Snacko
Level: Smiter
Rank Points: 448
Registered: 06-08-2006
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Disgaea: Hour of Darkness (+1)
I decided to rewrite this review because, one, this is my favorite game of all I've reviewed on this site and was largely ignored and, two, I thought the original review could have used some serious work. I've kept the original review at the bottom of the post if you're interested, but the new one is much smoother and more detailed.
Do you like games that are really, really deep, games that demand hundreds of hours just to scratch the surface of what’s on the disk? If so, Disgaea is an experience tailor made for you, it is obvious that developer Nippon Ichi would not stop until they made the largest, most complex and most addictive time sink of an sRPG of all time.
Seriously, the game throws in features like being able to amass enough loot to bribe senators into changing the rules of the game’s world, being able to knock your level all the way down to 1, keeping only a percentage of your abilities in exchange for bigger boosts when you level and being able to enter random dungeons inside your items to make them more powerful. Not only that, but the level cap is a whopping 9999 (yes, over 9000) and, depending on how you’ve played up to that point (and through heavy use of New Game+) you can access a total of four different final dungeons (two you’d play through just playing the game normally, but still…). Any one feature in the game, be it the brilliant mentor/pupil “extra gain” system, the seemingly endless expanses of the Item Worlds, the Dark Assembly or even the four side quests in the game can potentially eat up hundreds upon hundreds of hours.
The “meta game” that ties this all together is making one hell of an overpowered party, which is necessary just to get through the game’s main story, and you have more than enough tools to get the job done. The combat system is geared specifically towards amassing as much experience and loot as possible as quickly as possible. Team attacks that more than halve the damage of all but the main attacker reveals itself to be a great method for giving a level 1 cleric full credit for killing that level 70 dragon. Activating geo symbols doesn’t just work as a great method for dealing damage from the other side of the map, it does wonders for your bonus meter which governs how much loot you get for winning and throwing allies and enemies is fantastic for dispatching your foes in a quick manner. It always challenges you to try and get the most out of each battle and keeps the game from getting repetitive, a trap it comes far too close to falling in to.
Anyway, enough gushing. Disgaea puts you in the throne of King Laharl, the rightful Overlord of the Netherworld. Despite being alive for hundreds of years, Laharl is a spoiled, snot nosed brat who won’t hesitate to resort to violence to get what he wants. He oversleeps and wakes up after a two year nap to find his father has died by choking on a pretzel and every demon in the Netherworld is vying to become the new Overlord. Laharl, of course, does not like this and demands that his vassal Etna accompany him in his quest to find every tyrant and beat them to death (or in one case, out of gratitude “only beat [them] half to death”).
The story is charming and the dialogue is clever and funny, but the story really is too much of an anime parody for its own good. Laharl comes into contact with an angel early on that periodically challenges his stubborn, evil ways and the sappy “he’s really a great guy” scenes are far too common. The story is still enough fun to work, but anime haters should be warned.
The story characters aren’t nearly numerous enough to make a full party, right from the beginning you’ll be making your own members from scratch. Making one is simple, you choose who will create it, the class, what the level of aptitude is, and finally where to distribute points. When a character is first made, they’re not very powerful, nor do they really have the potential to become powerful, the only way they can become the gods they need to be to complete the game is to Transmigrate. Transmigration knocks the character’s level down to one and gives an incredibly harsh stat penalty, but allows you to add more stat points. The stat points govern how the character becomes more powerful when they level up, so when they reach the level they were when they last Transmigrated (which, given the fact that the enemies are a hell of a lot more stronger than when they were first level one, doesn’t take nearly as long as you’d think) they not only have built upon the abnormally high stats (for a level one character), but have gained far more power than they would have if they just kept leveling. Furthermore, this is the only way characters can change classes, so if you want a powerhouse Brawler with healing powers and naturally sharp spear skills, you’ll have to Transmigrate to a Warrior, a Cleric and a Brawler, spending enough time on each to allow the skills to be inherited.
Making characters has more uses than just more swords in your castle, the one who created the character becomes the character’s mentor and the mentor and pupil have a relationship known as "extra gain". The two have a higher chance of engaging in a team attack, the mentor benefits in many ways from the pupil growing stronger and the mentor can cast any of the pupils spells when the pupil is next to the mentor and, once the spell reaches level one, stays in the mentor’s arsenal.
