The story started out pretty good with Ash, but once it switched over the "real" main character( Marona ) , everything went down hill. I personally felt sad playing the game and almost had no interest to continue playing it because they keep going out of their way to make you feel bad. Least that's how it seemed to me. You go to a island and save everyone from their troubles and they yell at you for helping them out. Later on the story does a 180 and everyone loves the main character that it gets sickening. It's a drastic change too. One moment they all hate you, next moment they all love you. Laying off the details so I don't spoil things, if you're curious why I'm omitting things.
Sound/Graphics: 6
The sound is pretty good, it's what I expected coming from Disgaea. The music is good, and they have the sound effects down very well in my opinion. The graphics is why the score goes down. The cut scenes are very nice, a nice bring back from La Pucelle tactics where you actually saw you sprite character in the cut scenes instead of pictures like Disgaea. My gripe about this is how characters hold weapons and how they look. That alone is enough to really lower the score. You character picks up a sword that is about 6 feet high, which looks very ugly. Add on the fact that no one really knows how to hold onto a weapon only makes it look worse. All characters hold weapons exactly the same, like a flag pole. The weapon just kinda floats next to the character and points straight up into the air. Seeing a rabbit that's one foot tall holding a 6 foot sword that's just floating next to him is just bad design. In disgaea, each character had a certain way of holding weapons, that's not true here. The way characters hold the weapons in Phantom Brave makes the screen look cluttered and very unappealing.
Game play: 3
This is where things get bad. In La Pucelle Tactics and Disgaea, the games were turn based, that isn't true here. They decided to use a speed rating for turns just like Final Fantasy Tactics. The problem here is that you can have a character so slow that they'll never be able to fight a single turn, or a character so fast the enemy never gets a turn. Like at the start I wanted to make a mage. Everyone else, including enemies, got two turns to move and attack before my mage even got one. It only got worse as the game went on and I could never use the character because they were so slow. The enemy would end up getting so many turns they would kill the character before they even had their first turn. If you decide to be "cheap" about it, you can get all your characters equipped with high speed rating items that make it so the enemy never moves once. That's not much fun at all. That's no sense of fun or challenge when everything comes down to how fast your character is. You're almost forced to only play two classes in the game because they're the fastest, that way you have a chance of winning.
There is also another problem with the game. Characters can now only be out for a certain amount of turns before they vanish and never comeback for the rest of that map. It's normally 2-5 turns for each character, with the better characters having fewer turns normally. This really forces you to just rush the enemy because if you only have 3 turns to attack the enemy, you have to make them count. It just throws tactics out of the window, because you don't have time to sit and wait to lure out enemies when you have 3 turns. If you don't have enough characters made, you can end up losing the map because you didn't kill the enemies fast enough. Say I have 4 characters each with 4 turns each. If that's all you have, it means you have 4 turns to clear out the map before you have no more characters left to summon. To make up for this, you're again forced to make a lot of characters just to make sure you can keep summoning in more once they vanish.
Now for the next issue here. Instead of using a grid type movement system, they decided to throw out this half baked free movement system to players. It's not perfect and there are many flaws in it. Your characters can slip and slide or just fail to get over objects and waste their movement. Which forces you to cancel it and keep going. It takes awhile to get used to it, and it still has flaws in it. I've had it where I told my character to attack a enemy and they would move away from the enemy and attack one of my own characters that happened to be in the way. Very annoying, and it happens a lot.
Overall: 5 (or a 7 if you like the look of the graphics in battle and the free movement system)
While it may seem like I really hate the game, I don't. I just feel that it's better to list off the flaws of the game so a person knows what they're going to be getting. I had fun with the game, but no where near as much fun as I had with La Pucelle Tactics and Disgaea. The graphics is just my opinion, some people like it, some don't. I personally don't like them at all, it just looks ugly (reference to the weapons). The free movement system is nice if they fix all the flaws out of it and continue to make it better. Like how Disgaea had a better grid system then La Pucelle. I expect the next game to have a better free movement system if they plan to use it. I believe the game is worth picking up, but only if you're a fan of the other two games. The game is also much shorter then Disgaea, and fewer things to do after you beat the game. No new game plus either, so that kills the replay factor. I got 200+ hours in Disgaea, and about 30-40 hours in Phantom Brave, and I did all the side quests.
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