Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds gets off to a brilliant start, introducing a cast of charming characters with a cutesy aesthetic reminiscent of many modern anime releases. It’s just a shame that this faithfully localised Japanese beat-em-up doesn’t provide nearly enough depth to keep you invested beyond its quirky visual design and shallow combat system. The combat is fun to begin with but quickly devolves into bouts of excessive button-mashing, which is often the most effective way to succeed in each stage. Each character comes with their own selection of attacks, but these don’t feel different enough to impact the gameplay, especially when their special attacks hardly differ at all.
The most defining aspect of Phantom Breaker is the fantastic visual style, which flaunts the second you start up the game. Even the menu options pop with a nostalgic 16-bit flair as you navigate them, pumping your enthusiasm just before you jump into the action. You can select from up to eight unlockable characters, each with their own individual storyline, although the stages you progress through with each character are for the most part identical. This quickly made multiple playthrough’s a bit of a chore, with little benefit beyond levelling up your skills. Each character is adorably designed to accommodate the purposely archaic graphical style, with the sprites displaying a surprising amount of personality as they tear through hordes of repetitious enemies. The soundtrack is absolutely fantastic though, and is a must for anyone with a love for the retro-esque gaming tunes of yesteryear. A menu option that would have allowed me to listen back to my favourite tracks would have been an excellent addition.
The visual style is utilised brilliantly with the sheer variety of locales you adventure through during the underwhelmingly short singleplayer campaign. The faithfully recreated streets of Tokyo’s Akihabara are a particular highlight which sees you fight your way through old school Japanese arcades and suburban streets decorated with the spoils of otaku culture. Enemy designs are also impressive, taking clear inspiration from gaming and anime culture in each and every design. One minute you could be fighting some nerdy degenerate on the streets of Tokyo and the next could see you thrust into the depths of hell to fend of giant missile launching robots.
The premise is completely non-nonsensical, much like the plot that makes little effort to expand upon the back-story of each character. I never once cared for the story but I feel the game doesn’t care if you do, as more attention seems to be on the cutesy personality of each character instead of the underlying narrative. The plot is nothing more than a passenger to the constant action, which fits Phantom Breaker’s identity as a fast paced and frenetic brawler perfectly.
One of Phantom Breaker’s most abundant problems is its lack of difficulty. On normal difficulty I effortlessly ploughed through most of my enemies, only select bosses managed to pose a challenge that required a strategic approach. Otherwise building up and spamming my special ability was enough to overcome almost every obstacle, taking away what could have been an intensely skill based affair. Every time you die or complete a stage the coins and treasures you’ve collected are converted into experience points. These can be used to upgrade your attack, speed and defence or to progress through a fairly simplistic skill-tree that rewards you with new combos and abilities. The obvious flaw with this is, is that you can repeatedly die whilst simultaneously accumulating experience until your character’s level can’t go any higher, making progression feel more like a tedious grind as opposed to being genuinely rewarding.
This doesn’t mean that combat itself isn’t fun, but it fails to convey enough longevity or variety to remain interesting beyond your first playthrough. There are some nifty mechanics that shake up the experience however. The battleground is multi layered, meaning with the press of a shoulder button you can jump between the foreground and background of each stage. Many enemies will use this to their advantage to either take you from behind or flee from danger. This dynamic sets Phantom Breaker apart in some ways, but in others it can make combat quite irritable when an enemy constantly runs circles around the player. This makes them a nuisance to hit, and considering you can only move either left or right, the movement controls don’t always feel suited to fully take advantage of each environment.
A suite of multiplayer modes and options are available to you, but the lack of challenge makes playing through missions with a friend quite arbitrary. In no way does the combat translate well into team-based play, unless you are aiming for a high score in the enjoyable yet repetitive arcade mode. In arcade mode you progress through continuous stages until you are defeated, but unlike the singleplayer, you are unable to upgrade your character after dying. This, to me, made arcade mode a more satisfying and challenging way of playing, and I didn’t have to trudge through the tedium of such a contrived plot.
Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds is a beat ’em’ up with a top notch aesthetic that is ultimately held back by a combat system that is fun at first, but soon descends into nothing more than a repetitive exercise in button mashing. The amount of content on offer here is commendable, with a large number of characters each with their own extensive upgrade system. Unfortunately the mindless and unchallenging combat undermines almost every redeeming quality I just mentioned. If you are a die-hard fan of the genre then you may find this engaging, but beyond the beautiful visuals and occasionally intense combat there is very little I can wholeheartedly recommend here.