This will probably be the longest review I'll ever do. Anyway, lets listen to me ramble!
Plotline - For those of you that have never heard of this game, it's about this demon prince guy who suddenly gets awakened by a demon girl named Etna. Laharl (demon price guy) realizes soon after that his father, previous underworld Overlord, has passed away. Not really caring about his father's death, Laharl begins his quest to become the next underworld Overlord. (This is based off of what I remember... any parts that are wrong, I apologize)
For those of you that have played it, you should if you're into this turn based game system.
I bought this gaming because apparently it uses a similar Final Fantasy Tactics type system and combines it with an anime type style / story line to it. Add a max level of 9999, and you easily have me hooked there. I guess I expected too much of this game, because some parts just dissappoint me.
First off, everything about this game is awesome. It's unique, fun, and shaves off time really fast when you're playing it. Now the things I hated about this game are just some of the big differences between this and Final Fantasy Tactics, which I could rant on in another topic but we'll save that for another day.
GAMEPLAY
It's pretty much like Final Fantasy Tactics. You have a character class, you can move a character a certain number of spaces and attack on your turn, and you have equipment that you buy from shops. The major difference is.... you move everybody on your team (Max of 10) on your turn and attack whenever you feel like it. Now, there isn't any bad about this system.. it's just totally different from Final Fantasy Tactics. Instead of thinking about where the AI is going to move next, you try to kill everybody on your first move. I can't really say that this style is better than Tactics, but I prefer Tactic's CT charge over this.
Another thing majorly changed is the class system. When you first start off, you can only create characters from a limited choice selection, which is expected. The only thing I didn't expect, was the characters you created at level 1 sucked, which I'll get into later. In order to unlock new classes, you have to reach a certain level with the beginning classes and you can't class change without creating a new character with that class, or the Transmigrate option, which I'll also get into later.
Since we're on the topic of changing classes, I'll talk about something else in Disgaea. There's this thing called the "Dark Assembly". Basically, that's where you create characters, and have a "Voting" on stuffs. This voting can be used to vote on better equipment in stores, different shop item selection, stronger monsters, etc. Of course, you have to buy items and "bribe" the voters to get them in your favor. Now there's also this other part in the Dark Assembly, where you can "Transmigrate". Basically, depending on how much power your character has accumlated, you can reroll your character back to level 1. So you have this level 100 warrior, but he sucks because you created him in the beginning of the game. Want to make him better? Oh, lets Transmigrate him into level 1 so he can have better stats as he levels up! There went 10-20 hours of gameplay! (I'm sure people have cheap ways of leveling up, but leveling up at least 8 characters up to level 35 for the first time takes around 20-30 hours).
One nice thing about Disgaea, is that they have this thing called an item world. Basically, you take any, ANY kind of item you have.. whether it's a sword, healing type item, or armor, and you go into the "Item World" with it. There, you fight through 10 floors of non stop fighting. At the end of the 10 floors, you can choose to return back to the castle, and the item you went in there with levels up in stats, and other nifty stuffs. The bad part? 10 floors = 1-2 hours of game play. That's not really that bad, but at some points in the game they force you to do this. The really bad part is the random level generator, that places monsters in ridiculous spots.
There's also this thing called Geo Panels. In a nut shell, Geo Panels do things that you won't like. If a Geo Panel is on a colored square and you're standing on another colored square, it affects you. Lets say 5 monster thingies are standing on a colored square of +5x stat boost (enemy only). You'd want to destroy the Geo Panel of the +5x stat boosting thing right? Too bad it's all the way across the map! Of course, the smart thing would be lifting / throwing. What's lifting you ask? It takes a action (meaning you can't attack after you lift and throw) and basically you throw party members across the map with other party members in order to destroy (or lift / throw) the Geo Panels. This can get annoying after a while, because all the Item World levels have REALLY bad effects.
Just in case you didn't feel like reading all that, I'd like to point out some of the bad things I've found in this game:
-Bad way of changing character class
-Unique but different game-play system from FFT (FFT > Disgaea)
-Way too time consuming at times (Long games are good but this is ridiculous)
SOUND
The sound is pretty awesome, and pretty comparable to the FFT track. Each chapter has it's own musical track, and it fits the combat perfectly. I can't really comment on the music, other than that it's awesome.
A big plus from FFT, is japanese vocals! Of course being a huge anime fanatic person, this ups the game a lot. Laharl, Etna, Flonne, and all the other major (some side characters) have vocals. There's even a vocal song somewhere (I've only heard 1 so far). So yeah, can't get any better in this department.
PLOT
If you've ever seen Azumanga Daioh, a lot of the plot is like that. Cute, but not really serious. This isn't really a bad thing... but honestly, I'd rather have a plot that's actually more Final Fantasy like. Again, it's not bad... just not top notch. There's plenty of humors and stuffs in the game as well. The only one I can clearly remember well, is when Laharl was being cornered by succubus chicks, and he said something like "Gah, I can't stand sexy women unlike Etna and Flonne here, who are flat-chested!". The plot basically goes from Laharl trying to become overlord, to wild pointless adventures of "Lets steal treasure from this guys castle!", to other stuffs like that.
CONCLUSION
All and all, I think that this is a pretty good game that people should buy. The advantages just overlook the disadvantages, and it deserves recognition. I've yet to finish this yet since it's so time consuming (Mix this with watching anime and months fly by), but I'm sure that it'll still be as good as it is now if not better by the end.
Omoshiroi ne?
