Finished Phantom Brave PC Mian Story - there are also additional storylines and NewGame+ sort of but they are all just immensive amounts of grind so maybe I will play every now and then, but not gonna focus solely on that. As for the game - it’s very veeery weird one, even for jRPG crazy standards.
It’s a little modified DS port and it can be seen. While all 2D backgrounds got updated to higher resolutions and they look truly amazing, 3D textures and 2D animated character models only got slightly filtered and they look really poor in high res on PC. Another thing is the story - I generally don’t mind jRPG less serious approach to storylines, but here peroblem lies elsewhere. Story is soo plain, stupid and naive it leaves me speechless. It is stupid and naive even for much lower doujin jRPG standards. It’s on the level of kindergarden naiveness and serves just as an excuse for next maps. I had much more fun playing long random dungeons where there was no story between stages than playing story mode and reading one stupid cliche after another.
Now with bad stuff behind us, let’s get to one thing that saves the game - it’s absolutelly unique game mechanics. Game takes known formula of tactics turn-based jRPG but absolutelly elevates it with loads of unique mechanics. First of all you don’t have a party, you only have your main Chroma character and she can summon “Phantoms” - ghosts that will fight for a while on battle before returning to land of the dead. But you cannot just summon them, you gotta confine them into real-world objects - trees, rocks or even sword you threw on the ground, different objects give different stats modifications, also there are way over a hundred of different phantoms (“jobs”) to unlock, each with unique abilities, there are also various kinds of equipment. Phantoms, equipment and skills all can be separatelly grinded and levelled up, they can be combined, where at cost of destroying phantom/item you boost other one and give it it’s stats, there are unique combination, secret unlockables, hidden titles and probably a lot of stuff I didn’t even found yet. Does it sound complicated? Well it is hella complicated, so if you are looking for easy game with easy to understand mechanics - stay away. But if you are looking for something that will opn one hand require a lot of trial-error or reading through shitload of online guides, but at the other hand will provide you absolutelly unique experience with hundreds if not thousands of strategies you can come up with on your own - then despite all flaws Phantom Brave PC is worth it just for it’s mechanic uniqueness.
Not sure what will be my next game I try to beat - I will now try out Prey, but I am not sure if my old machine will be able to handle it so not sure if I will be able to finish it :>
EDIT: With a little bit of .cfg modification magic I managed to make Prey running at stable 50+ FPS with acceptable 1600x900 res, despite being way below minimum requirement specs :D: So Prey is now officially my next game to beat :D: