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cosmicspear(Originally posted on November 1.)
The back of the Disgaea box proudly declares, "Strategy RPG's are about to get a serious kick in the ass!" And there may be a pretty obvious typo there, but it is a pretty accurate statement.
Disgaea stars Laharl, the crown prince of the Netherworld. At the start of the game he's woken up by his loyal and totally not obviously plotting against him vassal Etna (through the use of such classic sleep-ending implements as swords, flails, drills, and a minigun) who informs him that his father, the great King Krichevskoy, died two years ago. Which he finds more than a little bizarre considering he never intended to sleep that long—his nap was only supposed to last ten days.
Yeah, it's that kind of game.
Anyway, having two years pass between the last Overlord's death and his heir doing anything whatsoever has left the Netherworld full of random warlords trying to take over, none of whom even remotely respect Laharl. So he sets out to take the throne by force, taking on everyone who dares disrespect him.
At the same time, Seraph Lamington, the leader of the angels who rule Celestia, sends a trainee named Flonne on what is ostensibly an assassination mission but is blatantly actually some other scheme whose nature will inevitably be revealed over the course of the game. And other elements in Celestia, as well as on Earth, are also preparing their own plans...
Disgaea approaches all of this with an extremely silly attitude. For instance, Laharl blatantly refuses to show the first boss any respect whatsoever, renaming him Mid-Boss during his introduction, and the game immediately accepts this. A later level features you facing off against the ultimate zombie, armed with the brain of the great sorcerer Mahogany, the body of Hercules...and a horse wiener (and yes, that is exactly how they refer to it), which is the only part Laharl is at all worried about. And all of those parts can be stolen to have your own units use them.
Also of note are the Prinnies, penguin-like demons who explode when thrown, say "dood" a lot, and are constantly the victims of assorted kinds of physical comedy. Like when a bunch of them challenge you to a game of baseball...and your party absolutely refuses to play by their rules, leading to a ridiculously easy fight.
Yet at the same time, Disgaea also knows when to stop joking around. The most famous moment of this is the game's eighth chapter, which I will not spoil but it manages to have more emotional impact than a lot of completely serious stories. And it never lets the jokes undermine the story it's trying to tell, which becomes particularly clear in the second half of the game when all the plot threads start really paying off. There's still jokes, but it's not about to let them overshadow the serious points.
It also benefits heavily from a strong main cast. Laharl, Etna, and Flonne play off each other extremely well, with Etna's cynical and sarcastic attitude and Flonne's extreme belief in the power of love being an effective contrast. Laharl's attitude, which initially looks like a joke as he constantly insists he's the most evil demon around even as he's obviously struggling to hide his kinder side, is particularly important as well—in the end, this is a story about his growth as a person, and his gradual shift away from the heartless persona he initially tries to project is handled more or less perfectly.
And really, Laharl's development is one of the most important elements of the game's theme of how people should be judged by who they are rather than by existing prejudices—a frequently explored idea, yes, but it's a classic for a reason. He contrasts well with Vulcanus, the main angelic antagonist, who despite preaching righteous ideals is blatantly in it only for himself—in essence, being more traditionally demonic than any of the actual demon cast members.
So Disgaea's plot is much more gripping and effective than you probably expected if you only know it as "that game with demons and lots of level grinding." What about the gameplay?
Well, it's very unique, particularly compared to the other kinds of SRPGs that existed at the time. For starters, you deploy units from a base panel instead of choosing them before you start fighting. You can also back out of any movement or actions that haven't yet had an effect on the battlefield, provided the tile your character started the turn on is still open. Characters can also support each other when they attack, which only uses up the attacking unit's turn—so you can then back out of the movement for your other characters and have them do something else, for example.
But wait, there's more! Because you can also lift and throw any unit, ally or enemy. Throw allies to let them move farther! Throw enemies to keep them from attacking your squishies! Throw enemies into each other to combine them and mix their levels together, letting you get more experience! Throw characters who are carrying other characters to get even more range! Lift an enemy guarding a chokepoint, let your guys through, and undo the action to leave the enemy probably stuck between your guys! There's a lot of possibilities with throwing, and it's one of the more fun mechanics out there.
