Post
by Grayswandir » Thu Sep 25, 2008 3:48 am
Disgaea DS - 3 Hours In - First Impressions
I'd heard many things about Disgaea, some good, some bad, and seen a few of my friends spend countless hours playing this game. However, I'd never played it myself (Wasn't really into strategy-RPGs until I got my hands on a copy of "Final Fantasy: Tactics" in 2006). "Disgaea: Hour of Darkness" originally came out on the PS2 in 2003, it got a few awards, blah, blah, blah, basically a sleeper hit. They rereleased it on the PSP in 2007 as "Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness" and added new features, wide-screen, dual-languages, multiplayer, and a few new characters. The DS version is a port of the PSP version. So what we have here is a port of a port.
Having never played the PSP version and only messed with the PS2 original for a small amount of time, I can't really give you comparisons if that's what you're looking for. The DS version (according to a few sites, wiki, etc...) is a direct port of the PSP version, it has all the extra game modes, multiplayer, extra items (yes, even the "horse item"), and bug fixes, but its missing the japanese voice-overs, they cut some of the voice track because of space limitations, and the background graphics had to be changed, no wide-screen as well.
Anyway, three hours in:
The story is simple, Laharl, a demon-boy, has woken up from his nap two years late and found that his father, the king, is dead and everyone is fighting for the throne. Laharl decides that the best way to take his rightful place on the throne is by rolling heads and to take over everything.
...
The first thing I learned with Disgaea DS is that you need patience. Patience, the willingness to level-grind, and be able to take it slow. If you try to rush through the first few levels (even the tutorials), you'll get your head handed to you. I spent most of those three-hours leveling up and training new units so that I'd have enough people to use in battle (the system is a bit confusing, but that's for another time). Beyond that, the game mechanics are quite fun. In most strategy-RPGs you'd move your character, attack, then move onto the next unit. In Disgaea, you can move all your characters at once, then decide on their actions, you can even have them attack and then move. This leads to the next feature that seems to be a primary feature of combat: combos and team-attacks. If you surround an enemy from all 4 sides and have all 4-characters attack the same person, you do extra damage, and start up a combo-counter which gets you better bonuses at the end of the level. You can also have team attacks where up to 4 adjacent units will attack the same target all at the same time. So potentially, you could attack someone 12 times in a row (assuming they survive that long). Yes, Disgaea is proud of its 9999 level cap and 1,000,000,000+ damage moves.
The story is ridiculous (in a good way), the writing is great and witty, and I'm enjoying most of it so far. Right now I'm fighting (and losing, hence the excessive amount of level grinding I'm doing) the first "boss". He has some really long name, but Laharl has renamed him, "Mid-Boss". Yeah, I don't know either.
I've been told that this game can take over 100+ hours to beat...so dunno when/if I'm going to do a full review.
*runs out to buy a DS*