Phantom of Inferno DVD Game Review

May 28, 2006 | 26 Comments

Time and time again I've heard the same (mostly justified) complaint: "Oh, if only this game was available in English". Be it Fate/stay night, Tsukihime, Air, or other kinds of games like Shuffle, it's sad that for most anime fans not proficient in Japanese the best games remain unavailable. Why? Because it usually involves translating incredible amounts of text, costing alot of time and money, while at the same time, the market and thus the potential revenues for it remain very small. Nearly nobody takes the risk.

Phantom of Inferno however is one of the great classics. Unlike the terrible anime version, which completely butchered this great story, this game is available in English and playable by everyone - because all you need for it is a DVD player.

About the storyline: Imagine the underworld setting of assassins from "Noir" blended with the loyalty-romance-and-betrayal drama of "Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien". The result is a thrilling epic with no less than six true endings, several of which I was unable to reach with dry eyes (even on my third replay). Add in the fact that the main endings take no less than 14 hours of game time each, and you can appreciate what you're getting.

Available dirt cheap for below 25$ in several locations. If you're remotely interested in the genre, get it.

Phantom of Inferno trailer 1 (MKV format)
Phantom of Inferno trailer 2 (MPG format)

Game Rating: (+++)

The Story

PoI begins very straightforward: You have lost your memory and wake up in the custody of a criminal organization called "Inferno". You're given a mindboggling, but simple choice: Either you agree to be trained as an assassin bound to work for Inferno, or you're going to be killed. Since you're obviously held far away from civilization and don't remember anything about yourself, there is very little choice for you but to play along to stay alive. You receive training in the usage of firearms, knives and martial arts by the enigmatic Ein, who is the top assassin of Inferno, called "Phantom". While you're still struggling to keep your sanity and to regain knowledge of who you are and what happened to you, you're dropped into a do-or-die situation fighting against a traitor. With your training, you manage to survive but are now locked in as a murderer yourself: You're "Zwei" now, (German for "two", Ein means "one") the second Phantom.

Without spoiling too much, the story generally branches in two main directions: Either you stay within Inferno, accepting the new lifestyle, or you try to convince Ein to break free from Inferno and to regain your old life. In the first case, the story becomes very much "film noir", with three true endings (and one particularly impressive bad one), most of them pitch black and very atmospheric. Or, you try to break away, which opens up some entirely new storylines. And if you ever thought that Takayuki was between a rock and a hard place in the last episode in KimiNozo has seen nothing yet - this must be some of the most cruel and unfair dramatic situations I've ever seen anyone in. Beautiful storytelling, extremely atmospheric and riveting, and still very logical and tight.

Simply amazing.

The Tech

PoI is a purely DVD-based game. That means that you simply have to insert the disc into your standalone player in the living room or your software player at your computer, and you're good to go. The story will play like any other anime as a subtitled video, but for most parts, you will get static backgrounds and standard character designs which are changing their expressions.

The entire game has japanese audio of professional seiyuus. For example most anime fans should be able to recognize Kikoku Inoue voicing Claudia. You as Zwei get a distinct voice too, and it definitely helps the atmosphere to hear the bubbly-lively Cal, the seething Drei, scheming-oily Scythe Master or the deadpan Ein (a character which was later stolen by Noir as Kirika). However, there's no English dub - that should come as a relief to most people.

Several sequences are animated CG of fairly high quality. If you watch the two trailers I've linked to, you will know quite well what you can expect. But also the static parts are enjoyable: The hundreds of different background graphics are nice to see and definitely help the atmosphere.

Since you cannot "save" a game on a DVD, the game offers passwords which can used to jump to branches. Around once per hour, you will be given a new password which you can later enter to jump back to the spot you left the game at. And no, it's not possible to guess combinations randomly to spoil yourself: We're talking about 30^8 possibilities.

The game itself offers the typical multiple-choice-at-branches setup. You can make the selection via remote control (or mouse-pointer in the case of software dvd players). The paths are flag-based, and to reach one of the "main true endings", you will have to make around 25 decisions. There are four "main true endings". On successful completion of such a path, you will be given 2 letters of the final password. With its help, you can reach the main menu which offers several extra movies and the full list of the excellent game OST.

The DVD is region-free and can be played on every system.

The Trailers

You can find the links to them at the top of the article.

The first one is the intro movie of the PoI DVD game and will be the very same you get when you fire up your player. It will give you a good idea what kind of graphics you can expect in the game.

The second one is the intro movie from the PC game version. Compared to the DVD version, this one has 1-2 extra animated sequences aaaand the H scenes which are only "hinted" at in the DVD version. The DVD version is listed for "Ages 15+", which seems like a fair assessment, taking into account the violent nature of the game, containing 1-2 relatively explicit shots.

The "H"

Yes, the DVD version has been reedited to be fairly "tame" in this aspect, but the real selling point (at least to me) aren't the sex scenes to begin with. The romance drama elements are very well-developed in the story and extremely compelling - especially to the end in the final third chapter, where the cards dealt to you give you only extremely cruel and hard choices. For those people who really really need the H to enjoy it, there's HGC packs around for it. I certainly didn't need them to be utterly delighted.

The Translation

Well... you'll soon see that not too much quality control went into the final version :) ... many many typos remain, and sometimes the punctuation is also strange. Nevertheless, the English is very readable and _not_ the kind of "Engrish" which plague some of the pseudo-translated games of old (see "Silver Giniro" for example). Perfectly readable and understandable.

The anime version

Forget it. It doesn't exist. I refuse to acknowledge the existence of this disgusting three-part OVA which butchers the beauty of the original game and turns it into a pointless bloodfest.

It depicts parts of the first chapter (of three). Instead of a subtle Film Noir, you get a butchering bloodfest with headshots a dozen from screaming killing machines. All the interesting parts from the first chapter are pretty much erased and the personalities of the main characters are twisted beyond recognition.

I'll say it once again: Ignore it. The game has next to nothing to do with the animation.

THANK GOD.

The Conclusion

Buy it.

I mean, for real. The whole game offers what I'd estimate to 30 hours of gameplay (the box understates them as 20, but I once clocked a single true ending path at over 14 hours), which is around 20 times what a normal anime DVD will offer you today, for less money.

If I had to take 10 DVDs to the famous remote island, Phantom of Inferno would be one of them. If you're a sucker for a dark-atmosphere plot and aren't adverse to gripping romance drama (and have a decent stash of hankies - I'm not ashamed to admit that I need them), here you go. And who knows, maybe you help convince other game companies that English translations of their games might be worth the time and effort invested.

I love it!

© memento 2003