It’s finally here! Yesterday, the Phantom Breaker series returned with Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds Ultimate, a remaster of MAGES.’ beat-’em-up classic. The release boasts a treasure trove of exciting additions, like cross-platform play, an English dub, and over thirty playable characters—Steins;Gate’s Kurisu and Robotics;Notes’s Frau among them.
It’s clear to see that Rocket Panda Games, the series’s new IP holder, put a lot of work into this release. How much? Well, we asked them for ourselves! We hope you’ll enjoy this exclusive interview with Rocket Panda Games CEO Mike McNamara and producer-slash-director Sakari P.
Kiri Kiri Basara: Thank you for joining us! Would you mind introducing yourselves and your respective roles on the Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds Ultimate project?
Mikey: My name is Michael/Mike, but everybody calls me “Mikey” McNamara, CEO of Rocket Panda Games (RPG for short). My primary role is to ensure the development team has access to the right resources at the right time… which is a nice way of saying I oversee the budget and schedule, and occasionally get to chime in on the creative side. 😛
Sakari P: I’m Masaki Sakari, also known as Sakari P. I serve as the producer/director at Rocket Panda Games Japan, the development arm of Rocket Panda Games. I was also involved in the development of the original version, so I’m overseeing PBBGU as well.
Kiri Kiri Basara: For our newcomers, can you introduce Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds Ultimate? What kind of game is it, and what can players expect from it? Any cameos our semicolon enthusiasts can look forward to?
Mikey: For the sake of saving everyone’s bandwidth, let’s call the game “PBBGU” from here on out. The game is a side-scrolling anime-style beat’em up with the soul of a fighting game. PBBGU supports up to 8-player cross-platform VS and 6-player co-op multiplayer, with 12 playable “main” characters and 24 playable enemy characters.
We put everything including the kitchen sink into the game.
At the moment, Kurisu and Frau are the two “semicolon” cameos, but depending on how successful our launch is, we are potentially looking at more. 👀
Sakari P: PBBGU is a pixel-art style 2D game. It features cute chibi characters taking down swarms of enemies in exciting, fast-paced battle action. We’re proud of the pixel art—we’ve made sure that guest characters like Kurisu and Frau move with smooth, lively animations. For fans of the semicolon series, there are tons of fun little references like tag-team moves with the Lab Members and a massive attack featuring Gunvarrel.
Kiri Kiri Basara: Exciting! And for our returning Battle Grounds fans, what does PBBGU bring to the table? Any fun new additions? We’ve heard something about being able to play as the truck…
Mikey: And you would be right about the truck. If I can direct your attention to around 0:30 of this trailer, you’ll see the truck in action.
But the biggest addition is definitely going to be Playable Enemy Characters and fleshed out online modes.
Sakari P: While retaining the core elements of the original, this version makes all enemy characters playable. It’s a bit of a nod to “Guardian Heroes” on the Sega Saturn, if you know, you know. You can control not just the truck, but also dragons, demons, even an egg. The more you use them, the more you can level them up and make them stronger.
Kiri Kiri Basara: Many of our readers are fans of MAGES.’ Science Adventure series (Steins;Gate, Robotics;Notes, etc.) Like SciADV, Phantom Breaker was originally a MAGES. IP, and they developed the series’s fighting games—as well as the original Battle Grounds spin-off—before Rocket Panda Games acquired the IP.
Mikey, can you explain how Rocket Panda Games came to be involved with the series, as well as why your company decided to acquire the rights to Phantom Breaker?
Mikey: Certainly.
Our sister company / marketing agency, Strangely Compelling Multimedia, helped market the original Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds for Xbox360. This was over 10 years ago, hah!
Interestingly, it was the original PBBG that brought the game’s producer, Masaki Sakari (we call him SakariP), and me together.
When I formed Rocket Panda Games around 2019 and was looking for games to develop / publish, SakariP suggested, “How about Phantom Breaker?” while we were having a drink in a bar. A few more drinks and lots of agreements later, Rocket Panda Games launched “Phantom Breaker: Omnia” in 2022.
Knowing all the work Rocket Panda was about to do for the Phantom Breaker franchise, SakariP and I talked about the possibility of RPG acquiring the IP, so we could do more with the franchise without oversight from MAGES. Ironically, since the acquisition, SakariP moved from MAGES and joined us at Rocket Panda Games, ensuring we preserve the core integrity of the Phantom Breaker series into the future.
Kiri Kiri Basara: Sakari P, it’s our understanding that you worked with MAGES. for a number of years on the Phantom Breaker series before you joined Rocket Panda Games.
What are some differences you’ve experienced when it comes to working with Rocket Panda Games? Does the language barrier ever come up, and if so, how do you overcome it?
