The Haunted Hoard: Phantom Fighter (NES)

Jiangshi, also known as Chinese hopping vampires, are a particular type of undead who can suck the life energy from a person. However, unlike many reanimated corpses, rigor mortis already set in, making them stiff so they are often seen hopping around, arms outstretched, as they chase down the living. While Phantom Fighter refers to this folkloric figures as kyonshies, this martial arts action game on the NES almost exclusively features jiangshi enemies, a commendable commitment for a creature that isn’t that well known but one that does a feel a bit at odds with the fast-paced Kung Fu action your character brings to the table.

 

Phantom Fighter began as a movie adaptation in Japan. The film Reigen Doshi (or Mr. Vampire) is actually a bit of a comedy, but in translating this side-scrolling action game to English and scrubbing away the licensed property, Phantom Fighter is left as a more serious effort to rid various villages of kyonshies who have taken residence in buildings, graveyards, and forests. Admittedly, comedy does squeak in at times, mainly in the manual that refers to the enemies as “those wacky Chinese phantoms” and the martial arts expert you play as is said to have an incompetent assistant who does sometimes crack a joke when you fail about how he’ll be the new one to save the day. Generally, the adventure is treated pretty seriously in the game’s context, your character Kenchi stoic and revered with most every village overjoyed to finally see him arrive.

The issue with fighting stiff hopping corpses will become apparent almost immediately as you face your first foe. Very few kyonshies have any sort of special attack or trick, the majority of them relying on leaping towards you over and over and hoping their hands poke you as they do so. If you do stand close to them they can jab at you a bit, but generally, most every fight in Phantom Fighter will involve a kyonshi leaping towards you and you need to find the right moments to strike without getting prodded by their outstretched arms. At first, Kenchi himself also seems very limited in what he can do, a simple punch and kick joined by a jump and crouch as your only means of facing off with the first few life-sucking fiends. While your blows can sometimes knock a kyonshi down, you won’t really know when this will occur, meaning hit and run tactics are likely your best bet.

 

There are only two ways to heal, one being to grab one of the three special Jade orbs you need to find in each of the eight villages in order to face the boss monster and the other being to clear out a temple of kyonshies so the monk within can provide free heals on visits. Otherwise, any damage you sustain will be carried between battles, and as you reach later villages and need to clear out their buildings, you’ll sometimes face multiple battles in a row. The kyonshies not having diverse tactics does help you some, you won’t be blindsided by what they can do, but there are a few variants that can make them tougher. Small kyonshies are hard to hit safely and can’t be crouched under, while certain large and tall kyonshies seem better at hitting you if you’re too close when they stand up. The fights will grow repetitive because that type of iteration isn’t particularly meaningful, but luckily while the battles stay fairly the same throughout the adventure, Kenchi can grow to become a more capable warrior.

 

Training dojos exist in some villages, these crucial to increasing your attack options so that Phantom Fighter isn’t an agonizingly slow experience. First, you’ll need to clear out some buildings in town, whatever resident is trapped inside sometimes offering helpful information, useful items, or training scrolls. The items can be brought to battle to help, a sword giving you a new attack type even though it’s shockingly fragile while a talisman can briefly freeze a foe or the tonten mirror can knock a foe backwards. These are quickly exhausted and often not the greatest prizes, but the scrolls can be taken to the dojo to learn new moves, provided you solve some trivia first. The multiple choice trivia questions can be quite simple, like asking which country samurais come from, but others can provide three answers that are all correct or ask about something unusually specific. Some expect you to have knowledge about kyonshies that is not given elsewhere or have some awareness of Chinese history, but the good news is if you don’t know something odd like that kyonshies apparently hate ice cream, you can just try again to get a new trivia question and then finally go to redeem some training from the master.

The attacks you can learn in Phantom Fighter are mostly strict upgrades, things like letting Kenchi strike multiple times with a button press so each blow does more damage, and almost every time you get a new skill it is a satisfying little boost to your abilities. Fights will go by faster and battles will be less risky, but the later villages stringing more battles together will mean there is still room to become more capable. Eventually you will start getting some truly unique attacks rather than competency upgrades. A drop kick gives you a nice way to slip past a foe while damaging them if you time it right, and unlocking crouch punching can start to trivialize the taller energy vampires who have nothing they can do against that tactic. However, there are few unique foes to encounter, such as a ghostly woman who is the only time you really need to worry about aerial combat much, and each village’s boss kyonshi has some trick or gimmick to make them a bit different. One can launch itself across the arena, another comes wielding a weapon, and one even utilizes fiery projectiles, although if you take the time to build up training scrolls by repeating kyonshi battles elsewhere, some of the bosses are pushovers because their gimmick isn’t strong enough to make you have to be cautious in unleashing your own strength.

 

One unusual touch is also included in the form of a baby kyonshi named Conshi. Bring the bell item to face this normally harmless little vampire and it will actually join your side, fighting for you albeit not very well. You actually control it fully and it battles the same way the normal kyonshies do, meaning it’s a bit of a tedious hopping battle if you do try to get some use out of baby Conshi. More a curiosity than a useful option, it can perhaps at least buy you some time if you’re low on life and need to weaken some foes on your way to a healing opportunity.

THE VERDICT: Phantom Fighter never really finds its footing because the competition is stiff in a far too literal way. All of the kyonshies hop towards you in basically the same way, even the bosses often not shaking up the formula enough to make the battles more exciting. The skills you earn by collecting scrolls and learning at the dojo do feel satisfying in a way because they speed up the fighting and give you new tricks, but you’re still just trying to dodge the outstretched arms of hopping vampires so the game mostly just gets less bad rather than truly better.

 

And so, I give Phantom Fighter for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

A BAD rating. Kenchi gradually gets more interesting to control and better at taking down individual kyonshies in Phantom Fighter, but the other side of the conflict isn’t carrying its part of the experience quite so well. A bit of a rough start is forgivable to make those first few upgrades feel important, and you don’t even need all the strongest ones to be able to keep up with the bosses you’ll encounter. However, running into the same small handful of kyonshi types with such little meaningful variation between them makes Phantom Fighter a bit of a bore. The other items you can acquire aren’t interesting additions, the enemies almost always use the same tricks to fight back, you’re just gradually getting better at speeding up the process or accommodating certain threats. More of the regular hopping vampires should have mixed up how they try to attack you so that your new skills can be used for more than trying to nail baddies as they hop all about. Phantom Fighter at least doesn’t become too easy as you grow your abilities, the simple strategy of the kyonshies still able to hit hard enough that you have to be smart about how you approach battle. That same type of battle over and over again just isn’t a thrilling gameplay loop though, playing through all eight villages feasible thanks to easy continues and passwords but not appealing because there’s not enough of note to keep you playing.

 

Phantom Fighter really should have been less faithful to the kind of threats a jiangshi normally presents. It is almost admirable they only let the rare boss monster break from the rules of the creature, but if every enemy save that rare ghost is going to be a kyonshi, being a kyonshi should have been more interesting or variable. Perhaps Phantom Fighter should have expanded its scope beyond the hopping vampires, or even just take a note from the film it was based on since Mr. Vampire had more flexible kyonshies and other monsters to contend with. Instead, it committed to the one idea to its detriment, only your own expanding Kung Fu knowledge keeping this game from feeling too stiff as well.