Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds is a 2D side-scrolling brawler set in a Japanese fantasy world. It's a spin-off of the fighting game Phantom Breaker . The player selects one from four young female characters: Mikoto, Waka, Itsuki, or Yuzuha. They fight against various monsters and try to find the mysterious Phantom who has kidnapped the sister of one of the girls. The game consists of several levels where large groups of enemies need to be defeated by stringing together moves into combos. As its origins are in one-on-one fighting, there are a larger amount of moves. Girls have access to weak, medium and strong attacks combined with special moves. They can also dash, break off guard, and jump between the foreground and the background to dodge. Each heroine uses her own weapon, like a spear or a sword. Through fights, experience points are earned to access new skills from a small skill tree between levels.
The game has several modes, including single-player mode, cooperative mode, an arcade mode focused on clear times and high scores, and competitive battlegrounds mode against other players.
The later release of Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds - Overdrive introduces new skills and abilities for character customization, such as air dash attack, shadow attack, and triple jump. Some of these are found in new secret alternative routes that require certain conditions to unlock. These also lead to new items and enemies. With the new abilities, some levels now have more enemies on the screen at once, but there are also more item drops. The game music has been re-arranged as well.
Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds was released for the Xbox 360 in April 2011 and is a fighting game.