Review | Phantom Breaker: Battlegrounds Ultimate – Thirty-Eight Eclectics from the Seventh Gen
Phantom Breaker: Battlegrounds Ultimate (developed by Rocket Panda Games from earlier this year) opens with a gorgeously expressive and stylistic hand-drawn cutscene that alternates between depicting its action through cute, low-fidelity chibi-esque caricatures and expressive, high-fidelity combatant characters. Setting the precedent for what to expect throughout the rest of the game, another cutscene like this won’t appear for another hour and a half – just before the credits roll, cutting off the climax of the story early.
This second – or final – cutscene is itself very different, opting for a comic book style reminiscent of those found in Gravity Rush. Calling Phantom Breaker: Battlegrounds Ultimate (PB:BU from here on) what it is – inconsistent – feels like it undersells the experience that you might have with the game. Why? Because the gameplay (almost) never failed to deliver the exact experience that I wanted it to at any given moment.
PB:BU is a pixel-art, anime-style beat-em-up in the vein of Bladed Fury or Castle Crashers – an apt comparison that I’ll be referring to again later. It is also a cross-platform remake of a game of the same name, without the “Ultimate”, from 2013 on the PS Vita and Xbox 360. Throughout the game, we, the player, progress across each purely linear level by brawling with a plethora of enemies in one of two two-dimensional planes. On my first normal difficulty playthrough, I found that I didn’t see the game-over screen a single time. Enemies could easily be cleared by memorising tutorialised combos and mechanics found in the excessively long in-game manual. Given how derivative and easy my first playthrough felt to play, the presentation was what provided the motivation to see it through until my first credits roll.
PB:BU's art style is constantly vibrant and playful, sometimes even too bright. As a result, it’s one of many aspects of the game that elicits the vibe of an arcade machine, pay-to-play beat-em-up title. The enormous roster of thirty-eight playable characters, the “CONTINUE?” countdown that appears after death, the four-player local multiplayer, and the minimal presence of story all contribute to this feeling. It’s this mood that is the presentation’s biggest success. Each locale is colourful and distinct, and the user interface and format all contribute to a game that replicates the tightness of playing a one-sitting to clear, coin-stealing beat-em-up.
Where the presentation is a drawback is regarding the character designs, which is particularly acute in the early game. The core cast of characters that are playable through most main modes all have interesting and distinguishable designs that clearly identify how it might feel to control the corresponding combatant. The only characters of racial minorities – excluding when the game lets you race-swap Japanese characters like Guilty Gear Strive – are found in the enemies. Instead of holstering Castle Crasher’s nostalgically dated design of seventh-generation games with poo and pee humour, PB:BU goes for the more problematically dated visual design choices of many Japanese games of the same era. The two most problematic character types come from your frequent first opponents: muscular black men or women with distinctly large, pink lips. The adjacent white men, also from the early game, who fall under one the categories of either otaku cliché or a flamboyantly camp middle-aged man don’t fare much better. For the first third of my first playthrough, there was a noticeable othering of and in-universe justified hostility towards anyone who wasn’t a conforming and cute Japanese teenager. After this point, the game pits you up against far more interesting and engaging-to-fight masked bikers, robots, Neon Genesis Evangelion-inspired demons, and vehicles. PB:BU should have done this from the start. The fact that it leads with streotyped “street level toughs” left a bad taste in my mouth.
The other, less sweeping, shortfall of the game is in its story. The quest to save the kidnapped character, “Nagi”, will be led by one of four leads, all of whom stand apart from each other with minor narrative changes and novel personalities. Normally, I’d change the spoken language of the media I interacted with to the original performances, however, the excellent dub cast impressed me when I realised I forgot to change over before the first mission. Therefore, my English-dubbed quest was led by “Mikoto”, who was indelibly voiced by Erica Mendes, notable partly for her roles as Ryuko from Kill la Kill and Bernadetta in Fire Emblem: Three Houses. This quest rolled credits right before what felt like the highly foreshadowed encounter with the – absent – main villain. I may never know what happens to Mikoto, Nagi, and the Underworld. Not that I care. Not that the game cares.
If there’s one thing PB:BU cares about, it’s being fun to play. And in that, it is confidently successful. I know that I previously made the campaign on normal difficulty sound quite mindless, but it’d be remiss for me to deny how riveting killing swarms of demons and robots for ninety minutes was when my damage numbers never dipped below triple digits. On the next higher difficulty, this time playing as Yuzuha, I found that enemies would cleverly use the two-lane system to avoid my attacks and flank me. Furthermore, I also found that this character choice meant that I had to play with a much faster move set and increased ranged attacks in combat. These changes and unique playstyles appear throughout the experience between all thirty-eight characters, half of which cover every available enemy (and boss) type in the game. This is a truly impressive feat that Rocket Panda were right to boast in the trailers. Nagiri (an enormous playable boss fight), a literal truck, and the aforementioned two leads were my personal highlights to play as from this extensive roster.
The one major gripe I initially had about combat departed quickly after playing my first (and only) online cooperative game. Flying enemies tend to egregiously stun-lock our protagonist in the first single-player playthrough. This is something you’ll see mentioned a lot if you browse the Steam reviews. However, watching other players dispatch of these foes quickly with ostentatious arial combos that I never knew existed encouraged me to learn these more skilful techniques as a way to mitigate what I had thought of as the game’s only mechanical flaw until that point.
PB:BU’s impression hauntingly resembles that left by Castle Crashers. Progression is constant with minor RPG elements indicating character growth, the games provide a motley hands-on experiences between co-op and solo play, and the presentation reflects a different time when the Xbox Live Arcade still existed, and the PS Vita still had promise. Some people might pay a pound to experience that at an arcade. Some people might pay a small fortune for retro hardware to relive those days and indulge in nostalgia completely. PB:BU asks for twenty pounds, rough edges not sanded.
I hate to admit that being a product of its time, through all aspects, is the component of PB:BU that stuck with me most and holds it together, bringing me back to the game when the brawling alone couldn’t. At no real point does the immediate, tactile gameplay or its aesthetic presentation falter; thus, it’s the bizarre assortment of other artistic choices that provide the game its flaws and memorable friction. The character designs of early enemies vaguely edge towards giving the game a problematic identity that validates stereotypical caricatures before it comes into its own, more distinct and less profiling style. The consistently tight, frequent, and gratifying linear combat encounters are packaged in an equally epigrammatic time capsule of the seventh generation.
Despite these caveats, all that Phantom Breaker: Battlegrounds Ultimate needed to be enjoyable was not to be perfect or flawless, but to work. That it does, very well.
