Be Excellent To Each Other

I've been playing Phantom Crash again. The first time I played it, I inevitably got completely mashed up because I didn't know how to play it and probably picked the A-rank matches instead of the beginner D-rank matches.

However, I read the tutorial and am now good at the game! YES!

What little of the game there is, at least.

You bounce, you dive, you go invisible, you run out of ammo, you WAIT A MILLION YEARS FOR THE BOSS TO APPEAR, you kill them, you get money, you upgrade your robot.

Except you don't upgrade your robot. Robot game fans may be familiar with the format where your robot is modelled as a series of components: a chassis, legs, arm weapons, backpack weapons, special items. They're all here in Phantom Crash, except there's only really one type of each. Here's how it works:

There's three 'flavours' of robot you can have: Photon, Holy and Aeron. You can't mix pieces from different flavours. Because you can't.

Within each flavour of robot, there's different weapons and leg mounts you can add to the basic core. Specifically, there's one of each. Say you want to begin with a robot that wields two basic arm pistols and a rocket launcher backpack and uses a Johnny Five set of tracks. That's it. There's one type of each of those. There's no 'better pistol'. You've just made your first and last ever robot.

You can 'tweak' the pieces by spending absolutely hideous amounts of ingame cash, if you're feeling up to it. Each piece has a slider ranging from 'Light' through 'Normal' to 'Heavy'. 'Light' weapons are lighter, weaker, and carry more ammo. 'Heavy' weapons are heavier, more powerful, and carry less ammo. 'Heavy' leg mounts are slower, but allow your robot to hold more weight.

You get your own AI co-pilot as well, which represents your ability to lock on to targets. You can upgrade them too! After each battle, spend all your money on an AI level up, and your lock-on range will increase by a single pixel. YAY.

I guess it's a tactical thing to only be able to have a robot that's slightly 'this' or 'that', but when the computer cheats (because it has to) and has significantly more powerful weapons and armor than you can ever have, it's just not very fun and all a bit stupid.

If you're a canny sort, you can do the maths and come to the conclusion that if you had infinite money, you could whack all the sliders to an extreme, causing the game to give you another 'special item' slot so you can give your robot 20% extra health at no disadvantage, but that does rely on you winning the game a few times over to get the necessary funds.

The player is supposed to complete matches in each level, in day and night to progress through the game. I'm told that this reveals the plot. Didn't really happen to me. Phantom Crash makes up for this by showing absolutely baffling cutscenes before each battle where the pilots of the robots (and their AI animal co-pilots) meet up and talk complete nonsense at each other until you hold down the 'skip conversation' button and make them go away.

Very occasionally, these scenes include discussion of the tournament you're participating in. Usually, they're along the lines of.


To complete a level, you wait for twenty minutes, blasting simple stupid enemy robots until the boss decides to show themself. When they do, it's a matter of luck whether you win or not. It takes more ammo than you can carry to kill the boss in most cases, so you need to hang around the ammo and health crate respawn point a lot. All robots have the power to become temporarily invisible, it renders all enemy robots and enemy missiles completely useless, unless you're against the boss where it just doesn't work.

On my latest battle, I do the mandatory 15 minute wait before the boss character shows himself. We spar for another five minutes due to his robot having five times the HP of mine, and I hog the only location on the map where health and ammo can appear. We take turns engaging our invisibility powers and pretending not to be able to see each other.

Suddenly, he blasts me from being at 60% HP and invisible to dead with a single shot from the railgun he didn't use until that point. Blah.

No more Phantom Crash for me.

I looked up the ending of the game (because I like looking up game endings) and found that

I thought this was going to be about an invisible RRoD.

I think Phantom Crash is the excellence, as DoktorGlenndowager will attest.

It's bizarre how Genki somehow took their 'like multiplayer, but with bots' and 'lots and lots of customizing' structure from Tokyo Xtreme Racer, and made it work as a robot combat game. But they did.

I love it. It's the sort of cheery, wacky Japanesey thing we don't get enough of these days. It has a marvellous soundtrack that can stand proudly next to Jet Set Radio and The World Ends With You, it has loads of bizarre and amusing Tenchi Muyo-style dialogue, it's just excellence.

Yes, the boss robots are rather tough (especially if they mount that accursed railgun thing) but given all the other opponents are little more than cannon fodder they had to put someone in who had a chance against you.

You seem to have forgotten the stealth system which is utterly integral to the game.

It's very hard to forget it when you instantly lose when you don't turn it on.

Luckily, the first option modules that rolled out the shop were a 15sec/0.5sec optic camo unit and a 0.5sec/-0.2sec optic camo accelerator, meaning I could stay invisible pretty much indefinitely.

When you get hit in PC, your OC terminates. When that happens, you're probably in the middle of a volley of machinegun fire. If you're in the middle of a volley of machinegun fire (and the bosses have a lot of ammo given that they're the boss and they've just appeared fresh out of the gate), you're not going to be able to turn the OC back on until they choose to stop, or you find some very, very lucky cover.

Gonna try and dodge? You're either in short or medium range. (The only level with a long range is the aircraft carrier full of crates, and it's hard enough just to find an enemy on that stage) Short range: What in blazes were you doing in short range?! Medium range: The AI will track you perfectly no matter how much dodging you do. If you try to circle around or move in any way except forwards or backwards, your robot will almost certainly fail to switch from 'walk' to 'boost' as your controller registers near-diagonals and causes the robot to move in a jagged line very slowly. The black-white button E-Dodge is pointless.

Really? I found the dodge to be very useful... dodge behind a pillar or something, OC, and then circle around the pillar more in case your enemy tries to follow you and hit you again.

Thing is, there's very good places on each level to lurk and wait for the best time to attack.

In the underground level, wait at the bottom of that giant pit where the powerups get dropped, in OC most of the time unless you see some foes you can easily take.

In the docks, at the far end (where the exit is) you can hop up on top of the exit and be all but unhittable by the enemy. And again, the powerups are dropped right there.

In the city, there's something of a makeshift bunker of wrecked cars you can hide inside and again, watch for powerups and foes.

You win a prize for getting the dodge to work. :(

All of the levels except for the city one are too big, and the underground one is just stupid (a map would help.... slightly. It would have to have a very novel way of showing multiple levels.).