I first heard of Phantom Brave in Lucky Star, and I was curious when I discovered that it was an actual game. Being a fan of heavily-strategic Japanese role-playing games, I figured it was worth a shot.
The feature that surprised me most about the game was the ridiculously high level cap. Pokémon caps at Lv. 100, Final Fantasy at Lv. 99, and Phantom Brave- Lv. 9999. Yeah. You might be playing this for a while if you want to master it. Combine this with the multitude of options (I'm not exaggerating here, there really is seemingly no limit to the number of different combinations between characters, abilities, items, and so on!) and you have yourself a game that will take a huge investment to beat.
There is a lovely feeling of freedom here. There's no “You have to use a warrior class or you'll never kill anything” rule, you can feasibly use whatever character classes you feel like, and there are a lot. In fact, there's not even any rush to complete the story; one character class in particular gives you the opportunity to create totally random training dungeons. I'll just say it. These dungeons are unbelievably challenging, as long as you don't enter dungeons far below your level. This feature honestly has me forgetting about the next story mission and just trying to clear these random dungeons.
The art style is charming, the characters are likeable, and the gameplay is strong.
In conclusion, Phantom Brave is definitely worth a try if you're into number-crunching handheld strategy bonanzas.