necessary but still useful on certain occasions. In battle, items count as characters, so bringing a character holding an item into battle counts as bringing in two characters. With the sixteen-character maximum in battle, this can become annoying, but thankfully the game can be completed relatively trouble-free with just Marona and four well-trained companions.

While nowhere near as technologically advanced as most current generation games, Phantom Brave still has a lot of style. As with Nippon Ichi's other titles, the environments are in isometric 3D with objects and characters animated in super-deformed anime style 2D. Everything has a definite charm to it, in battle or out. Occasionally, battles can look cluttered with a lot of battlers and objects on screen at once but this is never really a problem. The sound effects in Phantom Brave have largely been recycled from Disgaea and La Pucelle, save for the voice acting, which is thankfully pretty good. The option for Japanese voices is very welcome, too. Phantom Brave's soundtrack doesn't fare as well as the voice acting, not that it's terrible, but it can often become very repetitive in drawn out battles.

Phantom Brave is a game that can definitely be enjoyed for many, many hours. The amount of variety and options in and out of battle will keep you playing far longer than the typical game, while there are enough differences in the combat system to make it feel fresh and new. Any fan of Nippon Ichi's other offerings would do well to check Phantom Brave out, as would anyone interested in the strategy RPG genre.

Reviewed by Kieron Bosveld for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).