The Video Game Revue

Disgaea: Battle History of the Evil Kingdom

It's done--it's finally done. At 63 hours of play-time, I've finished Disgaea: Hour of Darkness (that's the North American title), and hardly a moment too soon considering that the sequel is nearly upon us. I probably could have finished the final level a couple of hours earlier, but once you get into a good rhythm in the Item World, sometimes it's hard to stop.

Disgaea is far from perfect. It's a bit of a grind and the battle system is a far cry from the most sophisticated Tactical RPG game systems out there. But what Disgaea lacks, it more than makes up for in style, and then some. It is a Tactical RPG, which is not a genre for everyone, but the charm of this game is undeniable: it's funny, it's approachable, it's endearing, it's addictive, and it has fantastic staying power. At the end of my 63 hour journey to finish Disgaea, I'm left with the warm, fuzzy feeling that Disgaea is more the sort of game that one is never really finished with. Disgaea may not be technically impressive, but it is a masterpiece of a game with a strong and well deserved cult following.

I'll throw out some general advice for anyone who is just starting Disgaea:

- Use the Transmute option on your characters to power them up to better classes. The advantage of doing this over creating new characters every time is that your transmuted characters retain their learned skills, which is really handy because you'll get some really powerful moves late in the game if you keep at it. In order to transmute a character, they have to gain a few ranks in the Dark Assembly first, but that should be no problem.

- When you have a level 1 character (at any point past the start of the game, that is) and you want to level them up quickly, equip them with really strong items to boost their stats so they can kill enemies at much higher levels than themselves right away. This trick is a staple in La Pucelle Tactics, and it still works in Disgaea.

- Use the Dark Assembly lots to keep store inventory up to date. Later on in the game, money should be easy to come by; I found that I didn't spend as much money on strong items as I should have. On the other hand, it's not hard to come by powerful items through random combat in the Item World either.

In continuing with my exploration of Nippon Ichi tactical RPGs, I did start briefly on Phantom Brave, which is the next game chronologically from Disgaea (don't be confused by the fact that La Pucelle is actually an older game than Disgaea, although it wasn't released in North America until later.) I've only just scratched the surface of Phantom Brave, but it does strike me as a much more complex game, with many more stats to keep track of as well as more sophisticated strategies involved in combat.

Although I still struggle a little bit with the control scheme in Phantom Brave (mostly because I have Disgaea programmed into my fingers), I'm really impressed by the fact that you can access orders through multiple contexts: for instance, you can "click" (X button with cursor) on the active character, select an action, and then select a target for the action, or you can click on the target first (instead of on the active character) and then select the action. Little touches like that are slick.

Anyway, there will be more about Phantom Brave--and hopefully Makai Kingdom and Disgaea 2 as well--in comming months.

posted by Parappa @ 11:41 AM