There's also Geo Panels, which are one of the most unique takes on the terrain effects you see in every SRPG that I've run into. You see, instead of certain tile types having fixed effects, tiles might contain a Geo Panel of a particular colour, whose effects are based on objects called Geo Symbols that contain them. If there's red Geo Panels that have an ATK +50% symbol on them, everyone standing on the red panels gets a 50% increase to their offensive stats. If there's green panels that have an EXP +50% symbol on them, anything you kill that's on one of those gives you 50% more experience. If the red panels also have a Damage 20% symbol on them, they also cause anything standing on them to lose 20% of its max HP at the start of every turn. And you can throw the symbols around to change which panels have which effects—if you move the Damage 20% to a green panel, then the green panels are the ones with that effect. But there's more to it, because Geo Symbols are also colour-coded, and if you destroy one on a panel that's a different colour from it, those panels change to match the colour of the symbol you just destroyed! This also produces a shockwave effect that damages everyone on the panels that changed. So in our example, if the ATK +50% symbol on the red panels is green, you can destroy it to turn all the red panels into green ones that have the effects of all the symbols on the green (and everything that was on a red panel takes damage). And if the shockwave from destroying one symbol hits another symbol, it destroys that symbol no matter what its HP is, and if that symbol is a different colour from the panels, it changes them too! And to finish things off, there are also clear Geo Symbols that just destroy the panels they're on if you destroy them, and destroying all the panels gets you a nice boost to your bonus meter. So let's go back to our example and say the ATK +50% is clear, the EXP +50% is red, and the Damage 20% is blue. Destroying the EXP +50% would turn all the green panels red and destroy the Damage 20%. All the red panels would then turn blue, and the ATK +50% would be destroyed. This would then destroy all the blue panels, which is probably all the panels on the field.
(Mind you, most of the time you're not clearing out Geo Panels in the story maps. Usually you have to, say, find a way to get rid of some Enemy Boost symbols that are making a group of regular enemies into seriously dangerous murder machines before they kill you.)
Also of note is the combo system, which makes attacks stronger if you repeatedly attack the same enemy. This only works if you queue up multiple attacks at once and then confirm them, and also gives you more bonus meter (and thus rewards) than attacking separately would. The downside, though, is that the more attacks you set up the harder it is to keep track of what tiles your attacks will hit, which increases your risk of killing one of your own units, which is bad because if you get even one ally kill? You can say goodbye to the good ending until your next loop.
You also have the Dark Assembly, which is where you go to do...a lot of things, really. You use it to upgrade the shops, recruit new generic characters, transmigrate your characters (letting them start over from level 1 with bonuses for what their stats were when you used it), unlock bonus areas, and so forth. A lot of this involves bribing senators to vote for things you want them to, which is a complex and arcane process whose primary variables aren't visible in the bribery interface and just might end up being irrelevant once you get strong enough to pass bills by force instead. They also demand that you reach the right rank to propose certain things, which involves doing promotion exams where you fight solo against specific enemies. The promotion exams, not to put too fine a point on it, suck ass. Not only does the system ignore how a lot of units really don't have the durability for solo combat, but because elemental resistances are random, it's not unheard of for mages to face enemies they literally can't damage. And it's game over if you die in a promotion exam, so good luck!
Then there's the Item World, which is exactly what it sounds like—a world inside every item. Using this has you go through a bunch of short randomly generated maps all in a row, then when you're done the item levels up and gets stronger. You can also run into specialists, which are specific enemies that provide bonus stats, and if you defeat them you can move them to another item or combine them with other specialist of the same type, letting you effectively build ultimate weapon. It's surprisingly fun, and I don't think I've ever seen anything like it in any previous SRPG.
And then there's the subject of what everyone knows about Disgaea: the level grinding. If you've heard of these games before, you probably know about how the level cap is 9,999 and you can eventually do millions of damage with each attack. Fortunately this is handled a lot more sensibly than that simple explanation makes it sound. During the main story you're not expected to go above level 100, and even that would be extremely high for it. There's also plenty of maps, both in the main game and the postgame, that exist primarily to give you a place to grind lots of levels extremely quickly. The jump from the final boss being L90 to the first postgame area's boss being L1,000 is a lot less intimidating when you can gain dozens of levels in a single attack even before you start stacking experience-buffing effects.
There's a few different versions of the game out there, and I played the North American PS2 version. There's also the PSP version that adds an alternate story and replaces Etna's English voice with a somewhat less fitting one, the DS version that is surprisingly intact for being a PS2 game ported to DS, the PC version that changes the interface but is mostly just a new coat of paint on the PSP version, and the Complete version, which has different1 graphics and lets healers get experience for healing like in later games in the series. So there's a decent amount of variety, but there's no really bad versions of the game or anything.
All told, Disgaea is a classic that I'd strongly recommend playing
1. I say "different" and not "better" because for the most part they just pasted the HD sprites from later Disgaea games into the original game without considering things like how a few monsters have a radically different look in the HD sprites or how some types just don't exist in that spriteset.
