Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness

"One of the most masterful, social-life killing SRPGs has made a move to handhelds! Rejoice?"

Fun Fact: I am a grinding machine. The most repetitive of tasks, which would bore any other gamer to death, can be repeated happily by me, ad nauseam. And that describes this particular game very well, but I mean that only in the most loving of ways. Do you like putting more than 60 hours into a game just to see its basic ending? Do you repeat stages endlessly to farm experience and delicious loot? Would you look forward to spending 200 hours getting cozy with a game just for the pride of having ridiculously overpowered characters that completely break the game? If your answer to any one of these questions was ‘no', then this will try your patience, make you pull your hair out, and force you to relegate it to the back of your closet to be forgotten.

However, if you are like me and your answer to all three of those questions was a confident ‘yes sir!', than you may find enough entertainment in this little gem of a game to cause you to fear for your social life. This is very much an old-school SRPG in every way, but thankfully there are enough genre innovations to discourage me from comparing it to Final Fantasy Tactics every other sentence.

Graphics

Charming, in all their 16-bit glory. This game would look at home on the SNES, except for the spell and ability animations which are smooth and pretty, but not exactly awe-inspiring. Story sequences are told through hand-drawn sprites, which are invitingly colorful, if occasionally repetitive and unwieldy. There honestly isn't all that much for me to talk about here. Nothing to laud as earth-shattering, but nothing to complain about either.

Sound

The voice acting is hit and miss, with Etna being delightfully snarky, and Laharl overacting more and more as the game progresses This game sure has a lot of it though, which could be a perk, depending upon how you wish to look at it. A couple voice actors were inexplicably changed around for this PSP port, but the most noticeable alteration has affected the Prinnies (to the Disgaea newbie, these critters are explosive penguin minions with a dark secret, and if that's not enough to pique your interest, you're reading the wrong review). Their earnest, nasal interjections and protests have been replaced by the blandest of bland deadpan deliveries that will make you cry and flinch every time one opens its beak. It's a mystery why Nippon Ichi changed this, but it will make you long for Disgaea for the PS2, and will probably result in you turning off the sound- and for the most part, there's no reason not to.

Story

The story in this game continues to be my biggest beef with this particular entry. Other reviewers describe it as ‘charming' and ‘well-written' but I've never seen any major redeeming element in Disgaea's embarrassingly saccharine and puerile tale, as its cliche-ridden and boring, and definitely not a contributing factor to why I played this game to death. The fact that you can't skip through the story sequences that are at best, inoffensively unobtrusive, and at worst, obnoxiously dry, upon further playthroughs (which are necessary if you want to see all the endings and get all the secret goodies) are further nails pounded into the narrative's coffin. The occasional bright moment, such as Laharl's insistence upon referring to a particular snooty faux high-class demon as ‘Mid-Boss' (who is, sadly enough, a low point in this game's wildly inconsistent voice acting) isn't enough to save this sizeable portion of the disc from being almost completely unnecessary. Admittedly, later additions to the cast lend some more enjoyment and spark to the story, including a wonderfully voice acted scientist with a gigantic schnoz, and a fairly obvious spoof of Flash Gordon who has some nice writing, but a terribly hammy voice which will grate on your ears, your nerves, and your patience.

The added chapters for the PSP release really don't add much. They take away one of your early powerhouses, Laharl, and therefore could be considered a hard mode of sorts. More of a gimped main story mode than anything else, you'll most likely be diving right back into the main missions to do your primary leveling soon enough.

Play

Have you played an SRPG before? Than you will be comfortable with this game's control scheme. Final Fantasy Tactics devotees will have to get used to a decreased emphasis on facing, but there's nothing terribly out of place or innovative here. As a whole, many strategic techniques have been de-emphasized in this game, as it's much more about beating the stuffing out of enemies with pure power, which makes it one of the more action-packed turn based strategy RPGs that I've ever played.

