I’ve played and beaten all Nippon Ichi Software (NIS) strategy games for the PlayStation 2 (PS2) with the exception of Soul Nomad, which I have yet to beat due to a certain horrible gameplay feature. Point is, I’m a fan of all these games. Phantom Brave isn’t an exception.

A lot of the NIS staples are there. Hand-drawn sprites, strategy game, high stat possibilities, humor, yadda yadda. What sets Phantom Brave apart from most is that like Makai Kingdom it has no grid, and you move in a free range circle. The size of the radius depends on the character. This doesn’t really work for a variety of reasons. The main one is that the path you often draw for a character to follow won’t work because the character will take the long way around certain obstacles and such and use up too much of their movement to get where you wanted. But it is possible if you just move the character bit by bit during their turn so they don’t make stupid movement choices. This is a big pain in the ass.

There are also many times where the game will glitch it up and your moved character will get stuck and not be able to go back to where they were, so you can’t redo the movement or they’ll fall off the map which makes them randomly teleport somewhere else back on the map. Using this glitch can sometimes help, but it shouldn’t be in the game to begin with. The horrible automatically-calculated movement is by and large the biggest problem with Phantom Brave, so I wanted to get that out of the way.

Also, besides the main character Marona, all your units are phantoms and can only be summoned to the field by picking an item on the field on confining them to it, and then that phantom can fight for a certain number of turns until it’s gone from that battle for good. The kind of item can give bonus stats to a phantom confined there, so this really changes the strategy to a lot of maps, which is nice.

The plot starts off incredibly aggravating but gets good by the end. Marona is an overly-kind little girl who has the power to see and summon phantoms, and everyone hates her for no reason that makes sense simply because she can summon phantoms. And this is bad because… well, it just is. Everyone is a complete asshole to this little girl and because she’s a “mercenary” of sorts, her clients often find out she does it by summoning phantoms and then don’t give her the money for completing the job. Because the money is also important to the player, this is especially frustrating to witness.

Marona is, of course, a complete pushover, much to the disdain of her guardian and other main character, a phantom named Ash. Ash is pretty cool and has to be the voice of reason for when Marona is being a dumb little girl. As you might expect, by the end of the game everyone realizes they’re being stupid and there’s nothing wrong with Marona and everyone loves her, blah blah. You’ve seen it all before. There’s also some evil force or whatever who wants to destroy humanity. Though much of Phantom Brave is stock, that’s not too unfamiliar in a JRPG. At the very least the characters are bright and colorful and the writing and world is charming. Phantom Brave is a much more lighthearted, “cute” game than Disgaea. Sort of like La Pucelle, but less prude and the game attached to it is actually good.

Though I like the game, the story can be painful to follow sometimes because of sometimes illogical character decisions. And the glitchy free-range movement is consistently a problem and half the time you spend in battles will be you resetting your moved character and hoping they’ll do it right next time. It’s such a fucking hassle. This is slightly improved in the PSP and Wii ports, but the problem is still there. A good game, but a step or two shy from being great. Give it a shot if the game looks appealing, though be wary that it can take quite some time to get into.