When it comes to titles from NIS America, I doubt anyone is going to list Phantom Brave as their favorite all time. To be fair, it’s not a terrible title by any stretch of the imagination: a fairly decent SRPG with cute characters and a whimsical approach to summoning and dismissing troops. However, NIS also publishes Disgaea, which has always done some wild ideas with SRPG elements, as well as Labyrinth of Galleria, which broke my heart back in 2023. Still, Phantom Brave was a fond memory of the PS2 days, and I was at least a bit interested that a sequel was being made nearly two decades later. For Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero, it’s a bit of a homecoming for fans of the franchise, bringing back Marona and her unique abilities but carrying a whole new load of pretty unbearable baggage.

Marona…wake up, Marona…we’ve got money to make on nostalgia…

Taking place just a few months after the events of Phantom Brave, The Lost Hero asks players to grin and bear it as we introduce a new villain and promptly eject half of the reason you’d want to play, Ash. For those who don’t remember (or are new to the game), Ash is a Phantom (ghost) that only Marona can see thanks to her unique magical abilities. Ash is literally with Marona for the entire first game, as he was resurrected purely to watch over her. So to quickly dismiss him, even for plot sake, is a wild swing. Don’t get me wrong, the new Phantom, Apricot, is adorable and interesting in her own right, but it’s still a rug pull. If you’re going to remove Ash within the first five minutes and keep him out for a LONG while, why have him in so many promotional images and screenshots?

Anyways, Marona and Apricot are dealing with The Shipwreck Fleet, a pack of baddies that want to be horrid, you get the idea. In order to go after them, Marona needs to build a team of Phantoms to assist her, and you need to get used to the idea of having a main character whose entire identity is support. Though Marona can deal damage and steal items from mobs during battle (and is actually the best at thieving in the game), her primary job is to Confine Phantoms to inanimate objects (swords, barrels, bushes) to bring them into the fray. Then Marona needs to make sure she is refreshing the Phantoms’ longevity on the battlefield, because they have a finite amount of time to brawl before their spirits naturally dissipate. It’s a novel idea, and also allows you to have a massive roster of Phantoms that aren’t plot centric.

Oliver the rabbit may not have been a permanent party fixture, but he was frigging awesome.

Thanks to the Phantom creator, The Lost Hero allows you to make any number of NPCs to be your summoning squad, though, for the most part, the plot-centric characters you encounter will be the stronger choices. You do need to summon at least one of everything, though, in order to do all of the mini activities that take place outside of the combat. Things like making smoothies, buying equipment and salvaging items for better abilities and buffs mean needing to have a chef or a merchant in your stable even if you never plan on actually using them during fights. This can lead to an overcrowding of choices in the summon menu, even early on, so take some time to familiarize yourself with who and what you want to have and how necessary they are outside of moving the plot forward.

Fighting, once you get the bare essentials down, has some fun elements to it that can make combat interesting. You’ve got your basics at hand: melee fights, spell damage that works better on some than others, items that get thrown, and being able to throw your companions in order to have them be in prime position for the next turn. There’s nothing groundbreaking or revolutionary about how it goes, but the effectiveness of fighting is pleasant and, well, expected. That is to say, I didn’t really have to invest time in a lot of consideration: I picked one or two characters that I really enjoyed from the beginning, made sure to keep power leveling them, and then just let the NPCs pivotal to the storyline drive the rest of the way. It wasn’t exactly a challenge in that department, but it certainly doesn’t need to be.

Plus, after a while, the special attacks and combos from storyline NPCs just became silly.

In fact, for Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero, I was astonished to find out just how easy and self-driving the lowest difficulty was. For the most part, I tend to angle lower for my initial foray into games so that I can better judge the overall quality of things like story and artwork, but also how approachable a title is to someone unfamiliar to the genre. The Lost Hero has one of the grandest seals of approval I can give an SRPG in terms of accessibility without it being completely automated and self-driving. The leniency given to your party right up through chapter three in terms of damage received and dealt is almost laughably low. If you’re genuinely here for just the story, good news: you barely need to pay attention during fights if you ratchet things down.

This, oddly, is in spite of some changes to the gameplay that made The Lost Hero less functional than the original. For example, I used to love throwing enemies off the map in order to get a cheap win back in the PS2 days, because I suck as a strategist. None of that anymore: the map will loop the enemies back around. Fair enough, but its purpose was to allow for speed finishes when necessary. In the same vein, it used to be that equipment would buff any number of stats, but now it seems that you’re limited to just attack and defense, removing the speed buffing EQ. When the purpose of the game is to powerlevel certain characters through repeat map play, being able to augment speed for faster turns was very important, and now that’s gone. The result are tedious, simple battles that are more grindy. Yay?

Oh, no problem, mushroom, I’ll just, I dunno, fly up to where you are? Totally fair.

Interestingly, the story of Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero felt a bit darker and more engaged than the original, which is saying something about a game focused around summoning and communing with the dead. Marona is a sympathetic protagonist who somehow does a fabulous job of never making the story about her. In spite of being central to all the events occurring, she seems to almost Gump her way through the storyline, accidentally connecting with the right folk and managing to piss off the antagonists through pure happenstance that then moves the beats forward. While the complex relationship of Apricot and her father, along with Ash’s eventual return and transformation, are intriguing to behold (not to mention the big-bad twist reveal), Marona gives the air of someone who wandered onto the scene and is enjoying a bag of chips while watching doomsday unfold.

While console players have been griping for months now about performance issues, I was still surprised at the glitchy delivery that The Lost Hero gave on my modest PC. I wasn’t expecting to run at 120fps or anything like that, but I was surprised how often enemies decided to, for example, freeze in midair to prevent me from attacking them, or for the game to simply lock up and refuse to move forward. I thankfully didn’t have any instances where I lost massive chunks of game time, but that’s also because I didn’t feel compelled to invest several hours due to the tremulous stability of my game. Why on Earth would I risk raging at wasting my afternoon when I was getting clear indicators that this wasn’t a welcoming battlefield? Players shouldn’t have to drop sixty dollars and patiently wait for a game to be patched to satisfaction.

It sounds like she’s applauding a toddler for crapping in the toilet and not the salad bowl.

Lastly, please, for the love of all that is holy, use the Japanese voices. I don’t mean to be a snob about this, but Marona’s tone and delivery changes with the inflection of her English voice actress. She shifts from sweet and positive to empty headed and saccharine, and she’s not the only victim here. Mayfair sounds more at home working at a garage than a captain on the high seas. Henna is too whispery instead of coy and assertive. And a lot of the voices tend to blend together: Orange and Apricot sound almost identical, as do Urumi and Rouen. To his credit, Argento has a pretty solid cadence and character in English, so it’s not all bad. But enough of it changes the implications to make this game feel like a band of simpletons instead of anime riff raff.

Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero was made because NIS said a survey of fans demanded these characters return for another installment, so I have to believe that someone is emphatically excited about this title. And there is a lot to see and do: randomly generated maps, tons of equipment to find and buy, customization through skills learned and taught, and generally fun combat that requires little higher brain power. While it’s clearly not my favorite of the genre, it was a cute return to this world, and, when it wasn’t glitchy, it was enjoyable. Still, I recommend grabbing this on console: hopefully stability there will win out over the game’s incessant attempts to crash itself.

Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero is available now on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4/5 and Steam.

Reviewed on PC.

A copy of Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero was provided by the publisher.