Disgaea: Hour of Darkness

"Don't get me wrong, I like this game. Nevertheless, it isn't very good."

I want you to do me a favor before reading my review. And this plays a big part in wether or not you'd like this game at all. Ok, imagine a little girl, sent to assasinate someone; she's an angel. Imagine this small, innocent-looking girl dashing throughout the dark, perilous halls of the Underworld, saying ''I want to be like a ninja one day! Nin nin! Nin nin!''. Now, imagine a stuffed animal penguin attacking an enemy, saying ''Doooood!!''. Thank you. If you have found anything so far to be in the least bit comical, then you should stop reading right now, and go out to get the game. Any further reading of this review, will most likely offend you, because I will be explaining, using facts, why this isn't the good game you might think it is.

Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, is the kind of game that, in order to get the best of it, you have to spend literaly hundreds of hours playing. While many people think this is a blessing, please keep in mind that these hundreds of hours will be spent doing the SAME thing over and over - an endless cycle. If you have nothing better to do then spend hundreds of hours doing the same thing over and over, on a video game, then, once again, go out and by it. While the game features an above average battle system, and pretty good graphics as well, those are about the only two things it has going for it.

.:Gameplay (Overall):.
~ 6/10

I'm going to do the best I can here to incorperate all the poorly done aspects of this game into this paragraph. First of all, you spend the whole game in a castle (wich is about 3 screens I think). In this castle, you can talk to the 12 or so demons who reside in it. The bigger half of these demons sit around and say one different thing to you every chapter. The four or so that remain, are shopkeepers, or guard the gates to the 'Item World', 'Dark Assembly', or to the outer Netherworld. I'm going to go over a few things in detail now, so hopefuly you can understand better.

The Item World: A semi decent concept, where you take your team and go into any of the game's item's unique ''Item Worlds''. In these ''Item Worlds'', you go through a good deal of floors. Each floor is generated COMPLETLY random, and is usualy INCREDIBLY irritating to navigate through. You advance throughout these floord, participating in normal battles. A very large amount of your time playing will most likely be spend here, so for those of you who are going to get the game, I hope to God you enjoy this kind of thing. Anyway, as you progress through the stages, the item in wich you are fighting in will slowly begin to attain higher stats. Again, a fantastic concept, but I for some reason can't get over how repeditive it is.

The Dark Assembly: Another good concept, done alightly better then the Item World. Here, you can choose to do any number of things. For starters, this is where you create new characters. You select one of the unlocked classes, and how strong you want him to be (based on how much 'mana' you have), and he gets created. You now proceed to train him to become stronger. The next thing, is transmigration. Oh..Haha..Transmigration. If theres one frusterating thing, it's taking time to build your character up incredibly high, and then think ''Oh, how wonderful, my fighter is at level 250. Oh..But if I REALLY wanted to make the most of him, I'd transmigrate him..Aw crap.'' Transmigration resets your selected unit at level 1, but this time around, he levels up a LITTLE bit faster, and his stats go up ever so slightly higher. This is the only way to upgrade your unit's class. If you want to advance to the next class, you will have to start at level one..Or make a new character. Again, expect to see a massive deal of transmigrating. Finaly, you can confront the Dark Assembly, and ask them to pass a number of laws, such as ''Better Items for Sale'', or ''Raise War Funds''. all you do is bribe the kind members of the Assembly, by giving them items. The more you give, the more they like you, and the more likely they are to vote to pass your suggested law.

In my opinion, everything I'v covered thus far has been fine. I, for the most part, enjoy the Dark Assembly, Item World, ect. However, I can think of many better ways to waste hundreds of hours of my time, other then doing these things repetidly.

.:Gameplay (Battles):.
9/10

To put it simply, the battle system in this game is absolutly spectacular. It's fast paced, takes a decent amount of strategy, and most important of all, it's fun as hell. This is the Disgaea's saving grace. Allow me to illustrate my point. If someone had a gun to my head, and said ''Play Disgaea for 100 solid hours'', and the battle system were even slightly less fun then it is, I would say ''Shoot me you bastard.'' The battle system is why, if I had cancer, was in the hospital, and had nothing better to do, I'd actualy spend time on this game. You can have up to ten units on the field at a time (field sizes range from very small, to very large). You place your units whereever you want them to go, and basicly take turns attacking each other with the enemy. After about an hour, at most, anyone can have the basics of the battle system down. However, there are so many other things involving the battles, such as throwing team members, or ''Geo Panels'', or a number of other features, it could take weeks to fully understand it, wich I think is fantastic. It reminds me of a quote pertaining to the game Othello, I believe: ''A minute to learn, a lifetime to master.''

