Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero PC port impressions
It may have taken a few months after the PlayStation and Switch releases, but Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero is now available on PC. This version should in theory be the definitive release, offering support for higher resolutions and framerates, while also allowing for portability via devices like the Steam Deck.
However, the PC port is far from perfect for a number of reasons. Regardless of my thoughts on the game itself, I’d recommend waiting on Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero’s PC release to see if things get better any time soon. As for why this is the case…
Annoying Bugs
This is the main reason why I’d not recommend Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero for PC right now. Even with a beefy PC or sticking to lower settings, there’s a high chance you’ll run into a few issues at some point. These bugs come in two flavours, with one potentially being an issue in the other versions as well.
For starters, the AI has a number of issues when it comes to pathfinding. It seems to be mostly related to objects being in the way of wherever the AI wants to go, but it’ll essentially just have them run into an object until they give up.
Both the player and enemies have the ability to jump over objects, but it seems like the AI can’t handle this properly half the time. It makes cheesing fights unintentionally very easy, as you can just attack from out of range as the AI keeps wasting turns. I’m not sure if it was this bad in other versions, though a cursory glance online seems to point to this always being a problem.
The other PC-exclusive problem is that there are a number of bugs related to physics that at worst make turns longer, or (more likely) softlock the game entirely. Characters will occasionally get stuck in an animation loop, often after being knocked back.
While this sometimes fixes itself, the animation will often keep going forever, forcing you to close the game. Worst of all, there doesn’t actually seem to be any consistency to this. I didn’t run into this issue at all for the first few chapters, but then my luck seemed to have run out after.
Inconsistent Performance
From the footage I’ve seen of the Switch version, it seems like performance has always been a little rough compared to how simple Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero actually looks. This seems to have been an issue ever since the switch to 3D character models with Disgaea 6, and one that isn’t going away any time soon.
In regards to PC performance specifically, there are a few key problem areas. To start with, water reflections seem to cause a massive performance hit. With many maps (and the hub area) featuring water, this naturally isn’t the best issue to have. At the very least, choosing one of the lower settings for water reflections seems to stop this issue entirely, without having a huge impact on visuals.
I also ran into issues running The Lost Hero on my Legion Go. It seems to be one of those games that has issues with certain AMD APUs, causing performance to be far poorer that it should be. Despite being able to play much more graphically intensive games on the Legion Go normally, this game struggles to put out a consistent framerate.
While I would like to do a proper review at some point, the issues I’ve ran into with Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero have caused me to shelve the game for now. I hope that some patches some out to fix the game’s more egregious problems, though there’s currently no news on this from NIS America.
A code for Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero was provided by NIS America.
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