Xbox Addict

Phantom Dust Now Available on Xbox One and Win 10, for Free

Phantom Dust, a game that was an OG Xbox title, is now available for play on both the Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs. It’s a game that was, for it’s time, something fresh and original.  

Phantom Dust is such a unique game, that when it was released for the original Xbox in 2004 in Japan, it was hard to classify. Microsoft decided at the time to not release it in the United States, although it was already localized in English. A card game plus an action game with quirky Japanese style and a post-apocalyptic setting? Who’d ever heard of such a thing?

While Phantom Dust did get released in the U.S. through another publisher, it did so as a limited release to a passionate audience – an audience that was still playing it online the day we turned off the original Xbox multiplayer servers. It became a cult classic, and for over a decade, fans have found ways to continue to play the game on modified original Xbox’s, or via special LAN tunneling programs on the Xbox 360’s back-compatible version.

Fast forward to today.  The game is now on the Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs for free.  For solo players, it has a 15+ hour campaign that takes you through a story of loss, isolation, and belief, set in a world ravaged by a strange etheric dust.

On the multiplayer side, it features up to four-player games with a host of options and incredible team combat dynamics. It features collectible card game mechanics, in which you earn skills and credits through play and visit the in-game shop to buy skills in random packs or pick specific ones from the incredible diversity of over 300 skills the game offers. There’s a skill for anything you could possibly think of, allowing the creation of generalist combat decks to specific ones that require unique play strategies, great timing, combinatorial teamwork, or good draws to completely obliterate opponents in moments. Its excellent balance and the very nature of the game (and 13 years of play) has never resulted in a “perfect” deck being created.

In the end, Microsoft didn’t give Phantom Dust a chance to really find its audience when it was first released, and while visually it remains a product of the era it was created in, its gameplay is still just as compelling and unique today as it was then.