Game Journal: Phantom Dust

written on Thursday, May 7, 2009

This post was thirty minutes late. The fact that I had to pry myself away from the game to write it is probably a good sign.

Phantom Dust was recommended on some forum (Penny Arcade or Quarter to Three or both) as one of the best games for the first Xbox that too few people played. So I found a copy on half.com and started playing it. When it was first mentioned, it was described as a card battling game. I generally hate those, but I was desperately bored, and didn't want to go back to Free Realms to try their card battling game. (Tycho, from Penny Arcade, was extolling the virtues of the Free Realms card game on the latest Gamers With Jobs podcast. But he has an appreciation for the arcane and tolerance for the grind that I do not.) Luckily, Phantom Dust is part card game and part action game, so it's much more up my alley.

Your character is given special powers by the world blanketing, amnesia causing phantom dust. Powers come in pellets (ever since Pac-Man, I suppose). The most common pellets raise your level, allowing you to generate Aura. Aura is the energy needed to use powers, which fall into many schools, but basically resolve into Attack, Defense, and Other. You build a "deck" of pellets (The game seems to mix metaphors.) based on powers you win at the end of fights and buy in the store. When you actually battle, only three pellets appear on the field at any one time, randomly chosen.

This gives the game the same basic strategy as Magic: The Gathering or any number of other card games. If you don't have enough level up pellets in your deck, you may not be able to use all your cool abilities. And if you stack up on single use cards, you may run out, which means you start losing health until you die. And if you want to try and be clever, you can use some of the rarer cards to pull off fancy tricks. One card does damage based on how much more health your opponent has than you, doubled. So I let the opponent beat me down to half health and one shotted him. It was gratifying.

But it isn't all about the cards. If you maneuver well and use cover, you can avoid most attacks. If you're very confident in your dodging abilities, you can reduce the amount of defensive cards you carry. But maybe you like playing defensively. Pile on the cards that reflect attacks and the cards that erase attacks from the enemy's inventory and watch them run their deck out and die (if they don't shoot themselves to death first). It strikes me as kind of boring but aside from bosses (who don't use decks), it's a viable strategy.

The game also changes things things up in the later stages. In one level the cost of all powers is halved so you can bring out the big guns. In another, every power is one use only, so you have to make careful choices. And of course there are the boss fights.

My only real complaint so far is that many of aspects of the game outside of the actual fights are awkward and slow. It takes hours to get to the point where you have enough cards that you can start building interesting decks. Too many of those hours (and all the hours in the game) are spent running around the hub world trying to figure out which random person has your next quest. And the actual mechanics of building a deck are tedious. I suppose that's a balance issue, because if it were quick and easy you'd just throw together the exact deck to breeze through every fight. But it makes a core game activity tedious and discourages experimentation, which is where a good portion of the fun of the game lies.

I know this reads like a review. And I feel like I know the game enough to call it one. But really that's what all game journals are. They're really long and in depth reviews, the kind most folks in the enthusiast press could never write because not nearly enough people have the interest or patience to read them. But this feels like a good format for Phantom Dust. The game mechanics are fairly complicated and take some time to explain.

Irrelevance has its privileges. :)