Phantom Dust was announced last year at E3, a remake of the post apocalyptic third person adventure-strategy game which hit the original Xbox in Japan back in 2004.
The announcement of Phantom Dust left a lot of people scratching their heads, before frantically hammering the name into Wikipedia for more information. Phantom Dust was never released in the EU, and suffered a low-key launch in the US. Despite it’s obscurity, Phantom Dust enjoys a strong cult following and has quite broad critical praise for its mechanics and systems, which are regarded as being ahead of it’s time.
Our partners at TiC Podcast bought up the game to Microsoft Studios Creative Director Ken Lobb in their latest show.
Describing the previous game, Ken Lobb said he didn’t see eye to eye with the original developers, describing the game as ‘way ahead of its time’. Phantom Dust’s card-based strategy combat was wrapped around a full blown JRPG, and accessing this aspect of the game took several hours. “It was a trading card game based arena combat game (…) but it had a full on JRPG to unlock the cards. It had one really big flaw – if you started playing this game you had no idea it was an arena game until you played 3-6 hours depending on how fast you went.”
Ken Lobb emphasised that they want to tell the game’s story better, which sees humanity hiding under ground from a mysterious apocalypse, whilst Esper’s (humans granted psychic powers by the apocalypse) venture above the ground in attempts to discover humanities lost history.
“The core of ‘why Phantom Dust’ it’s because this game is better than it was rated. Its way better than it was treated, except by the people who really got into it.”
Ken credited Phil Spencer with Phantom Dust’s return, stating that the decision to revive it was based on the games uniqueness, and the simple fact ‘not enough people got to see’ the game. Phantom Dust would also serve to diversify the Xbox’s portfolio beyond its shooter image.
Regarding launch dates, Ken said it ‘may or may not arrive in 2015’ based on the games development, but also that it wouldn’t be fair to shoehorn it in to what Microsoft regard as a very strong 2015 line up.
Podcast host KoR X Kal El asked whether or not Phantom Dust was pure PVP, Ken Lobb had this to say: “No no no, it’s a JRPG. It’s about a 30 hour RPG. Through that, you unlock the cards. (…) We want people playing PVP before 6 hours, and we want them to have viable decks without having to wait 15 hours. A lot of the discussion is how do we front load a little of the multiplayer side without breaking the beautiful unlock that was so well designed in the original RPG.”
It certainly sounds like it has the potential to be the JRPG that many people are clamouring for. I’m going to try and get a copy of the original somehow.
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Jez C (MSFTY) is a games journalist, Executive Editor at Windows Central. They contributed 39 articles to ICXM in 2015, focused on game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: now leads Xbox coverage at Future plc’s Windows Central as Executive Editor.