Phantom Breaker is a niche market anime fighting game that’s been unavailable in the West for a very long time now. Developer MAGES Inc, who is more well known for their visual novel games have decided that now’s the perfect time to bring Phantom Breaker to the rest of the world and release it on next-gen consoles and Steam.
As fans of anime fighting games, we were chomping at the bit to get our hands on a brand new title but unfortunately, Phantom Breaker Omnia felt like a slightly lacklustre letdown more than anything else. Let’s dive right into why that’s the case.
First and foremost, the story mode. Phantom Breaker Omnia is broken up into two different stories. Phantom Breaker and Phantom Breaker Extra. There’s a lot of story content to get through here with each character’s story spanning 10 battles which are broken up with visual novel cutscenes that are fully voiced in between. This isn’t as polished as say, competing anime fighting game BlazBlue’s story mode but it serves its purpose and does get you interested in finding out just what exactly is going on in the game.
Phantom Breaker Omnia Story
The story of Phantom Breaker Omnia revolves around a mysterious figure known as Phantom. Phantom pits “Duelists” against each other with the promise of granting a wish to the victor. Needless to say that a lot of people enter the fray, each wanting to get their wish granted by Phantom. To get the full story of the game, players will have to slog through each character’s story campaign and listen to or read through all the visual novel scenes. The writing is about as generic as you’d expect from a janky anime-themed fighting game but that’s not really an issue to be honest. The stellar voice acting cast makes up for this since it’s great listening to extremely prolific and seasoned veteran voice actors taking on these character roles and truly bringing them to life.
Gameplay
Moving on to the actual gameplay of Phantom Breaker Omnia, the game’s fighting mechanics have been reworked from the original and a new battle style known as “Omnia” has been added. Players can choose between a Quick style, a Hardstyle and the new Omnia style when selecting their characters and this affects the way they play out in battle.
Unfortunately, this is where problems occur in Phantom Breaker Omnia. At its core, the fighting mechanics of the game are fairly straightforward. Extremely reminiscent of the numerous other fighting games in the genre while still trying to be unique with its own flavour. The problems lie with the fact that the game’s animations are inconsistent and janky. There’s a very noticeable difference in the way certain characters are animated and play out, with some being so much “smoother” to use while others feel rigid and stiff.
The actual attack visuals don’t help matters much with some characters’ attacks looking flat out gorgeous while others look lacklustre. Fin’s ray gun attacks for example look so out of place when compared to Chaos;Head’s Rimi. Speaking of, Steins; Gate’s Makise Kurisu also features in the game and fans of the show will definitely love to play as her in battles. Her attacks are super flashy and this is great.
Controls
Another downside to the game is the fact that reassigning actions to specific buttons on your controller is a bit of a backwards mess. It’s confusing to do this. You’ll have to sink quite a bit of time into remapping buttons to your personal liking if you want to get good at the game and figure out its nuances and finer mechanics. This is further confounded by the 3 different fighting styles being available and how they trigger special attacks and Phantom Breaks. Pulling off Phantom Breaks, however, is thankfully very easy with characters being able to use these special attacks as soon as they have enough of their pre-requisite gauge charged in battle. Players can also cancel animations and go straight into attacks as well as trigger Overdrive and Emergency modes which help with fending off an onslaught of enemy attacks.
The Battles
The battles in Phantom Breaker are still enjoyable despite being janky. You can button bash and most likely succeed at fights but more skilled opponents will easily destroy you if you start repeating the same attack over and over. It’s ridiculously disappointing though that you cannot see your playable character’s action list in the pause menu but rather have to navigate out into the main menu and look at them buried in an obscured tutorial page which cannot be accessed while in battle. Players might as well screenshot these pages and print them out to keep them handy while playing but this is absurd for a modern-day title. Hopefully, a future game patch puts the action list straight into the pause menu because come on, this is 2022, not 1995.
Characters
The character roster is fairly hefty with over 20 characters to choose from. Favourites will quickly be found once you’ve given each character a try (Rimi is great fun to play as!) and there’s a lot of bonus content that players can unlock in the game. The gallery has a tonne of visuals and artworks to unlock as well as all the story CGs used for each character’s individual stories in the story mode. Some of these are a tad fanservicey but the artwork is as gorgeous as expected from MAGES Inc.
The game does not feature any modernisations such as rollback netcode or a far more interactive and in-depth tutorial as seen in titles such as King of Fighters XV, Guilty Gear Strive or BlazBlue Centrafiction. It’s disappointing because there’s so much potential here that’s been squandered but maybe with this release, a future title will one day emerge and be far superior.
The soundtrack in Phantom Breaker Omnia features some adrenaline pumping background music tracks in both their original form and the remixed versions for this release. The voice acting, as previously mentioned, really stands out here with the English and Japanese voice cast both being great.
Conclusion to Phantom Breaker Omnia
Overall, Phantom Breaker Omnia is a rough around the edges anime-themed fighting game with a great voice cast and a mixed bag of great visuals and imperfect janky combat implementation. The game has allegedly been rebalanced and reworked slightly to its Japan only predecessors but it seemingly could have used a lot more development time to really nail this. With all that said though, we still had fun with it and it’s a blast to play the versus mode locally against a friend or sibling.
Reviewed on PS4
Developers: GameLoop Inc., MAGE-X
Publishers: Rocket Panda Games, Limited Run Games, CubeGame (China)
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows
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