They’ve done it again. NIS comes to us with another great Strategy RPG. But they’ve done a lot of changes since Disgaea and La Pucelle. They let go of the grid-based system to a system offering more “freedom” as they say. Not only that, but they changed their normal story-telling style and went for a more serious story and more “real” characters. Even without all the comedy, Phantom Brave is a very fun game, and here is why.

Story

To put you a bit in context, here’s the story of the game. Marona is a young girl who has the uncanny power to see dead people, ghosts known as phantoms. Her parents, along with a man named Ash, were killed when she was young by evil and strange demons. Ever since his death, Ash became a phantom and helped Marona live through hard times. Now at 13 years old Marona is working as a chroma, which is a warrior who does jobs such as finding lost objects or killing monsters. But because of her power, she is hated by everyone and called “The possessed”, and because of that the people don’t pay her much and insult her all the time. But she doesn’t mind much since she can help people and gather money little by little to buy the island she lives on. Other than helping Marona, Ash is also a bit on a quest to avenge her parent’s deaths, trying to find the demons that killed them and stopping such attacks from the underworld. That’s pretty much the basics of the story. The characters in this game, differently to Disgaea and La Pucelle, take themselves much more seriously than Laharl, Prier, and pretty much everyone else in Disgaea and La Pucelle. There is practically no comedy in the game, the characters are always really serious and it feels like they could actually be humans in real life, while I wouldn’t really be able to imagine someone like Etna or Laharl in real life. So as long as you’re not expecting a wacky story and characters you’ll probably like the story here.

Graphics

The graphical style is similar to Disgaea and La Pucelle, basically a very colorful anime style. The little differences here are in battle and during story segments. In battle, the characters, differently to Disgaea and La Pucelle, are a bit more on the chibi side than before. A bit like someone stepped on them during game development or something. As for the story segments, you see them from the side in the place they are located, a bit like in La Pucelle, but more “life-size”. Again, in battle, there are some cool over-the-top attack animations like there have always been in NIS games, so if you liked seeing them before you’ll still enjoy them here. All-in-all the graphics are quite nice, but they don’t feel exactly as refined as Disgaea’s.

Sound

The music in the game is quite nice. Actually, the game comes with a soundtrack CD is you get the limited edition, so it’s a bit normal that I like the music a bit. Anyways, the music helps a lot with the general feel of the game and fits the story quite well. As for the rest of the sounds, there is a lot of recycling, so you’ll probably hear sounds that seem familiar if you’ve played other NIS games. It’s not 100% recycling, so there are some original sounds too. Also, the game features voice-acting for all the characters you see in cutscenes/story segments, and it’s done quite well. None of the voices are really bad, and most actually fit the characters well, so they did quite a good job here. So there’s not much more to say here. The game sounds nice, has nice voice acting but has some recycling from older games.