Of course, adding incredibly powerful units to the army of a high ranking government official may not always be in the best interest of the Netherworld, higher levels of aptitude need to be cleared by the Dark Assembly, this is a democracy after all. Like any good senate, the Dark Assembly takes bribes, the only way to get certain motions passed is to give high ranking senators loot they want or otherwise beat anyone who opposes you to death. Of course, being killed painfully may give some of the more easily upset senators a grudge against you, but even they’ll come around if you give them a protein shake they really like. The Dark Assembly’s bills cover a large part of what plain leveling doesn’t. You can increase your chance of counter attacks, increase your speed, raise military funds for some pocket change and if a level is giving you trouble you can always declare the next day a national holiday where only exploding penguins are allowed to fight. The conditions for passing the bills are draconian (yays minus nays must be greater than or equal to the amount of mana it takes to propose the bill), but it’s the only way to open up certain side quests, increase certain stats or change the difficulty level.
The largest side quest of all is the item world considering there’s over a hundred battles in every sword, snack, shirt and stick of gum in the game, a lot more in some cases. In your castle is a machine that can shrink you down to the size of any item in the game and fight through randomly generated dungeons to power up the item. This acts somewhat as a “skirmish mode” as the main story levels are generally constructed in a puzzle like fashion (a trend that becomes more apparent in the game’s two sequels). There are, however, two problems with these dungeons: one, you can’t exit until you’ve cleared 10 battles in a row and two, due to the random generation it is possible that the game will put an enemy on an island too far away for you to throw an ally to, forcing you to skip the battle. The second is minor, but the first means this isn’t a good fit for quick play sessions, something that becomes even more of a problem if your playing one of the two portable ports on the go. Still, it’s a nice distraction killing a god who resides at the bottom of a chocolate éclair.
Battles themselves seem at first to be typical. You move your characters, attack enemies and once one side is completely dead, the battle is over. However, the aforementioned team attacks, extra gain, lifting and geo symbols all greatly alter the course of a battle. Lifting is just like it sounds, you can lift and throw any character or geo symbol as long as the thrower is a humanoid and the throwee is not on a No Lifting geo tile or is on a non friendly dimensional gate (the stairways of Item World’s dungeons). Geo symbols are a bit more complicated. Every geo symbol has a trait and a color. When a symbol is placed on a colored geo tile, all geo tiles on the battleground of that color gain that trait. When a geo symbol is destroyed, all tiles it is affecting goes through a geo explosion which change them to the symbol‘s color and cause damage to anything on the tile. Symbols can be destroyed by having all their health depleted or by being caught in a geo explosion, allowing you to construct elaborate, damaging combos. Furthermore, large combos add to your bonus gauge, a kind of point tally that governs how much loot you get at the end of a battle. The bonus gauge can also be increased by consecutively attacking the same enemy in a single execution phase which only starts when you or the AI tells it too, these combos also increase the damage of strikes.
It sounds incredibly complicated, but it it’s fairly easy to get a hold of when you’re actually in a fight and if you ever forget what something is, you can ask Etna for some documentation.
Speaking of Etna, she’s also the reason you should definitely pick up the PSP or DS version over the PS2 original if you can. Reading all of her diary entries (which can be accessed in the hidden castle bathroom) unlocks a new campaign starring her. She goes to the same areas and the side quests are the same, but the story sequences are entirely different and the enemies in story levels are arranged in new, more challenging fashions. It’s not an entirely new experience, but it’s still dozens of hours of new content, not that the game needed it. They also eliminate the surprising slowdown in the PS2 version and add a few new story characters, but, again, it’s not a gamebreaker and I’d still recommend the PS2 version.
Disgaea is a lengthy, enjoyable and deep RPG for the hardcore crowd. It’s not for everyone, its high level of difficulty and complexity almost completely alienates the casual crowd, but it’s a must have for any fan of turn based strategy games and the series represents the pinnacle of the genre, possibly jRPGs in general. Don’t pass it up.
The game goes under three names, the PS2 version is Hour of Darkness, the PSP version is Afternoon of Darkness and the DS version is known simply as Disgaea DS and will be released September 28th. The DS version will contain additional “commentary style” dialogue on the top screen and at least one new character, but will not contain a Japanese voice track.
Note, the original review, first posted on 7-21 is below. I personally believe the rewrite is much better, but it's here if you want it:
I have spent the last two hours inside a protein shake. This isn't any ordinary protein shake of course, this protein shake has done something to obtain the trait of being incredibly and arbitrarily rare, I know that it I progress far enough through this nutritional delight I will obtain...something. I'm not sure why, I guess it's just that this shake doesn't seem to be called "Legendary" because it is any better or worse than other protein shakes when consumed.
Disgaea has reawakened a long dormant drive to just see how overpowered my equipment and characters can get, a drive that was beaten down by jRPG after jRPG with boring, overly lengthy and mindless battles that make up a majority of the game. This is why I've always loved sRPGs, I love the party systems, the customization, everything about jRPGs but the style and gameplay, if battles are made more interesting I'm sufficiently seduced by the genre. Disgaea not only has a refreshingly odd battle system, but is a hardcore RPG player's proverbial wet dream. You say you want randomly generated dungeons? Here's one in every item which powers up the item more and more the farther you get? Customization? How's the ability to have access to not only every class for any character, but the ability to create any of the game's monsters (sans bosses). Leveling up? How's a level cap of, say, 9999 sound? This is a game you can play forever and still have something to strive for.
