TGS 2024 | "Phantom Breaker Battle Grounds Ultimate"
It was in 2013 when Phantom Breaker Battle Grounds first popped up in my life. The Xbox 360 beat-em-up was a wonderful nod to those arcade games I used to sink quarter after quarter into. With the aid of Rocket Panda Games, a new Ultimate version will be arriving on current-gen consoles. At Tokyo Game Show, the first two levels were on hand to demo, giving players a chance to reacquaint themselves with this world.
Although it’s been a decade since I played the original, I found myself easily diving into Phantom Breaker Battle Grounds Ultimate. After choosing my character, I immediately began to pummel robots, gyarus, and big beefcakes that aimed to cause me some sort of bodily harm. Attacks and combos felt a lot easier to master than the last time, with the fluidity of the character movements looking delightfully cartoonish on every level. Maybe it’s because of the resurgence of classic arcade nods we’ve had in the last few years, but getting back into the swing with this new version felt second nature.
The only downside so far with what I’ve seen were the boss battles’ difficulty. Perhaps it was because I was on the Easy mode, or maybe it’s due to the fact that my character was already at Level 60 when I started the game. Either way, these boss fights were blink-and-you-miss moments that really took away from the urgency of these level-concluding fights. Still, the rest of the level layout — made to look like Akihabara in some places — was charming enough to make the overall experience fun from start-to-finish.
Hopefully the rest of Phantom Breaker Battle Grounds Ultimate will deliver the same amount of fun and mayhem as the first two levels. Everything thus far feels a lot more polished than the original 360 game. Hopefully with the multiplayer option to play with a bountiful of friends, Rocket Panda Games’s next foray to bringing back the Phantom Breaker franchise will be another beat-em-up worthy of any amount of quarters. Phantom Breaker Battle Grounds Ultimate arrives on Xbox Series X, PS5, PC, and Nintendo Switch in 2025.
