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Your aura depletes as you fire off skills, and it replenishes automatically over time until it reaches your current level. You begin a duel at level 0, but each aura particle that you pick up and use raises your level by one. A significant part of your arsenal's 30 slots must be devoted to aura particles, which appear out of your arsenal just like skills and are sort of analogous to "land" in Magic. The amount of aura you have is determined by your level. If you burn through your entire arsenal before the duel ends, your life points begin to drain until you eventually die.Įach skill costs a certain amount of "aura" to activate (think "mana"). After a few seconds, a new skill is randomly pulled from your arsenal, crammed into an orb, and placed back at your starting spot so that you'll generally have three new skills available at any given moment. This is effectively the top of your "draw pile."īy standing on top of an orb and pressing X, Y, B, or A, you replace the skill currently mapped to that button with whatever skill is contained in the orb. Three other randomly selected skills from your arsenal also appear as glowing orbs at your starting spot. You begin a round with four skills that are randomly selected from your "arsenal" (Phantom Dust's term for "deck"), which may include up to 30 skills in total. Instead of a traditional complement of weapons, however, you're armed with "skills." You can carry four skills at a time, each one mapped to one of the X, Y, B, and A buttons.
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Movement controls are typical for a third-person action game (left stick moves, right stick adjusts the view), and the duels take place in real time across various shooter-esque 3D environments. The duels are the meat of the game, where the object is to reduce your opponents' life points to zero before they do the same to you. This guy's not kidding-expect to wade through a lot of babbling.Įssentially, gameplay is a cross between the deck-building and card-collecting elements of Magic: The Gathering and the controls, speed, and environmental tactics of a shooter. Designed by Panzer Dragoon Saga creator Yukio Futatsugi, Phantom Dust is a unique and terrifically successful blend of strategy, tactics, and fast action. Though Microsoft must have had its reasons for dropping it, it's hard to imagine what those reasons could have been. First up, however, is Phantom Dust, an action/strategy hybrid developed by Microsoft Game Studios in Japan, published by Microsoft in Asia, and then abandoned by Microsoft for North American release. One eccentric castoff, Double Fine's Psychonauts, arrives in a few weeks.
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"So everything that we've been able to do in this version of Phantom Dust has been through reverse-engineering the binaries, and actually hacking and cracking the code back open again," he told Polygon.Įarlier this year, Microsoft said the re-release should be out "before E3," which is now just three weeks away, but there has been little word regarding its launch since.Majesco is gaining a reputation for publishing offbeat titles that have been unceremoniously dumped by Microsoft. Microsoft Studios creative director Adam Isgreen recently explained the challenges of the project, as the company didn't have access to the game's final source code. It runs at a higher resolution than the original game, supports widescreen, and adjust how the single-player progresses.
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The company officially describes this as a re-release, but it does boast improvements.
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Even better news is the fact that it will be a free download. Microsoft's Aaron Greenberg announced on Twitter today that the Phantom Dust re-release launches tomorrow, May 16, on both Xbox One and PC (Windows 10 only).
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We've since learned about a re-release of the original game, which is now coming extremely soon-and at a lower price than anyone imagined.
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At one point, it looked as if the Phantom Dust series might have been axed completely, as the developer of a new title was shut down in 2015.
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