YMMV / Phantom Breaker

• Awesome Music: Both games have some catchy tunes and Battle Grounds' 8-bit chiptunes are very reminiscent of the NES Mega Man games and Konami titles.
• Cult Classic: Although not as popular as some of the major names of AAA or indie fighting games, there is a small but devoted fanbase who appreciate Phantom Breaker's "easy to learn, hard to master" style of gameplay, colorful cast of characters, and the music from the main game and its Battle Grounds spin-off.
• Demonic Spider: The Magician type enemy in Battle Grounds, particularly the fire one. Their fire behave like your Outrange attacks meaning it will relentlessly chase you around and it's also painful as hell. If you ever find yourself fighting four of them at the same time: consider yourself done for.
• Fan Nickname: Battle Grounds has earned itself "Phantom Breaker vs. The World" by fans of both the aforementioned game and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game.
• Fandom Rivalry: Since the release of Omnia, there has been a number of fans of other tournament fighting games such as Guilty Gear, BlazBlue, and Persona 4: Arena among others whom put Phantom Breaker: Omnia down, complaining that its lack of single-player content, no character trials, no rollback netcode, no special moves list (despite the game's special move are very basic to pull off), and lack of polish from the launch day issues to write it off as a bad game and/or a shallow button masher. Fans of Phantom Breaker, on the other hand, have tried to argue against such claims that the game's "pick up and play" nature and nuanced approach to fighting games allows beginners to enjoy combo-centric fighting games such as Melty Blood without the need to memorize complex button commands while offering various ways to experiment with each character that suits their gameplay style and many of the initial release issues has since been addressed with patches, yet the former camp often go out of their way deride fans of the latter which led to some heated arguments in online forums.
• Just Here for Godzilla: A sizable number of players, specially fans of Steins;Gate, have admitted they played both the main game and Battle Grounds mostly for Kurisu; even Frau's DLC is looked over in favor of the Kurisu one.
• More Popular Spin-Off: Battle Grounds to the main fighting game, largely due to the latter being lost in localization hell... At least until the release of Omnia 11 years later.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Demonsphere, the sixth stage in Battle Grounds is a huge, unexpected shift in tone from the bright, retro-inspired locales of Japan. It's a dark, maze-like dimension littered with bones and corpses everywhere you go. On the Nightmare difficulty and above, players are required to find and destroy a cursed Japanese Ogre and Ko-omote mask to advance. Said masks are bloodied and decrepit, and stare right at the player.
  • Consider the Demonic Spider entry above. It's even more of a nightmare for anyone with a fear of spiders. Sooooo... Have fun.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: Par for the course with Phantom Breaker and its re-releases; despite each character having interesting backstories, the game does not fully flesh the world or it characters as much other than justifying who their next opponent is. This however may also be another example of an Enforced Trope as the game's narrative was substantially cut down to focus on the gameplay during its original development.
• Polished Port: The Switch port of Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds Overdrive has been considered as a solid way of the game to play. Despite initially lacking the Arcade Mode and online multiplayer features from previous versions at launch while removing the branching level paths that was introduced in the PlayStation port, it retains many of its new features and improvements while further rebalancing the game and bundling all of the game's DLC to make for these omissions. The hybrid console nature of the Switch was also put to good use as it not only allows players to enjoy the game on the go, local multiplayer games can easily be set up by both using the separate JoyCons, and later game updates eventually re-instated Arcade Mode and the missing online components.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • Phantom Breaker itself may be one to Melty Blood given the similarities of different Styles that provide different playstyles and mechanics of each character with fast-paced combo-centric gameplay.
  • Battle Grounds is probably the closest thing to a Panzer Bandit sequel, especially given that it was made by the same team members behind the latter.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Frau's theme has some notes that are very reminiscent of Ken's theme from Street Fighter II.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The game features various characters who either have their own reasons for taking part of Phantom's tournament to see their greatest wishes become a reality and those trying to stop Phantom from regaining his powers, as well as other characters own backstories that makes them stand out from each other. Unfortunately, the Story and Situation Battle Modes only very lightly touches on the characters' stories and don't properly flesh them our or give them any meaningful interactions, while the latter mode in Extra and Onmia have No Ending whatsoever. This also has to do with the developers cutting out a substantial amount of dialogue from the game during development, as they wanted to focus on the gameplay and pacing, yet none of the cut planned story content was ever used in Omnia.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: It's fairly easy to mistake Ende for a girl, due to his androgynous looks and his wardrobe choice.

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