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Disgaea

2007-04-10: Disgaea - Video Games

I clocked about 120 hours into this game. That should tell you a couple of things right there, both good and bad. The good is that it's a rock-solid and fun game. The bad is that it is structured around the level-grind paradigm. In its defense, though, the level grinding is damn fun. The game style is very similar to other tactical strategy games such as Final Fantasy Tactics, Vandal Hearts, and their grand-daddy Shining Force. You assemble a combination of "storyline" characters (think FF7) and your own custom created characters (think FF1), and battle them on a turn-based grid against ever more powerful enemies. At its core, it is pretty standard fare, but there are many interesting layers on top of its simple core that make it a very unique game.

The most obvious innovative game mechanic is the item world. In addition to the standard character leveling you can accomplish in this kind of game, Disgaea allows you to enter an "Item World" for any item in your inventory. The item world is comprised of a series of randomly generated dungeon levels that become increasingly difficult as you descend. For every dungeon level you complete, the item is increased by one level, and thus its applicable statictics are improved. In addition to this, you are able to defeat "Specialists" within the item world, thus freeing them and allowing you to move them from item to item. (Think materia from FF7). This Item World is one of the reasons that the "grind" is a lot of fun. Rather than being forced to kill the same spawn of womprat over and over, you can play randomly generated dungeons in any one of your items. As you find more powerful items, the types of monster you encounter in their item worlds become more powerful and varied. In fact, there are many items in the game that can only be acquired from enemies in the Item World of unique items.

Another interesting feature is the Dark Assembly. Rather than your weapon shop automatically stocking better items as you progress through the game, Disgaea requires that you petition the Dark Assembly for better items. In order to have any success at all in this petition, one of your party must succeed in a series of character rank trials which are completely independent of character level. After attaining sufficient character rank and "mana" (points earned for killing monsters), you can then call for a vote. Prior to the vote, you are allowed to strategically bribe senators to support your bill. Even if you ultimately lose the vote, you have the option of fighting the senate to the death to force your bill through, a very dangerous -- but often necessary -- proposition.

The characters in Disgaea follow the career-path paradigm common to a lot of these tactical strategy games. One interesting twist, however, is that rather than implementing the standard one or two branch mechanism, you are allowed to promote your characters to any other class you wish. One of my most powerful characters was a healer who I chose to promote up to an offensive mage. This leads me to another interesting mechanic: the pupil system. When you create new characters in this game, you choose their mentor. Whenever a mentor is within 1 tile of his pupil, he gains all of their abilities at level 1. When the mentor uses the ability enough times to reach level 2 with that ability, this ability becomes permanent. Using this I was able to build a quite eclectic fighting team.

The skill and magic system in this game are very interesting, with even your traditional combat characters having "spells" that allow them to do massive damage. The scale of the spells increases dramatically as the game progresses, and your characters go from doing simple sword swings and fireballs to summoning ice gods or literally throwing your enemies into the center of the sun! Although your melee characters do learn spells, it is really the mages who shine. In late game, the sheer range, area of effect, and damage of their high level spells is just staggering. My mages leveled much quicker than my other character types.

There is quite a bit of unlockable content in this game. Simply unlocking several character classes can be a fair amount of work. For example, unlocking the star mage class required that I level up a Fire, Wind, and Ice mage. Unlocking some of the "hidden" classes requires quite a lot more work, and there are many classes that I never unlocked. In addition, many of the game worlds are only unlockable after attaining a very high character rank in the Dark Assembly, and even then require you to kill a senate full of very high rank demons.

This leads me to one minor gripe with the game. It is relatively easy to beat this game, but many of the optional side areas are insanely hard to unlock. And the difference in character level necessary to reach each of these side areas is very stark. After unlocking a particular side level and beating it, you can be rest assured that it will take many (easily around 20) hours of grinding to reach the next interesting area. In fact, some of these grinds occur on successive levels in a side area, such that level 4 will be a cakewalk, but level 5 will require you to level to about 10x your current level.

Another minor gripe of mine is the item naming conventions. All of the items in the game are nonsensically named, and it is virtually impossible to know whether a given item of a particular type is more powerful than the one you have. The only way in-game to glean this is to put them both in your inventory and see which one has better stats. It is impossible to simply know by their names. I had to have the game FAQ in front of me at all times to know what items were. For example, all healing items are identical, and have nonsensical names like candy, cotton candy, eclair, chocolate. Hmm...Does chocolate recover more hit points or does cotton candy?

Those two points aside, this is an absolutely engrossing strategy RPG, and I think it represents the absolute best of the genre. I played it through to the end, and also played through several different ways to trigger alternate endings, unlocked many of the side areas and beat them, and went crazy in item world leveling up everything from my swords to my cotton candy.

Finally, the story in this game is actually pretty entertaining and funny. This game was the first that I can remember where I didn't mind that the cutscenes were not skippable (although you were able to rush through them by pressing X). The anime-style art is very pleasing on the eye, and the music box intro is a very calming and pretty little melody.

This game is difficult to get, as it is somewhat obscure and in very high demand (I got mine for 50 bucks used), but if you can find a copy, I highly recommend it.

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