April 20, 2005 - Originally developed as a niche title by Microsoft Game Studios Tokyo for the dwindling Japanese Xbox market, there was never any thought given to porting this game to North American shores. Import reviews of Phantom Dust, however, did nothing but whet the appetite of North American gamers who were being exposed to more and more quirky titles like Katamari Damacy and loving them. But Microsoft still held fast and gave no sign of wanting to translate the game into English. Enter Majesco, publisher of the fun and sexy Bloodrayne series, who accepted the challenge of publishing the title in North America. And the rest, as they say, is gaming history.

The story is epic in its telling. A cloud of dust engulfs the earth. The surface world now lays barren and inhabitable. Mankind, forced to live underground, has lost all of its memories. A gifted few, The Espers, are tasked with exploring the top-world in search of clues and memories, while fending off various attacks. On one such patrol, they discover two forgotten escape pods each containing one man: The Protagonist (who’s name can be chosen from a given list) and Edgar, a quiet man who is found with a locket around his neck containing the picture of a mysterious white-haired woman named Freia who may hold the secret to both their pasts. The two of them are recognized as having the potential to become Espers and they too begin exploring the surface world in search of the earth’s past.

To give anything else about the plot away is to do Phantom Dust a great disservice, but rest assured, the wonderfully nuanced story holds at least one twist which may rival that of Bioware’s Knights of the Old Republic.

The game’s Scenario Mode (a token training mode which also serves as a way to acquire skills and arsenal cases) begins by dropping you on the surface world and letting you dispatch a few monsters with various skill orbs. To try and explain the gameplay mechanics of Phantom Dust, however, is much like trying to describe a perfect sunset to someone who has never opened his eyes; suffice to say, it isn’t going to happen! Phantom Dust is the hybrid of an action game, a collection game, a card game and a chess game. In its simplest form, it is about gladiators thrown into an arena and trying to survive the encounter. In its most evolved form, it is a game where you must plan, anticipate, analyze, outguess, rethink and outplay your opponents. It also helps to be a little lucky too once in a while.

Yukio Futatsugi, the producer/director of Phantom Dust has explained that he was inspired by Magic: The Gathering, Japanese Anime/Manga, Pokemon Card Battle and to a certain extent, Yu-Gi-Oh, when creating this game. The end-result does not stray far from his vision. The gameplay, when not walking around talking to Non Playable Characters to further the story along, consists of entering a battlefield with a certain amount of health and 4 empty skill slots, gathering randomly generated skills from a pre-selected arsenal and then using these skills at the appropriate time and place to lower your opponent’s health until only one character remains. The arsenal cases (available for editing at the beginning of level 3) can contain one or more school of skills (Psycho, Optical, Nature, Ki, Faith) and in turn, each school can contain various skill types (attack, defense, Status, Erase, Environmental, and Special). Within those skill types, each skill has a specific range to be used at (short, mid, long). Now, if 300+ skills weren’t hard enough to chose from when forming an arsenal (which can contain a maximum of 30 skills), remember that you also need aura of a certain level in order to use each skill. These aura levels generally vary from 1 to 5 (each skill is also rated on a scale of 1 to 5 for rarity and power). While aura regenerates over time, you need to keep “empty” slots in your arsenal in order to have any aura available to you on the battlefield. If this sounds complicated, it isn’t at all. The game takes great pains in slowly walking you through the whole learning process until you are ready for play on Xbox Live. But still, picking 15 skills to go into battle (out of 300) is hard enough.