The cellphonization of gaming is, to many, anathema. Polygon Not Forgotten has condemned oversimplification throughout the blog. But simplifying is not a bad thing per se. Cutting the fat can, when there is fat to be cut, be the right design choice.
Before Phantom Crash, every mech combat game fell somewhere on a scale between "Boring" and "Utterly Impenetrable" for me. The action in Mech Warrior and Armored Core was alluring, but sparse, occurring between long intervals of menu-sifting, micromanaging, and trudging across empty game space. Phantom Crash cellphonized the class mech combat games, and that's not a bad thing. It made customization brief and engaging, streamlined mech controls, did not permit dialogue to interrupt gameplay by quarantining it to wholly skippable segments between battles, and, most importantly, has no empty space. Its arenas are small and heavily populated. In a Phantom Crash battle, you are always shooting, shot, or hiding from the shooting by using your mech's camouflage (a visual effect that still impresses over ten years later).
My point is that simplifying a game can often mean distilling it--shrinking the intervals between battles in Mech Warrior and reducing Armored Core's controls to only the strictly necessary commands. Playing Phantom Crash is like playing the trailer for Armored Core--it's only The Good Parts. That it has a licensed soundtrack whose high mark is a stone-facedly unironic inclusion of The Kuricorder Quartet shows how much fun Genki had making this game, which, I imagine, was the only thing more fun than playing it.
Highest Recommendation
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