Apart from these, the only other complaint I can field at Phantom Dust is one that applies to almost all card games: drawing a bad hand can leave you royally screwed. Truth be told, these really are minor grievances, easily overcome by following a mission order guide, but their presence interrupts the flow of gameplay far too often. There are also missions that require you to use a specific ability to pass them, but they will happily let you enter the combat arena without said skill equipped. By the end of the fourth chapter I’d snapped, resorting to using a guide to tell me who had the next mission. As a result, you’re forced to walk up to every NPC and talk to them, hoping they have a job for you. Missions are doled out by various NPCs in the hub world, but there are no quest markers to let you know who currently has a mission available. While the core mechanics are fantastic, there are several minor issues within the campaign which undermine the experience. Phantom Dust’s story mode is also where the vast majority of my complaints about the game come into play. It’s an intriguing and effective premise for driving the player to complete each successive mission, as the protagonist and Edgar try to find out how the world became the dust-covered hellhole that it is. After training, both head out on missions to gather memory fragments, slowly unlocking their pasts. Awakening from cryogenic pods in the game’s opening, our nameless protagonist and his friend Edgar discover they are Espers, a rare breed of human that can control the dust as a weapon. To avoid the amnesiac effects of the dust, surviving humans now shelter underground in a settlement reminiscent of The Matrix‘s Zion. An unknown catastrophe has devastated the Earth, leaving behind a mysterious dust which causes those exposed to it to lose their memory. The story itself is engrossing, even if the plot does revolve around one of storytelling’s favorite clichés, amnesia. The hand-holding subsides as you progress, but new cards and enemies are constantly trickled out over the course of the campaign, all of it serving as a kind of extended tutorial for the multiplayer. While it’s true that the game’s combat needs a lot of explanation, this tutorial section drags on way past its welcome, sometimes taking an entire mission or two to explain a single nuance of the battle system. Phantom Dust’s first couple of story chapters constitute its tutorial, about 30 missions in all. If you’ve ever played Magic the Gathering, then you may recognize aura particles as essentially equivalent to land cards. Abilities have varying aura costs and your available aura will always recharge back to up to your level. Each aura particle collected increases your level and therefore your mana pool by one. In addition to these skills, your deck contains aura particles, which serves as the equivalent of mana. Running over these nodes and hitting one of the face buttons will assign that power to that button. Instead of drawing cards like a typical card game, each player has a home base of sorts where three abilities nodes will spawn at regular intervals. Players battle it out using several card types including attack, defense, healing, buff, and debuff skills. You control your character in real time and navigate the map like in any other third-person shooter, but the meat of the combat comes from the deck of abilities that you choose to take into battle with you.Įach round of Phantom Dust takes place in a small arena-style map. So, what is Phantom Dust? At first glance, it looks like a third-person shooter or Japanese role-playing game, but at its core, Phantom Dust is a card game, more akin to Magic the Gathering or Hearthstone than anything else. Often described as ahead of its time, Phantom Dust lives up to its reputation in many areas, but it feels understandably dated in others. This past week, with very little fanfare, Microsoft made good on its word, releasing the remaster on Xbox One and Windows 10. After the franchise’s reboot was put on indefinite hiatus, Microsoft announced last year that it was putting out a remaster of classic Xbox title Phantom Dust.
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