Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero review

I’ll never forget my first Nippon Ichi tactics game. After seeing my cousin play the original Disgaea, I continued my quest as an avid young hunter of all things weird in gaming and rushed to my local video game emporium. Unfortunately they didn’t have a copy of the more well known NIS game, but I did discover Makai Kingdom – a wonderful Nippon Ichi game in its own right albeit a less accessible one. It took me years to truly discover what a gem of a game this was, but once I did I began trying all the NIS titles I could get my hands on. Phantom Brave always eluded me though, but now I’ve made up for that by devouring its 21 years in the making sequel – Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero.

A direct sequel to the first game, The Lost Hero follows a young Chroma called Marona. Chroma are rare magical beings who can talk to and summon phantoms (dead people) and are generally feared and despised for being different. Marona was able to overcome this for the most part in the first game, after using her powers for good and becoming a hero alongside her phantom friend Ash. This time around though she’s separated from Ash, and flung across the ocean into pirate territory. Joining up a young phantom girl of a once mighty pirate family, Marona helps gather a crew and makes some friends before looking for her buddy. It’s a lovely story to propel you through the battles, with a lot of heart and plenty of colourful characters.

Tactics fans will be more focused on the strategic combat than the narrative though, and in The Lost Hero it’s just as compelling as ever. Instead of featuring the more stereotypical grid, in Phantom Brave you can move characters anywhere in their movement radius, with no squares to conform to. Each battle starts with only Marona on the field, and she’ll need to Confine your ghostly allies into various items strewn across the battlefield to summon them into combat. Depending on the item each ally will receive a stat buff, so for example summoning your warrior into a rock will raise their defence. It sounds a bit quirky, but bringing out your buds in this way becomes second nature in no time.

Once your army of phantoms are summoned it’s time to take down the enemy. Each unit has its own array of skills based on the weapon it has equipped, and these have various ranges, areas of effect and elemental types. To call this the tip of the iceberg though would be beyond an understatement. In true Nippon Ichi fashion your characters are all able to lift and throw each other, enemies and items, be that to get around the battlefield faster or to damage foes by throwing them out of bounds. It’s a bit more fiddly to make work in Phantom Brave because your units can’t be holding a weapon if you want them to do this (except for Marona) but can still be used to cause all sorts of chaos.

Other fun and slightly less mind bending battle mechanics include things like fusing Marona with allies to create one super unit, which allows you to use super special attacks and usually an additional powerful effect (like healing and reviving the entire party). Then there are gadgets, which you can construct on your hub island and use to wreck shop in battle. The depth of the combat Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero is (as returning fans will expect) rather ridiculous, but if that’s your jam then you’ll be grinning from ear to ear.

Before you can beat up evil pirates and save the day in tactical battle, you’ll need to create the units that’ll do it. There are dozens of unit types to choose from in The Lost Hero, from self explanatory archers and mages to bizarre options like shopkeepers and anglers. A lot of these character classes are most useful in the hub world, because a shopkeeper actually opens a shop, the angler will go and fish for loot between each battle, and so on. Levelling these units up will make them somewhat stronger in battle, but for the most part you’ll be doing so to give yourself better facilities to use back home.

Forcing yourself to use units that aren’t great at combat would be annoying if not for my beloved juice bar. This can be used to store a set amount of experience in each battle, which you can then slap onto which ever character you want. By leveling up the juice bar you can increase the amount of XP it gobbles up, and before you know it you’ll be getting all your leveling up powers from this wonderful hangout spot. I cannot understate how helpful a system this is, whether you want to have an evenly balanced team or to just power level someone into a god.

Worryingly, I’ve only scratched the surface of what Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero has to offer in this review. There are custom dungeons, requests which gives you bonus currency and send you on extra battles, titles you can apply to characters and dungeons to really mess with stats, and even the ability to reincarnate units to make them stronger. This is a game you could easily lose days to, although you’ll have to put some effort in to understand all different systems and mechanics.

The biggest issue that Phantom Brave has is absolutely this complexity. Because there are so many wild elements to the game it’s hard to piece them all together (especially if you haven’t played one of the similar tactics games like Disgaea) and you are constantly thrown new mechanics even when you do feel caught up. The other main issue with The Lost Hero is the performance of the game on Switch, which is a little ropey. Even playing in Performance mode the framerate can’t manage a steady 30fps, and although this isn’t too important for a turn based tactics game it’s still rather distracting.

Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero is a game that will either devour your entire life or cause you to run away faster than you’d think your little legs could handle. The complexity even for an NIS game is pretty wild, but once you understand all its weird and wonderful systems you’ll never want to put it down.