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This is one of the most confounding games in the entire Xbox lineup. On a system where most games seem to revolve around Western tastes, Phantom Dust is decidedly Eastern in look and feel. However, as an Eastern game, it also features gameplay that revolves around a Western-developed gameplay ideal, the collectible card game. The game is also published by Majesco here in the US but designed by Microsoft's Japanese development studios. Since one common criticism of the Xbox is its lack of Japanese-developed games, it's baffling to find out that possibly the best one to emerge from Microsoft's internal studios in Japan isn't even published and marketed by Microsoft themselves. Finally, to make it even harder to comprehend what's going on here, the game is sold for a budget price of $19.99.
The only thing that's absolutely certain about Phantom Dust's arrival is that it's a superb value because it's one of the system's very best games.  Phantom Dust is the brainchild of Yukio Futatsugi, one of the minds that brought Panzer Dragoon to Sega Saturn and unleashed mechs on World War II in Konami's Ring of Red for PlayStation 2. In an unlikely turn for a Japanese developer, he's been keeping a weblog of sorts on 1UP.com that can be found here... http://phantomdust.1up.com. It's highly recommended for a superb description of how Phantom Dust came to be. Mechanics of the game revolve around a simple idea, incorporate the deck building of a collectible card game into an action game where one button press "plays the card", sometimes as often as you want and sometimes only once. Using a combination of attack, defense, special and environmental skills, you can do everything from attack another player with a knife all the way up to altering the rules of the entire match. Combat is exciting and challenging. Strategizing before the matches is absorbing and crucial to success. It's got all the things that make collectible card games entertaining wrapped up in a full-on real-time action-packed battle with some very pretty graphics. The single player game is the weakest part of the package. It follows a mysterious story that explains the phantom dust of the game's title as well as who the player really is. Playing at least some of the single player game is necessary to get to the real meat of Phantom Dust, Xbox Live play. At the beginning of Chapter 3, you're given your first arsenal. This arsenal is akin to a deck in a collectible card game. You can make and remake your arsenal as many times as you wish but as you create strong ones, you'll want to keep them and then buy a new arsenal to start the process all over again. Arsenals are filled with skills of your choosing. A good balance of offensive, defensive and special skills along with aura particles to power your skills will allow you to dominate. Arsenal building is a very large part of the game and absolutely entertaining on its own. You can spend hours thinking of new ways for your skills to interact with each other and with your opponent's choices. With over 300 skills available, including many won only online, you won't soon run out of possibilities. Combat takes place on entirely destructible battlefields where destroying the very ground under your opponent's feet to send them plummeting to their doom is always an option. Every attack leaves its mark on the field of play and this really helps immerse you in the fights. Attacks come in lots of different types and all sorts of ranges. You can fight in close with psychic knives or swords. Back off and plink your opponent's health away with lasers if you wish. There are just so many fun things you can do to other folks and yourself that the purely action-based combat just never gets tiresome. That's good since battling this way on Live will be the lifeblood of Phantom Dust for just about any purchaser. You just never know what sort of combos other people will come up with or how they'll employ their skills against you. In a nice nod to collectible card games again, you can see your opponent's health at all times and you can see what type of skills they have readied. This often turns battles into a game of chess where the counter strike after a debilitating blocked attack can be even more devastating than you not striking at all.  Characters look so cool doing it too. It's ominous to watch another player with far more health than you stand unimpressed in the middle of the battlefield just shrugging off your psychic advances and toying with you before administering the fatal blow. Buildings come apart, craters are made, whole walls come crashing down and in the midst of it stand these "The Matrix"-esque people who are like after-nuclear-holocaust superheroes of the mind. The powers all look so cool in action and are easily identifiable by their effects. Like so many great games, every little bit of the graphic appearance is there to help the player decipher the gameplay and latch onto nuance to prepare for future action. It's also set to an often haunting musical score that mixes techno and classical music to come up with one of the more brilliant bits of game music from this generation. Phantom Dust is the type of game you can play for years and never really bottom out. It focuses on player preparation and interaction at all times and emphasizes one-button cause and effect. It's got the rough edge of a single player game that needs a little less running around and talking and a lot quicker fighting. But as long as you know going in that Xbox Live is where this game was meant to be played, you're not going to be disappointed at all. The question of why this game ended up a budget release and wasn't even published by Microsoft themselves may never get a satisfactory answer, but that turns out to be largely irrelevant. The game made it here intact, has a pretty good translation from the original Japanese and makes a convincing argument that Xbox Live is just plain awesome at delivering unique new videogame entertainment. Tell your friends and don't let what may be one of the Xbox's last great games pass you by. 
Phantom Dust doesn't have a whole lot of objectionable stuff in it. There's a nurse that could be the sexiest ever seen in a videogame, but beyond that babe there's no blood, no dismemberment and just good clean knock-down-a-bridge-with-your-buddy-on-it fun to be had here. The most prohibiting factor for younger kids is their likely lack of attention span for the arsenal building (though you can play Quick matches with pre-set decks) and the usual T becomes an M rating voice chat on Xbox Live. That said, pull the plug on the headset, mute the morons, and they'll find all sorts of action online just like you. Phantom Dust is one of those nebulous games that every parent will decide a bit differently upon. Finally, the low price should definitely make you consider this one if you've got kids with an interest in collectible card games.
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