Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero Review

During a Nintendo Direct in June last year, NIS announced a surprise sequel to 2004's Phantom Brave. Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero sees the return of Marona and Ash, the Chroma and Phantom duo that runs errands for the people of Ivoire. It's been quite a long time since I played the original game but, from what I remember, the original game ended on a definitive note with a sequel seeming unlikely at the time. So, let's see what NIS has cooked up all of these years later.

A few months after the end of the original game, Ash and Marona are sailing to a new land to continue Marona's Chroma duties. On the way, they are ambushed by a group of Phantom pirates named the Shipwreck Fleet. Ash pushes Marona overboard in order to save her, and she later washes up ashore where she meets a young Phantom named Apricot. Apricot hopes to find her father and restore the integrity of her father's crew, the Argento Pirate Crew. Marona and Apricot team up to find Apricot's father, and try to work together to locate the Shipwreck Fleet and rescue Ash.

While you don't need knowledge of the previous game, it'll help with some references made throughout The Lost Hero. As someone who played the original game years ago, even I don't remember all of the details of the plot. It's not a terribly engaging narrative anyhow. It's by no means bad, but it's not winning any awards for its story. It's the fairly typical adventure story where we recruit companions along the way and have a good time in between the fighting. 

Phantom Brave's chapters are mostly broken up into multiple battlefields over a specific area, with a hub to return to between fights. Battles take place over a small battlefield with items scattered across the terrain. From these items is where your units will spawn once the battle has started. Marona has the ability to "Confine" Phantoms (spirits from this world) into the items to give them physical form. There are dozens of classes and even creatures to recruit to Marona's army. How you utilize the various classes will be important to doing well in battles.

As a traditional SRPG, positioning your units according to their strengths and weaknesses is key to success. The interesting thing about Phantom Brave is that only Marona starts the battle on the field. You get to choose what Phantoms you'll summon on the field according to your needs, or based on the buff the item that the Phantom is confined to provides. Phantoms can be summoned from any item on the battlefield, and that includes dropped weapons or items from your own Phantoms. You can strategically position items in certain places for Marona in order for her to summon a Phantom in an ideal location on her next turn. There are multiple ways to tackle every battlefield situation.

The hub world serves multiple functions throughout the game. From here you can do various things like Phantom recruitment, learn new skills, and send out your Phantoms on expeditions. As you progress through the game and recruit specific Phantom classes, more facilities will open up and ones already in use can be upgraded further. It's a decent loop that keeps the downtime between battles from getting too stale, since there's always progression to be made and something to look forward to in the future.

A big issue I ran into during regular gameplay was enemies not pathing correctly. If there were objects in the way, or too many elevations, enemies would simply struggle to move properly. Enemies would move as if they were trying to get around the object, then would suddenly stop almost like they felt they reached their intended destination. At points, enemies would simply get stuck and I could more or less leave them where they were and instead focus on threats that were right in front of me. This made parts of the game unintentionally easy. Some battlefield weapons could also have Phantoms confined to them, which would lead to wiping the field of multiple enemies at once. Difficulty can be a bit on the easy side, but you can change it as you wish.

Now, I'm usually not one to complain too much about a game's performance. I used to happily play co-op Dynasty Warriors on PS2 where you got a maximum of 5 enemies on screen and the entire map was distance fog. However, Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero tested my patience, at least on Nintendo Switch. I can usually excuse action or real-time games with frame rate issues because there are all kinds of things happening on screen at once. However, when it comes to turn-based games with frame rate issues, it’s more difficult to tolerate. Even in Performance mode, the game starts to noticeably lag a few chapters in and the number of enemies per map only grows from there. Forget Graphics mode entirely, even the first few levels start to chug. There’s not a much clearer example of why the Switch 2 is necessary than this game. The Switch is struggling to run a cel-shaded, turn-based RPG. I'm sure if there was more time put into this version, the flaws could possibly have been ironed out. However, as it stands, it's not a great port.

Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero is a solid game, but the Switch performance really detracts from the overall experience. If you have the ability to grab this on another platform, you should do so. This is otherwise a very enjoyable game with a decent amount of depth if a bit lacking in difficulty due to poor enemy pathing. If you're into SRPGs, it's worth a look into if you have the time.