It’s not uncommon for Japanese games to include English voice acting, even for games that aren’t necessarily planned for release outside of Japan, just for the sake of maintaining an exotic vibe. PaRappa the Rapper for the Playstation and Sin and Punishment for the Nintendo 64 are fairly famous examples. Phase Paradox for the Playstation 2, however, is unusual even in this context due to the sheer quality of its voice cast. Names like Beau Billingslea and Mary Elizabeth McGlynn, names that quite literally legitimized English dub work for anime. Yet the game is remarkably obscure. What in the world happened there?
Phase Paradox has its origins in, of all things, the shooter game Philosoma for the Playstation, which came out in 1995. As a scrolling shooter with only minimal emphasis on plot, Philosoma is an odd choice of prequel here. After all, Phase Paradox is an ambitious space opera depicting the perspectives of several workers on the giant spaceship that was in orbit in a support role around Planet 220. This was where the action of Philosoma takes place, dealing with the immediate aftermath of the apparent destruction of the alien threat in that game.
This continuity is mostly irrelevant in Phase Paradox itself, which doesn’t provide any more information than just that the spaceship is there, and decimated by some sort of energy wave that transforms most of the crew, some faster than others, into a malicious alien presence. If this sounds like a survival horror premise, and a decent one at that, it is! Which is why anyone who actually tries to play Phase Paradox will probably be a little surprised to learn that the game has no action elements whatsoever. Despite the fixed screens and tanky controls giving the impression that Phase Paradox will play something like Resident Evil, at no point do any of the perspective characters fight the aliens directly.
So, what exactly do you do in this game then? Well, the only real video-gamey element of note in Phase Paradox is the use of what we would today call Quick Time Events- little prompts where you get to choose what the character does. The right answer prompts survival, the wrong one a death scene. Ironically, by having no action-based gameplay whatsoever, Phase Protocol accidentally manages to be quite ahead of its time in the sense that it’s a walking simulator- the derisive name given to games with technically impressive environments and stories (or at least, pretensions at these things), with no attention paid to any interactive elements.
Of course, the development team of Phase Paradox didn’t set out to make a walking simulator. By all accounts the production cycle of this game was quite ambitious- hence the high-profile voice actors. The environment of the spaceship is just plain huge, even if most of the rooms don’t actually have anything in them. The graphics are also fairly impressive for a first generation Playstation 2 title. It’s clear the production team wasn’t just twiddling their thumbs for four years. Unfortunately, aside from the bare minimum elements necessary to call Phase Paradox a game, there literally just isn’t anything there.
Philosoma, for what it’s worth, also had a troubled production, and managed to be a decent success in spite of that because, well, because it was an early Playstation title when the library wasn’t that great. Phase Paradox wasn’t so lucky, launching alongside 2001 titles that are best remembered for being much faster and much more intense than anything anyone had seen before. It’s little surprise that, high quality English voice acting notwithstanding, Sony never bothered to export it. The game surely would have been savaged by the press at the time for its general lack of interactivity.
In the modern day, it’s easier to look at Phase Paradox with a bit more sympathy. As cheesy as the game’s story can get, it’s remarkably sincere without any sense of retro-tinged irony. There’s something oddly compelling about this obviously unfinished game if only because we can see what the priorities of the developers were at the time. Or at least, we could see the gameplay elements they were able to figure out how to do halfway competently in a time of rapidly improving technology.
If you have four hours to kill, this longplay of Phase Paradox is a pretty fascinating watch. I don’t think there’s any good reason for anyone to actually play Phase Paradox, mind you. The title is worthwhile mainly because of the glimpse it offers to bygone gaming history- an alternate evolutionary track that, for various reasons, the industry didn’t go down.
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