The back of the Disgaea box proudly declares, "Strategy RPG's are about to get a serious kick in the ass!" And there may be a pretty obvious typo there, but it is a pretty accurate statement.
Disgaea stars Laharl, the crown prince of the Netherworld. At the start of the game he's woken up by his loyal and totally not obviously plotting against him vassal Etna (through the use of such classic sleep-ending implements as swords, flails, drills, and a minigun) who informs him that his father, the great King Krichevskoy, died two years ago. Which he finds more than a little bizarre considering he never intended to sleep that long—his nap was only supposed to last ten days.
Yeah, it's that kind of game.
Anyway, having two years pass between the last Overlord's death and his heir doing anything whatsoever has left the Netherworld full of random warlords trying to take over, none of whom even remotely respect Laharl. So he sets out to take the throne by force, taking on everyone who dares disrespect him.
At the same time, Seraph Lamington, the leader of the angels who rule Celestia, sends a trainee named Flonne on what is ostensibly an assassination mission but is blatantly actually some other scheme whose nature will inevitably be revealed over the course of the game. And other elements in Celestia, as well as on Earth, are also preparing their own plans...
Disgaea approaches all of this with an extremely silly attitude. For instance, Laharl blatantly refuses to show the first boss any respect whatsoever, renaming him Mid-Boss during his introduction, and the game immediately accepts this. A later level features you facing off against the ultimate zombie, armed with the brain of the great sorcerer Mahogany, the body of Hercules...and a horse wiener (and yes, that is exactly how they refer to it), which is the only part Laharl is at all worried about. And all of those parts can be stolen to have your own units use them.
Also of note are the Prinnies, penguin-like demons who explode when thrown, say "dood" a lot, and are constantly the victims of assorted kinds of physical comedy. Like when a bunch of them challenge you to a game of baseball...and your party absolutely refuses to play by their rules, leading to a ridiculously easy fight.
Yet at the same time, Disgaea also knows when to stop joking around. The most famous moment of this is the game's eighth chapter, which I will not spoil but it manages to have more emotional impact than a lot of completely serious stories. And it never lets the jokes undermine the story it's trying to tell, which becomes particularly clear in the second half of the game when all the plot threads start really paying off. There's still jokes, but it's not about to let them overshadow the serious points.
It also benefits heavily from a strong main cast. Laharl, Etna, and Flonne play off each other extremely well, with Etna's cynical and sarcastic attitude and Flonne's extreme belief in the power of love being an effective contrast. Laharl's attitude, which initially looks like a joke as he constantly insists he's the most evil demon around even as he's obviously struggling to hide his kinder side, is particularly important as well—in the end, this is a story about his growth as a person, and his gradual shift away from the heartless persona he initially tries to project is handled more or less perfectly.
And really, Laharl's development is one of the most important elements of the game's theme of how people should be judged by who they are rather than by existing prejudices—a frequently explored idea, yes, but it's a classic for a reason. He contrasts well with Vulcanus, the main angelic antagonist, who despite preaching righteous ideals is blatantly in it only for himself—in essence, being more traditionally demonic than any of the actual demon cast members.
So Disgaea's plot is much more gripping and effective than you probably expected if you only know it as "that game with demons and lots of level grinding." What about the gameplay?
Well, it's very unique, particularly compared to the other kinds of SRPGs that existed at the time. For starters, you deploy units from a base panel instead of choosing them before you start fighting. You can also back out of any movement or actions that haven't yet had an effect on the battlefield, provided the tile your character started the turn on is still open. Characters can also support each other when they attack, which only uses up the attacking unit's turn—so you can then back out of the movement for your other characters and have them do something else, for example.
But wait, there's more! Because you can also lift and throw any unit, ally or enemy. Throw allies to let them move farther! Throw enemies to keep them from attacking your squishies! Throw enemies into each other to combine them and mix their levels together, letting you get more experience! Throw characters who are carrying other characters to get even more range! Lift an enemy guarding a chokepoint, let your guys through, and undo the action to leave the enemy probably stuck between your guys! There's a lot of possibilities with throwing, and it's one of the more fun mechanics out there.
