If it weren't for a few restrictions then Phantom Crash would earn the true prestige it deserves.
You play as a nameless Jet Set Radio Future reject in a future Tokyo where three isolated post-apocalyptic districts of the city are left to rot while the rest of the world goes on with life. Japan's decided to use this area – The Neglected Area – as a national arena for giant robots (or SVs as they're called) * from past wars to bust each other up. It's as simple as that; the story has infinitesimal/unimportant plot twists that are balanced with awkward character resolution. It's just you in a giant robot with a wad of cash fighting against Japan's most irritating pre-teens; the combination is almost entirely makes up for the game's flaws!
You get a choice between three different giant robot makes from three different companies (I'm surprised Germany's not included), each with their own array of long and short range weapons with different types of legs and parts. Where the game gets its name though is in the recent development of Optic Camouflage: each robot is equipped with an OC which briefly enables you to turn invisible, adding some stealth strategy into the otherwise straight forward combat.
Much like Tokyo Xtreme Racer, there's a lot of emphasis on part-switching and weight-watching: if you have a mech that's too heavy, it will move slower than a Fatal Frame character, but you'll need that extra weight to add to the robot's durability. You can increase robot durability either by adding weight to the hull manually or by equipping unseen armor, but then you have to factor-in how heavy your parts are and how much they'll weigh you down. The controls, while somewhat un-customizable, are blissfully easy to learn and functional which makes the combat all the better; there's nothing more than running/hovering/rolling around a destroyed city block blasting giant robots on the way while seeking cover. What's cooler is finding a combination of weapons that works for you, adding a sort of personal attachment to your mechanized monster. You can also repaint and add stickers to your choice mech, though the color schemes and stickers are all randomized making select types available per day.
As awesome as the combat is though, it raises a few problems. Why is it that a rocket-blast to an injured mech sometimes inflicts mild damage whereas using a sword against a healthy mech can kill it instantly? Maybe it's just me, but I don't see a giant robot getting sliced in-half by a sword or chainsaw the size of a person, that would be like trying to cut an Abrams tank open with a fire axe. Why is it that you can get disarmed by a mech during hectic combat, but when you try to do the same to your opponents it rarely works? Whose idea was it to make it impossible to restart a match in the pause menu, yet every time you die you have to wait twenty seconds before you get a chance to start over?
Where the combat really takes it in the mess is waiting for the particular Class Ranker you need to beat in order to progress. Sometimes I had to wait thirty minutes just to beat a guy in combat, all the while fending myself off from a bunch of regenerative suicidal psychos who hog all the item pick-ups. Ordinarily, this would make sense if the Class rankers were actually challenging, but most of them are just push-overs in fancy paint-jobs! There were few rankers, Class or Area for that matter, I ever broke a sweat over; most the time I just found higher grounds, launched explosive weapons at their heads every time they tried to jump up and beat them that way (Hell, I even beat the final boss that way)! This is like playing a classic Mega Man game where you're playing a normal level, but the level is twenty-three minutes long and you only have one life left just to get to the Robot Master so you can kill him in about three seconds. The only time I ever had a problem crashing someone of high rank was when I had to fight Roy, probably the only sympathetic character in the game and the only one carrying the best fight theme song ever (Disco is always good to rumble to).
What shocks me about Phantom Crash is that it's one of many X-Box games that abuse the technological opportunity the console has for Custom Soundtracks and nearly abuses the purpose of its own soundtrack arrangement, yet the music rarely sucks. You see, in Phantom Crash you can buy songs to include in your own music collection inside the game which plays during combat. However, half the music that isn't action-packed or adrenaline fueling is overly calm, quiet, peaceful and sometimes even obnoxious. The music I found however seemed to work during combat, so it's hard to complain (though I'm sad I couldn't find Roy's disco fight theme).
There is a story going on in this game and one that's actually character driven, but the sad thing about it is that most of the characters are either bland or borderline detestable. I'm awfully glad this game doesn't have Quick Time Events, but having to sit through each character's interminable dialogue feels like a QTE in itself. Random characters will leap on-screen and drown you with pointless, rambling dialogue either between their Chip AI, other characters or sometimes themselves and some of the characters are instantly hate-inducing. Not twenty minutes into the game we're introduced to a fifteen year old girl who has a serious crush on a guy in his thirties, an unthreatening eight year old Area Ranker with the complex of a 1990's high-school student who's dating a chubby, tiger-eyed androgynous thing with a surf board mounted to its back and your incredibly stoic/uncharismatic rival keeps trying to tug at your heart strings, hoping that we care about the tender story about a girl and her reject William Gibson construct. And believe me... that's not the worst of them.
I used to favor the idea of a giant robot game with Third Person perspective combat that had a character driven story line, but Phantom Crash changed all that almost instantly. What's even worse is how the character dialogue interrupts the game. Sometimes, on your way to the Wire Heads Club, you'll get attacked by idiots talking about wannabe-comedic BS while other characters randomly pop-up to join the fray. Even when you're in combat, the game wastes screen space by throwing combat-based character dialogue in the top-half of the screen. All of this could have been mildly tolerable if the dialogue actually contributed something to the game: the characters rarely address the player past the start-up mode in the very beginning by Roy and Pepper (probably the only characters who make you even feel remotely welcome thus the only likable ones), the player character looks no different than the other badly dressed, irritating pre-teens surrounding him and the dialogue rarely delivers the plot-points necessary for a story; it all blends in with the rambling schizophrenic text-screen crap around us so much its hard to tell when a character is actually being serious. The only thing it contributes is setting the theme of what kind of people would be into Robot Sports in the near cyber-punk post-apocalypse, though I'm not convinced the majority of them would be obnoxious pre-teens. It certainly gave me more incentive to kill everyone, that's for sure…
What Phantom Crash really needs to do away with is the waiting aspect where you have to wait for a Ranker of Area or Master Class Regulation ranker to show up; if you wish to progress in the game at all, you have to wait for the Area or Regulation ranker of a particular day or event to show up and at times this can take up to half an hour. I almost lost my mind later in the game when I waited literally – and I swear to every planet in the solar system, I'm not lying about this – 45 minutes for a Regulation Ranker of a particular event to show up. 45 minutes!! By the time he showed up I was just getting ready to leave the arena. I had all ready crashed 46 people, lost one arm in the process and was down to one shot. Once he showed up, I waited for more ammo to arrive when he leaps at me, guns me down almost a block away from him (with an impossibly magnetic mini-gun) to which I got propelled into a mech guarding recently dropped items who finished me off. There have been few moments in gaming where I wanted to throw my controller into the TV screen, but that was one of them. Ten or twenty minutes is fine, but when I have to wait a quarter of an hour before someone I need to cream shows up whilst surviving the other psychotic dickheads around me, then something's obviously wrong.
Despite the blatant grievances, I still can't help but recommend Phantom Crash. It's exactly the kind of giant robot game the X-Box needed: a free-roaming game that isn't mission based (not entirely anyway), one with a fair amount of customization despite some restrictions and one loaded with all the giant robot action your heart could desire! If you can find it, get it 'cause it's giant robot gold.
*: I REFUSE TO CALL THESE THINGS "SCOOBEES."