Phantom Chaser - Gotta catch'em all

Hello my fellow gamers, I’m back and this time I’m going to tell you about a new game called Phantom Chaser.

Phantom Chaser is a new mobile RPG aimed at those who just love collecting things. Phantoms, in this case, but the South Korean version is known as Yokai Saga, which means that you will be collecting Yokai. By now, you should already know what the word means: monsters, demons, spirits, that kind of supernatural stuff.

In Phantom Chaser, players are going to enter a fantasy world where they have over 130 unique Phantoms to collect, but one of the coolest things of Phantom Chaser is the culture clash. You’re capturing and controlling Phantoms from both western and eastern myths, including Dracula, Frankenstein, Anubis, Ninetails, Succubus and more. Most of them are creatures designed specifically for the game, but you’re in for a few popular surprises. Of course, the entire game has this anime style to it that suits the fantasy world nicely.

Speaking of graphics, Phantom Chaser has in fact been praised for its visuals, being the winner of a “Best Graphics” trophy at the Unity Korea Award 2017. It surely looks good for a mobile game, there is no denying it.

Before starting the game, you can choose one of seven languages. Besides the mandatory English and Korean, there are options for German, French, Taiwanese, Chinese and Vietnamese. I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the English translation, without any weirdly translated sentences that often plague this kind of adaptations.

As for the gameplay, at first you’ll be spending most of your time in the Adventure mode. This is where you begin small and grow big, capturing Phantoms and creating a team of three warriors and three mimics. But what is a mimic, after all?

Mimics are Phantoms or characters that you can use in combat to obtain new powers. By using a Mimic on a player character, he absorbs his powers – things such as attack speed increase or defense increase, and there is also one special ability at your disposal. It’s only for a short period of time, but it adds great depth to the relentless battles and could save you from tough situations. You have to choose which one of your three characters would benefit the most with a Mimic, and play with that. Just as your heroes, Mimics also level up.

Phantom Chaser isn’t messing around about stuff either; the gameplay is very straightforward, with no bullshit getting in the way of the action. Usually displayed in some sort of isometric perspective, our heroes are running and dealing with the enemies that show up. Despite one or two auto-features that you can choose to activate (auto mimic and auto skill), you can play with full control of your characters’ movements, switching between each one and activating the skills and Mimics as you see fit. Luckily, Phantom Chaser isn’t one of those fully automated click-fests where you’re nothing but a spectator.

Each stage is short and sweet, thankfully. Most of the time, it will take you less than a minute to finish the challenge, but I can’t say how it is going to be when you reach the hard difficulty level. In fact, scratch that – things will surely heat up when you reach Hell difficulty, but that is going to take you quite some time.

Every day or so, you can borrow a hero from a friend to use in battle, gifting them honor. This is a nice way to interact with other players, and also a welcome boost to your party.

You can level your characters up to level 100, but don’t think that the progress ends there. When you reach this level, you can upgrade a character and raise the level cap up to five times. Yes, up to level 500, that’s right. There is Transcend and Evolve, with your heroes changing their looks in the process in four steps. You can acquire gear and enhance it, as well as crafting heroes and items with what you acquired in your adventure. The game even tells you where you have to go to get the items you need for each character, but some of those stages are out of your reach until you complete the previous ones.

Oh, and about leveling up, there’s an odd thing in Phantom Chaser: you can consume other Phantoms, or heroes, for your leveling pleasure. This means that if you’re tired of Marie, for example, you can just consume her for a few experience points and stats increase. Hey, I’m not judging – as long as you fulfill your quest, please do consume whoever you want.

I actually do love Marie. She is an extremely useful long-ranged character, so you should treat her nicely. Or not.

The Battlefield mode, which becomes available at team level 8 will provide a few interesting distractions from the main campaign. There are quite a few challenges awaiting you, including a tower to beat, a survival mode of sorts and more. Obviously, there’s the Arena for multiplayer, with ranked matches, but you have no actual interference in this mode apart from picking your best team and watching the battle unfold.

This should give you a nice idea about Phantom Chaser. I have to say that this game won me over after a few minutes when I was thinking it was going to be a downer. The gameplay isn’t groundbreaking but it’s particularly polished and awfully addictive. The idea of leveling up our Phantoms and discovering new ones to use (or consume) quickly crept in my mind, and the appeal is easy to see and hard to deny. In the end, minutes turned into hours and it was hard to drop the game. Eventually I had to do so, but this is the kind of game that I see myself returning to now and then.

Even with all my playtime, I know that I’ve barely scratched the surface of Phantom Chaser. This is a game to consume (pun intended) many of your days, until you can see most of the 130 Phantoms available. If you like hero collecting games with a bit of actual strategy to go with it, Phantom Chaser is a good option that can be played in short bursts or hours on end.

Final rating: 8.0 phantoms out of 10

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