Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds Review

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Reviewed on PlayStation Vita
→ August 21, 2014 I was disappointed almost immediately after I started playing Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds. This freshly localized Japanese beat-’em-up (one of the very first Phantom Breaker appearances in the west) is fun in short bursts, but it's also profoundly imbalanced and excessively button-mashy.
I was surprised by how easily I plowed through enemies and bosses alike; I played the entire campaign on normal difficulty by myself in under two hours, and I didn't die once. So I started again on hard difficulty and, a few stages in, realized that the situation hadn't changed much, especially because I was given access to my buffed-out character from my previous playthrough. Button mashing may not be the most egregious charge to level against a game like this, but the best in the genre -- Double Dragon, Castle Crashers, TMNT, and the like -- are far more strategic, and virtually all of them are more of a challenge.
Battle Grounds’ story is also a letdown. It’s long-winded, confusing, and unimportant. A few stages in, I used my freshly practiced button-mashing skills just to get through dialogue and back into the action. Purists who want to engage with the plot will like that the original (albeit limited) Japanese voice tracks are intact; then again, unless quite a bit is lost in the translation, I can’t imagine this story is worth following in any language.
The characters you have to select from are all nicely designed and animated, but the way they play makes them somewhat indistinguishable from one another. I did enjoy the adventure's various locales, however, which were vividly colored and drenched in an old-school aesthetic we don't see much of these days. Likewise, enemy designs were strange, but fittingly so, and I was impressed by the visual variety of opponents I was pitted against.
When in combat, Phantom Breaker plays like many other beat-'em-ups, but there's a special twist. Typically, beat-'em-ups are side-scrollers with depth-of-field that can be taken advantage of on the fly. That is to say, you're not only going left or right; you're also moving up and down as you traverse city blocks, hallways, and all the rest. However, this can sometimes be confusing; it's sometimes not always clear if you're lined up properly with an enemy, and this can cause some frustration. Battle Grounds does away with this by having you use the Vita's left trigger to jump back and forth between planes. So you can jump into the foreground, and then into the background, and then back into the foreground again, laying waste to your enemies in both fields at your leisure. Your foes can do the same, adding to a dynamic fighting style that sets it apart from many of its contemporaries.

Hit the same button over and over again.

Unfortunately, for as interesting as some of the environments you work your way through are, and for as unique as the aforementioned combat approach is, Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds just isn't very fun. Virtually every enemy you encounter is nothing but fodder. Even the big, hulking mini-bosses don't pose much of a problem, an issue compounded by a leveling system that rapidly overpowers your characters. I actually loved how I could control the growth trajectory of my character, increasing her offensive and defensive prowess and speed, and even fill out a multi-tiered skill tree, but there’s a significant balance issue at the heart of Battle Grounds that made every upgrade in power a downgrade in entertainment value.
Battle Grounds is rounded out by online play options, but there, too, I had issues. Mainly, it’s a virtual dead zone. I ran into one person organically when looking for a partner, but immediately had game-ending connection problems. After soliciting some folks on Twitter, I found another person to play with, and while I got through an entire stage with him, connection issues were as persistent as they were obnoxious. You could play ad-hoc with a friend, though I haven’t been able to test if this will fully mitigate all connection issues.



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