While in your castle, you talk to this one lady, and she sends you to a menu of areas in the Netherworld that you can go to. Each chapter in the game gives you one new area, complete with new music, a new envorinment, and new challenges. Whats more, you can return to these areas, to train, better your skills, or try to get more bonus points, to gain items as a reward.

Again, I couldn't possibly compliment the battle system enough. I love it.

.:Graphics:.
8/10

Not much to say here. You either appreciate them or you don't. The graphics in this game are similar to that of Final Fantasy Tactics, just slightly better. The only truly good aspect of the graphics are the attack animations. The attacks are SO cool to look at, it's part of the reason this game didn't get a lower score. Wait, I need to mention one thing. There are TOO many palette swaps in this game. With graphics this low quality, one would think that they could at least make all the sprites different. Sadly, they didn't.

.:Music:.
8/10

I don't usualy pay attention to music in games. This game's music is about average, I'd say. One thing, however, that I love, is that there is a new battle song for every chapter. Each song fits the area perfectly. For example, the ice levels have music that uses alot of bells, and is very soothing, whereas the fire levels have more fast and hard music. Nicely done.

.:Storyline:.
3/10

Seeing as one can still have a wonderful game without a great storyline, I'm not really considering this section that big a factor when I make the score for the game overall. However, the storyline not only isn't good, it's BAD. To back up my statement, I would like to start by saying that this is the kind of game that makes you feel like an idiot when you play it. Your main character, Laharl, is a spoiled Demon Prince/King, who resembles a nine year old girl on her period (hey, it's the underworld), who just woke up on a bad day. Other characters include Etna, (who, ironicly enough, resembles a nine year old boy, who smokes too many cigerettes), Flonne (an 'angel trainee', sent to the underworld to..Yeah. She's incredibly annoying.), and a few other important characters. The storyline involves Laharl, the Demon Prince, who awakens one day to find his father has been killed. Laharl then..Wanders around aimlessly, and goes to different places of the Netherworld as if he were in a drunken stupor, and stumbles upon the Angel Trainee, Flonne. They then..Have..Adventures? Yeah. That's about it. One more thing. To you self respecting kids such as myself who live with their parents, expect to turn the game off or shut the TV off when your mom walks into the room, so as to not allow her to see you playing a game where your a bunch of anime kids trying to be funny. You might read what I just said and think ''Wow this guy's an idiot''. Well, I said ''To you SELF RESPECTING kids''. Yeah.

The battles in this game don't usualy relate to the storyline at all. You walk into an area, and a bunch of enemys are there. And you fight them. That's it. Theres about 12 bosses, and about six of those bosses actualy matter to the storyline. Be warned, if you play this game, you WILL find yourself constantly thinking ''Oh my goodness..What the HELL does this have to do with the story, and WHY am I here?!''.

.:Difficulty:.
4/10

This game gets pretty hard alright. Unfortunatly, it's more of an annoying kind of hard, then a challenging hard. In other words, a bunch of sitting there trying to think how to reach that one enemy who is actualy unreachable, or trying to find out how to make it so every panel in the level doesn't deal 40% damage to you.

.:length:.
4/10

The game's long, that's for sure. But, like I said earlier, you can expect to find yourself playing for HUNDREDS of hours, doing the same thing over and over. If you truly have nothing better to do, then fantastic, the score should be 40/10. But if you can think of anything better to do, and you will, this game will be nothing more then a frusterating, tedious, bothersome journy to reach level 9999. Have fun.

.:Overall:.
Many people dare to compare this game to Final Fantasy Tactics. That's just plain rediculous. Disgaea has some good features, but nothing can change the fact that the game is tedious, and more importantly, nothing is relevent to anything else in the game. You're fighting a horde of random monsters, in a so-called 'storyline battle', wich actualy have NOTHING to do with the storyline. Where Tactics provided a deep, motivating story, and well put together characters, Disgaea gives you an irrelevant story, and meaningless, not to mention annoying, characters. While Tactics brought you battles where you care about defeating the enemy, Disgaea's fights are nothing more then empty space fillers for the non existant interactivity of the storyline. I don't WANT to compare this game to Tactics, but on the message boards I see people trying to do so, and it makes me sick. If I could pick two words to discribe this game, they would be ''stupid'' and ''pathetic''. If I had to use two words based on facts, they would be ''irrelevant'' and ''tedious''.

RENT OR BUY??

Buy it. If you want to spend hundreds of hours doing the same thing, for barely any reward, then go for it. If you just want to beat the game (ultimatly reaching about level 90, out of 9999), then by all means. If you buy it, hate it, and put it away, that's good too. Chances are in a few years or sooner, youl be able to sell this game for a good deal of money.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 10/07/03