There's also Geo Panels, which are one of the most unique takes on the terrain effects you see in every SRPG that I've run into. You see, instead of certain tile types having fixed effects, tiles might contain a Geo Panel of a particular colour, whose effects are based on objects called Geo Symbols that contain them. If there's red Geo Panels that have an ATK +50% symbol on them, everyone standing on the red panels gets a 50% increase to their offensive stats. If there's green panels that have an EXP +50% symbol on them, anything you kill that's on one of those gives you 50% more experience. If the red panels also have a Damage 20% symbol on them, they also cause anything standing on them to lose 20% of its max HP at the start of every turn. And you can throw the symbols around to change which panels have which effects—if you move the Damage 20% to a green panel, then the green panels are the ones with that effect. But there's more to it, because Geo Symbols are also colour-coded, and if you destroy one on a panel that's a different colour from it, those panels change to match the colour of the symbol you just destroyed! This also produces a shockwave effect that damages everyone on the panels that changed. So in our example, if the ATK +50% symbol on the red panels is green, you can destroy it to turn all the red panels into green ones that have the effects of all the symbols on the green (and everything that was on a red panel takes damage). And if the shockwave from destroying one symbol hits another symbol, it destroys that symbol no matter what its HP is, and if that symbol is a different colour from the panels, it changes them too! And to finish things off, there are also clear Geo Symbols that just destroy the panels they're on if you destroy them, and destroying all the panels gets you a nice boost to your bonus meter. So let's go back to our example and say the ATK +50% is clear, the EXP +50% is red, and the Damage 20% is blue. Destroying the EXP +50% would turn all the green panels red and destroy the Damage 20%. All the red panels would then turn blue, and the ATK +50% would be destroyed. This would then destroy all the blue panels, which is probably all the panels on the field.
(Mind you, most of the time you're not clearing out Geo Panels in the story maps. Usually you have to, say, find a way to get rid of some Enemy Boost symbols that are making a group of regular enemies into seriously dangerous murder machines before they kill you.)
Also of note is the combo system, which makes attacks stronger if you repeatedly attack the same enemy. This only works if you queue up multiple attacks at once and then confirm them, and also gives you more bonus meter (and thus rewards) than attacking separately would. The downside, though, is that the more attacks you set up the harder it is to keep track of what tiles your attacks will hit, which increases your risk of killing one of your own units, which is bad because if you get even one ally kill? You can say goodbye to the good ending until your next loop.
You also have the Dark Assembly, which is where you go to do...a lot of things, really. You use it to upgrade the shops, recruit new generic characters, transmigrate your characters (letting them start over from level 1 with bonuses for what their stats were when you used it), unlock bonus areas, and so forth. A lot of this involves bribing senators to vote for things you want them to, which is a complex and arcane process whose primary variables aren't visible in the bribery interface and just might end up being irrelevant once you get strong enough to pass bills by force instead. They also demand that you reach the right rank to propose certain things, which involves doing promotion exams where you fight solo against specific enemies. The promotion exams, not to put too fine a point on it, suck ass. Not only does the system ignore how a lot of units really don't have the durability for solo combat, but because elemental resistances are random, it's not unheard of for mages to face enemies they literally can't damage. And it's game over if you die in a promotion exam, so good luck!
Then there's the Item World, which is exactly what it sounds like—a world inside every item. Using this has you go through a bunch of short randomly generated maps all in a row, then when you're done the item levels up and gets stronger. You can also run into specialists, which are specific enemies that provide bonus stats, and if you defeat them you can move them to another item or combine them with other specialist of the same type, letting you effectively build ultimate weapon. It's surprisingly fun, and I don't think I've ever seen anything like it in any previous SRPG.
And then there's the subject of what everyone knows about Disgaea: the level grinding. If you've heard of these games before, you probably know about how the level cap is 9,999 and you can eventually do millions of damage with each attack. Fortunately this is handled a lot more sensibly than that simple explanation makes it sound. During the main story you're not expected to go above level 100, and even that would be extremely high for it. There's also plenty of maps, both in the main game and the postgame, that exist primarily to give you a place to grind lots of levels extremely quickly. The jump from the final boss being L90 to the first postgame area's boss being L1,000 is a lot less intimidating when you can gain dozens of levels in a single attack even before you start stacking experience-buffing effects.
There's a few different versions of the game out there, and I played the North American PS2 version. There's also the PSP version that adds an alternate story and replaces Etna's English voice with a somewhat less fitting one, the DS version that is surprisingly intact for being a PS2 game ported to DS, the PC version that changes the interface but is mostly just a new coat of paint on the PSP version, and the Complete version, which has different1 graphics and lets healers get experience for healing like in later games in the series. So there's a decent amount of variety, but there's no really bad versions of the game or anything.
All told, Disgaea is a classic that I'd strongly recommend playing
1. I say "different" and not "better" because for the most part they just pasted the HD sprites from later Disgaea games into the original game without considering things like how a few monsters have a radically different look in the HD sprites or how some types just don't exist in that spriteset.