Much of the game takes place on an over world map in your castle, where you'll purchase items, make small talk with NPCs, teleport yourself to different story missions and venture into the hugely addictive and innovative item world (more on that later). All of this functions well, with plenty of secrets to find and sprites to ogle. Inside your castle, you'll find item and weapon vendors, chatty manticores and zombies, and a few unconventional additions that will make you scratch your head in confusion, at first. The most immediately important is the hospital, which is, predictably, where you go to heal your characters. In a move to perhaps cushion the blow of losing your hard earned cash to nurse your ailing allies back to health, the more money you spend and lives you restore in the hospital, the more items you get in return. Oddly, many of the more powerful potions and stat-boosting items can only be received by dying a whole lot. Luckily for you, though this game isn't difficult per se, you will find yourself taking the occasional beating when you start out.

At a nearby station is where you create and manage your characters. More than any other game in the genre, Disgaea puts emphasis on the customization of non-story characters. Although the small and deceptively youthful Prince Laharl is a complete powerhouse on his own, custom characters are where you truly have the power to break the game. As you level up in classes like archer, knight, and angel, more powerful versions of that particular class unlock, which visually are nothing more than color swaps, but statistics-wise improve exponentially each time. And rather than having to level up an entire new character, you can ‘transmigrate' your current character you've been using in that class (done at the Dark Assembly station), which starts them back at level one, but gives them significant stat bonuses each time you do it. This helps you get that character back to the level it was demoted from with blinding speed. Your characters can be transmigrated as many times as you so desire, which gives the game a frighteningly titanic amount of replay value. Conceivably, you can train all the way up to the level cap (a ridiculous level 9999), transmigrate back down to level one, and grind all the way back up as many times as you so wish. As many of the secret end-game bosses are tremendously powerful, this is actually the only way to see all of the game's content. Like that wasn't enough power to whet your appetite, the ultimate class in the game, the Majin, is perhaps the most overpowered class in any game I've seen, ever. These overlords of the underworld can kill with a stare, and with enough training, can help you breeze through the game in no time at all. To actually unlock this class is a feat in and of itself, so prepare to turn off your phones, lock yourselves in your rooms, and only emerge once your hunger pains begin to distract you from the task at hand.

Right by the character creation and modification hub is the Dark Assembly station. Now, there's not nearly enough space to describe the Dark Assembly satisfactorily, but basically it's a system where you can bribe and finagle with senators to try and upgrade your characters, unlock secret levels and endgame content, strengthen your enemies (a must for hardcore leveling) and mess around with odd little features like ‘Prinny Day', where the only allies you can use in battle are Prinnies, with an extra bonus of increased chances to score mega-items. When all else fails (which, oddly, is more often than not, especially when unlocking the higher level endgame material), you can resort to taking out all the opposing senators by force. The task of killing twenty or thirty high level senators is practically insurmountable as a beginning player, but later in the game it becomes tedious in its ease, basically serving as filler time when you could be doing other things- like grinding the infamous Cave of Ordeals 3.

The last important station of note in Larharl's castle is the Item World hub. In short, the Item World is where you go to level up and upgrade your items by fighting through up to 100 levels of randomly generated monster-bashing goodness. That's obvious enough. The game adds some real meat in the form of ‘Specialists', who are specific monsters in the labyrinthine worlds who add special features to your weapon, like any character who wields the weapon gains more experience, or levels up their weapon stats faster. This adds a tremendous amount of depth to what would normally just be endless grinding through obtuse randomly generated dungeons- and occasionally you will encounter a level that will be virtually impossible to pass through, and will cause you to have to reload an earlier save (you can't leave the Item World at any time you'd like, which is frustrating). This is the only way to get the maximum amount of benefit out of items, and the only way to make your characters as godlike as they possibly can be.

All of these innovative features combine to make a game that isn't exactly rife with strategy, but one that is all about twiddling and experimentation. There's no real way to level a character wrong so the game becomes impossible, nor is their any true linear path to success. The story mode functions almost as an afterthought, because I can guarantee you that if you spend as much time with this game as the average Disgaea player does, the great portion of your playtime will not be devoted to the story missions. It will instead be devoted to tweaking and transmigrating your allies, running through the item worlds looking for new loot and upgrades, and all around experimenting with the free form game design. This is open-world in a much different way than the Grand Theft Auto or Elder Scrolls games, this is more akin to ‘open-game'. And that, to me, is a sign of superb developing and excellent design. Even though the game stumbles some in terms of story-telling and general presentation, it's truly a masterpiece, and well worth the days of your life you will invest in it.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 05/16/08

Game Release: Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness (US, 10/30/07)