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Anime Navigator.net :: The Main Deck :: Games :: The Beauty That Is Phantom Dust

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Topic: The Beauty That Is Phantom Dust (Read 288 times)

EvaXenoPhon
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The Beauty That Is Phantom Dust
« Thread Started on Mar 27, 2005, 4:31pm »

If anyone owns a X-Box, can sit through small bouts of spotty English dubbing, is a fan of strategy card games like Magic: The Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh, and has a disposable income of about $20--check this game out!

The style and feel is very much like an interactive anime, almost Trigun-esque--minus the humour--mixed with a bit of dark fantasy, comparatively speaking. Think of a more depressing post-apocalyptic world of Trigun and insert a completely unfunny, stoic, but far less whiney Vash--the main character is a mute, so he can't whine! ^^

The game's concept is based around a world mostly devoid of people and all life in general. If any people did survive, they now live underground to hide from the dusty air on the surface. The dust is a funny thing, it gives a human the ability to create force and matter with just a thought. However, it's a double edged sword, for the dust takes your memories in exchange for your powers. Only a select few can properly use the dust, and can handle the ill effects of the dust for about 15 minutes. These are the scouts that go off into the desolate wasteland on different courier missions for the people below.

Later on some stuff happens and the dust doesn't flow as freely as it did before. So you have to bring your own dust in containers called Arsenals. The arsenals can only hold so many canisters of individual dust particles (each with their unique effect, called Skills). Your ki/aura/mana was also affected along with the change of the dust, so you need to supply some ki-inducing particles with you as well. So in the end, the Arsenal acts like a deck of 30 cards/skills/aura-particles. The more powerful dust-skills use more ki, so your level needs to be raised to a specific point to be able to use them. Luckily, after using most skills, the used ki will regenerate up to the cap of your aura in that particular senario/mission/duel.

The plot is surprisingly good, despite the awkward voice acting, specifically with a single female character--but she's the most talkative character and the actress is trying to fit her words within the mouth-flaps. This makes it a very good thing that the main character is mute. Some skilled and talented people could make an awesome OVA out of this game.

The maps, though few, are heavily detailed and interactive. High drops and psychic hops have you leaving huge craters in the ground, great dramatic way to ambush an oponent. Missed shots/slashes/punches/kicks leave holes in the walls or knock bits of the environment off--hopefully hitting your intended target anyways for a laugh. Often hit players fly back in obnoxious fashion and crash into anything in their way. There are plenty of pillars and other objects that can be slashed or blown away onto an unsuspecting baddie. There are random spots on maps with signature folderal that certain skills can utilize to be psychicly lifted and thrown at enemies.

As far as I know, there are 300 skills in the game, ranging from a simple punch or fireball, to skills that have infinite range and affect all the players--including you. Most of these skills do follow similar genres of attack: Short-range, Medium-range, and Long-range. Most skills that can be used as often as you can muster often have another power like it, but more powerful and can be used only once--so you gotta make it count if you decide to do more damage over reliability. The combinations of Attack, Deffensive, and everything in between can be simply stagering. Then there's the School of the Skill: each skill comes from one of five schools of thought Ki/Nature/Psycho/Optical/Faith. Most arsenals can only hold a couple of Schools within' them, this is one of the few--but needed--limitations on customization. I wouldn't worry too much though, I got by swimmingly, and I don't even play strategy card games!

There are a couple of issues with the game. For one thing, there's only about 7-10 maps to play on and the single player story mode uses mainly 4-5 of them (mostly just 3! >_< ). The rest I guess are reserved for online dueling I guess. The other issue, which ties into the map issue, is that it can be a bit repetative mission wise. Thankfully, you can create a custom soundtrack (upload a certain song you copied to your X-Box hard drive for a certain level). You can always customize arsenals to keep the gameplay relatively fresh as well. Another very small issue is that the computer can sideroll away from blasts and human players cannot, but you can try to trick the computer into rolling off of cliffs/ledges--which is always amusing (or you could try to have them accidently deflect your shot into the floor beneath them and watch them plummet! I've had this done to me a couple of times, still freakin' hilarious fun ; ).

I've heard that they might plan on adding more maps and skills to download on X-Box Live. I can only hope, because I love it!

Phantom Dust has to be one of the best delivered and uniquely conceptualized games I've ever played, definately in a long long time.

For those still interested, but without a X-Box: wait until the Next-Gen systems come out, buy an ol' X-Box for about $50 or so and get the game for about $5 and play it. Personally, I consider it an experiance, but I've been known to over-react. It'd be a $5 rental fee anyways ;p.

...SO TRY IT ALREADY! You can hate me later! ^_-

Has anyone else played Phantom Dust or is willing to try? Go ahead and post your thoughts! Feedback is welcome.

...This post is HUGE. EXP's back, baby! *Grins Widely*

« Last Edit: Mar 27, 2005, 4:32pm by EvaXenoPhon »

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