Sakari P: When I was at MAGES., I also worked with small teams, so in that sense, things haven’t changed much. That said, the process of getting budget approvals is definitely more agile now. As for the language barrier, I think we’ve managed to overcome it pretty well with the help of bilingual team members and tools like ChatGPT. We don’t use AI for creative work, but it’s been really useful for emails and chat.
Kiri Kiri Basara: What have you enjoyed most about working on PBBGU? Any fun stories or interesting anecdotes you’d like to share?
Mikey: Like most ambitious projects, there were lots of ups and downs throughout its 3-year development timeline.
But for this question, I’ll focus on the fun bits… which will have to be making the enemies playable. As we were demoing the game for press and industry colleagues, everyone was blown away with the idea of playing The Truck.
SakariP and I actually went back into the game and added more special attacks and flips (!!? 😱) to the Truck’s moveset, so players will get to really have fun with that one.
Sakari P: It’s never just this one game, honestly, every game development project is full of hurdles. Just when you think you’re climbing the stairs, you realize you’ve somehow ended up back at the bottom. There are always problems like creative ones, of course, but also issues with people, money, contracts… It’s like living a whole mini-life every time. And while it’s exhausting in the moment, that feeling of accomplishment when you finally push through is what makes it all worth it.
Kiri Kiri Basara: What are some challenges you encountered while working on PBBGU, and how did you and the team overcome them?
Mikey: Two of the biggest challenges were getting Unreal Engine 5 to play nice with 2D sprites, and the Online Multiplayer.
The cross-platform online multiplayer specifically, was causing our engineers a lot of headaches, as UE was designed to handle FPS games and not side-scrolling action games, which have different input and latency needs.
To overcome them, the dev team had to do a lot of trial-and-error. And occasionally, we go down the wrong development philosophy and have to walk it back, which is very painful.
Nonetheless, the accumulated knowledge among the team now is going to inform a lot of the future projects we work on.
Sakari P: Even though this is technically an indie game, developing something of this scale, launching on seven platforms, supporting full cross-play, and doing it all remotely over several years was a huge challenge. Honestly, I think it’s only because of Mikey’s leadership and the team’s relentless dedication and patience that we made it to the finish line. I’m just incredibly thankful to everyone who stuck it out with us.
Kiri Kiri Basara: Back in 2023, many readers were surprised to learn that the original versions of Battle Grounds would be delisted ahead of the upcoming release of Battle Grounds Ultimate. Mikey, can you explain why the decision was made to do so?
Mikey: Very astute observation.
The intent behind delisting the original versions was because it’s impossible to transfer the “ownership” of a project from publisher to publisher; thus, Rocket Panda Games technically owned the IP, but MAGES was still selling the old games, which we both agreed needed to be phased out.
With that said, we may bring back the Steam version at a later date, calling it “Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds Classic” or something to that effect. Stay tuned!
Kiri Kiri Basara: At the time of this writing, Battle Grounds Ultimate is about to release to the public—which means the series will be back in fresh territory soon. What are your hopes and aspirations for the future of Phantom Breaker?
Mikey: Every producer dreams that their project or franchise will light the world on fire and become the next Star Wars.
But, if we play our cards right I do think we can have some really cool content surrounding the Phantom Breaker world. In fact, the five main girls from the game formed a band that plays all the music.
They’re called the Phantom Breakers.
Who knows? If everything goes well, there might be a manga or anime based on Phantom Breaker. It all comes down to how much grit SakariP and I have.
Sakari P: I try not to box myself in creatively. If something looks fun, whether it’s a new IP or someone else’s, I’m always up for diving in. That said, Phantom Breaker really is something special to me. It’s got a world that can flex in all sorts of ways: action, adventure, RPG, you name it. Who knows, maybe the next Phantom Breakers game will be something totally unexpected. Stay tuned!
Kiri Kiri Basara: Let’s cap this off with a fun one: Who’s your favorite Phantom Breaker character, and why?
Mikey: She’s not in Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds Ultimate, but I’ve got zero resistance to characters in military uniform.
Sakari P: As for my favorite character… It has to be Waka. I’ve worked with the voice actress who played her on several projects, and we were quite close. So when she passed away, it really hit me hard. But even now, when I play as Waka, I can still hear her voice. In that way, she’s still with us, and that makes Waka incredibly special to me. Sorry if that got a little heavy, but it’s from the heart.
We want to convey a very special thanks to Mikey, Sakari P, and the PR teams of Rocket Panda Games and Strangely Compelling Media for making this interview possible!
Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds Ultimate is available now on Steam, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, and the Epic Games Store. Physical preorders and merch are also available here. Last but not least, you can read our review of the game here.
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