Chances are that if you know about Disgaea you’re a fan of Strategy RPGs, and if that’s the case you’re likely to already be playing it. For those of you that haven’t heard of it, here’s the review:

In Disgaea you play as Laharl, prince of the netherworld, and heir to the throne. The game starts out with you waking up after a two year sleep and finding out that the Netherworld has gone to hell in that time. Your father, King Krichevskoy, has passed away, and everyone seems to have forgotten about you. Therefore the main objective of the game is to take back the throne, which is rightfully yours.

The story in Disgaea is told through several chapters, and is genuinely funny. The English voice acting is surprisingly good, which helps things a lot. Sadly the PAL release is missing the Japanese voice acting due to the game being on a CD (more on that later). As well as having good voice acting, the game has good music – it’s catchy and fits in well with the theme, and unlike most long games, it doesn’t get on your nerves after 10-20 hours…

   

Graphically the game is rather poor. It’s low resolution, sprite based, and looks like a PSOne game. Spell effects are nice, but nothing special. The conversation scenes have some nice high res artwork though. Not much more to say about the graphics – it’s not the reason you buy a game like this, so it’s not really a factor to worry about. The only real annoyance is that, although the levels are 3D, you can only choose from four camera angles rather than a free rotate option, which means at times you can’t really see what’s going on.

Naturally in a game like this what matters most is the gameplay, not the technical side of it, and this is where Disgaea excels. The battles (where you’ll be spending 90% of your time) are turn-based. Magic and attacks are chosen from menus, and what’s nice is that they are done in the order you issue them, which allows you to set up various combo attacks. Another cool thing is that you can perform a group attack if you have an ally next to you when you’re attacking, which shares the experience, and usually causes more damage. Another nice feature is throwing – you can pick up an ally or foe, and throw them around the level. This might not sound like much, but it really adds to the battles. You can create huge towers out of people and throw them one-by-one. This is useful, for example, to get your strongest character up to the strongest enemy in the level on the first turn and eliminate them before they can do any damage.

   

You can also capture enemies by throwing them onto your base panel, but you risk destroying it for that battle, and killing anyone inside by doing that. (Your base panel is used to deploy your characters) If you succeed you will have a new character to help you in battle. Speaking of characters, there are hundreds of different types in Disgaea. You start off with only a few available, but as you progress into the game and level up you will unlock more classes. Creating characters is done via the ‘Dark Assembly’, and uses up mana. (Which is gained from defeating enemies) Weak characters don’t take much to create, whereas stronger ones do. You can also create the same types of creatures you have defeated, but these cost a lot to make. (Although as you defeat more the cost lowers) More powerful character types will require approval from the Dark Assembly.

Basically the Dark Assembly is a group of demons that will vote on whether you get to make that character. However, it’s not limited just to making characters; there are all sorts of things you can get them to approve, such as more expensive (and therefore better) items. If things don’t look like they’re going to go well before the vote, you can choose to bribe them, or fight them to get them on your side.

   

Yet another addition to the battles are Geostones. These affect coloured squares on the map with good and bad effects. Some good ones increase the amount of experience you gain for killing an enemy on that square, or getting more money. Bad ones will generally make enemies much stronger if they are on that square. The good thing is that you can throw geostones to affect different parts of the map, or you can destroy them, which can change the colour of the squares they’re on, and damage everything currently on them.

And then there’s the levelling. This game is a power leveller’s dream. I’m not sure on a specific number, but I know that unlike most RPGs, which stop your character growth at level 99, you can go into the thousands. On top of that, you can transmigrate your characters. This basically puts them back to level one, but keeping a percentage of their stats. It’s not as bad as it sounds, as they will have high level items, meaning they won’t be too weak, and you will be able to level them back up quickly. This also means that (in theory) it would be possible to have a level 100 character stronger than a level 1000 character if they transmigrated enough.

As well as insane levels on your characters, there is the item world to deal with. Basically you can hop into any of your items and defeat enemies within them, levelling up your items, and making them much stronger as well. You can also choose to skip the story elements before some battles so you don’t have to watch them again if you died on a particularly tough boss fight. (Most are funny enough that you will want to watch them again anyway).

   

Although the main story of Disgaea isn’t too long, I’d guess somewhere in the 20-40 hour region, depending on how good you are at the game, there is a whole lot more to do after, and when you do complete it, you unlock “New Game+” which is a good excuse to go through it again with your characters. For those of you that are wondering, the PAL conversion is pretty good. No huge borders to be seen, and although it doesn’t have a 60Hz option, it appears to be running at full speed. As I mentioned earlier in the review, for some bizarre reason the game is on CD, and not DVD meaning that the Japanese voice acting has been removed from the disc. This appears to be all that is missing though. Some parts of the game don’t have voice acting, but it was like that on the American DVD release.

The game does seem to have a bug with the timer though – I didn’t even have my review copy three days, and I had already racked up over 48 hours gameplay… (Or maybe it’s just that good). If you’re a fan of the genre and don’t have this game: rush out and buy it now. This easily the most fun Strategy RPG around, and in my opinion, the best. If you haven’t played this type of game before (and it’s quite possible, not many of these games make it over here) then Disgaea is a great game to start out with, as the tutorials are good, and it’s not overly hard to begin with.