Disgaea comes from jRPG gods Atlus, the developers responsible for the Shin Megami Tensei series which, in Japan, is equal to Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy in popularity. More specifically it comes from Nippon Ichi, the studio responsible for the abysmally cheesy Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure as well as many Jigsaw puzzle compilations, both of which are somehow less impressive, but Disgaea is every bit as engrossing, deep and challenging as any of the SMT series, though it appears just as nauseatingly anime inspired as Rhapsody. The story, though rife with clever dialogue and irony, falls pray far too often to the conventions it parodies.
Laharl is the rightful heir to the throne of Overlord of the Netherworld. He's been asleep for two years to find that his father has allegedly died by choking on a pretzel. He immediately goes about reclaiming power, but that isn't what the story is about. The story has an episodic nature with fairly separate occurrences that play out like a long running Saturday morning cartoon show complete with previews of the next after each (though they rarely have anything to do with the next episode). What does makes it in to the satire laden story unscathed, however, are the nauseatingly sweet lessons on love and peace. The dialogue's satire is constant and, when it tries to be humorous, gets a lot more hits than misses, but when it tries to be dramatic I often get the sense that the symbolism is pointed out overtly when the point was obvious enough to begin with, think Mirror Moon's generally fantastic translation of the quasi-pornographic masterpiece "Tsukihime: Blue Blue Glass Moon".
The battle system is similarly quirky with many features that work together in excessively strange ways. The true magic of these are that they are incredibly easy to abuse. For example you can literally lift and throw units and certain objects, the fastest way to transport your incredibly powerful characters across the map is to create a complex network of units; an overly elaborate game of leapfrog. Every unit involved in combo attacks (which have a chance of happening whenever a unit is adjacent to an attacking unit) gains full experience, that means you can easily level up lower level units by involving them in battles against incredibly high powered enemies, you can easily increase your loot by leveling up the bonus gauge with a sequence of geo-tile changes, the possibilities for abuse are endless and so easy that there inclusion can't be a mistake.
So it is fairly easy, with enough time and ingenuity, to become far too powerful for your own good, so what do you. raise the difficulty? Do you really think the citizens of the Netherworld would allow a high ranking official to increase the power of the monsters that they deal with every day without going through the official channels? The Dark Assembly is one of the oddest features in any game, but it works perfectly. The basic premise is that any character in your party (if they have sufficient influence) can call the Dark Assembly, the Netherworld's senate, to vote on an issue. These issues can range from more expensive and valuable items being made available in your shops to new areas and sidequests being made available to you. Continuing the hardcore philosophy of the game, a character can be transmigrated. A transmigration knocks your level back down to 1 (although a counter is kept of your total levels) in exchange for leaving behind a portion of your stats. You not only level up faster, but you get bonus ability points meaning the stat boost you get from leveling up is greatly increased. This is also the only way to change your class, but as stated you keep a good deal of your stats making the whole system very "Final Fantasy Tactics"-esque. More time consuming and elaborate, but the same idea.
With its incredibly difficult side quests and ability to increase the difficulty at any time (if your bribing skills are up to the task of course), Disgaea is an incredibly replayable game. You can play the game through again with your levels and items for the most part intact so you can play for literally thousands of hours and still run into challenging battles. Want an idea of how fit this game is for replaying? There are about 8 different endings, four of which have their own final battle (though two of them are battles you play through anyway if you get the most common first, one of them is radically different and is the longest non-random side quest in the game).
The game was ported to the PSP with the subtitle "Afternoon of Darkness" with new side quests, items and non critical story characters (including Adell, the protagonist of the sequel) and multiplayer support. The biggest new feature is Etna Mode which you can unlock by unlocking and all of Etna's diary entries. This is a separate campaign starring Etna, Laharl's most trusted vassal who accidentally kills him while trying violently to wake him up from his two year nap. The maps are mostly the same as Laharl's journey, but the battles have been retooled and are generally more difficult. It isn't a whole new Disgaea (that's why I'm saving up for a PS3), but it is well worth playing for anyone who liked the initial quest. It is soon going to be ported to the DS, though only one new bit of content has been announced (the main character of Makai Kingdom, also by Nippon Ichi, is going to be playable).
Disgaea is a gigantic, polished and enjoyable strategy game that is worth playing if you enjoy sRPGs, but will prove to complex and time consuming for more casual gamers.
And it has exploding penguins, I just wanted to share.
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Director of the Department of Orderly Disruptions
[Last edited by Snacko at 08-23-2008 01:06 AM]
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