Disgaea 3 – Protecting the Netherworld, one square at a time.

My second favourite game in the series, Disgaea 3 stands out amongst its crowd. In a genre filled with games that are in essence identical, the Disgaea series would still be great even if it’s only redeeming quality was how different it is. What belongs in a fantasy tactical RPG? Ghosts? Goblins? Machete wielding, undead peg-legged penguins that explode when you throw them? Disgaea 3 has two of them and I’ve got to say, after 100+ hours playing the game, I’ve yet to see a goblin.

Thankfully though, difference is not the games only card. It features solid game play with a variety of in-depth mechanics, and has a charm and sense of humour that will pleasantly catch you off guard if recent games have left you expecting a super serious plot. The story goes as follows, Mao, the son of the overlord who is also dean of the Netherworld academy, begins his first year at school. I know, the plot sounds like various manga series with the high school for demons angle, which put me off at first too, but I promise it gets better. While attending the academy, Mao wishes to become stronger than his father so that he may one day defeat him, in retribution for stepping on his video games after he’d put four million hours into them (slightly less than you’ll have to play Disgaea 3 before you’ve unlocked everything). Okay, I know that isn’t really what you’d call “better” but it gets more in depth as you progress and I don’t want to give anything away. Besides, the game’s charm lies outside of the main story, manifesting itself in the quirky dialog in between the soap opera moments where something big is revealed and everyone puts on their shocked face as if they’d just heard the requirements for some of the trophies. One thing I can give the story, is that they looked back at Disgaea 1 and like it, found much (and I mean much) better ways of connecting the plot to the plot battles, giving you a reason to fight. This may seem a little confusing but if you played Disgaea 2, you know what I mean. 90% of the Disgaea 2 cutscenes played out as plot --> light-hearted joke --> plot --> sexual reference from the frog --> plot --> rustling in the bushes OMFG MONSTERS!!! I guess we better fight them. Think almost the complete opposite of that and you have the fluidity of Disgaea 3.

After hearing that the game has enough witty banter to excuse the overall premise then you’d probably think that its some kind of cinematic masterpiece in which to convey it all, in which case you’d probably be horribly disappointed. The game’s story is driven by fairly lack-lustre cutscenes is which a bunch of still character images are pasted to a background pertaining to the current location, and change when the characters are now screaming and therefore shouldn’t be smiling anymore. There are some instances of sprite animation, but it’s meagre, it’s mostly just the bad guy walks over to your party and the still images commence. This is apparently the standard for TRPGs because now that I think about it, I don’t think I’ve ever played one that didn’t adopt this style, except for Final Fantasy Tactics on the PSX. Being from two consoles ago, it’s slightly embarrassing that everything lately is being shadowed by it. They are saved however by some truly masterful voiceovers which are really what bring the characters to life. While not as likeable as the original but much more so than that of the second, the characters have deep personalities which develop nicely as the story progresses. You get very attached to the main cast, and more than once I found myself trying to fly through the main plot battles just to see what happens next.

TRPGs are like FPSs in terms of consistency, if you’ve played one shooter, you can imagine it rendered in another colour and voila, a different game without having to shell out another 60 bucks. TRPGs are very much the same: you have a grid, a bunch of tiny players who vary in usefulness (perplexingly enough, based on how good their shoes are), and a group of monsters who have done their best to spread out so you don’t area kill them all at once. You move your characters (or character as I have found on many occasions to be more useful) from your base panel over to said baddies and start kickin’ ass one monster at a time using either swords, spears, axes, guns, bows, fists, staves, or monster weapons if you have monsters in your party. You can also use magic, which admittedly isn’t nearly as effective as Disgaea 2 and will have you running back to your warrior who can take more than a stern look’s worth of damage. Before long you get some very uplifting victory music and a variety of fairly un-useable items, along with some money. Simplistic concept, and yet often poorly executed. What makes Disgaea 3 so good is that it remedies the things that I have consistently found flawed in other titles.

Most importantly in my mind, is the speed. Oh my, there is a god, or at least a Santa Claus, because some higher power has granted my wish. NIS seemed to finally realise that these games tend to require you to grind levels ad nauseum so they decided to crank up the speed a bit. The battles flow quite quickly, but if you’re still too impatient or you are attempting to level anywhere past 100, then you can open up the options and change the speed to a level where the characters blur across the screen. Very few things invoke constant frustration for me that can be said about any game, but slow movement speed poisons the experience quicker than anything does. This being said, you can’t imagine the rejoicing as, while trying to adjust the picture so I could actually make out the numbers in my stats, I discovered that you can not only set the speed to “Blitz”, you can also forego all of the animations that come with special moves. Don’t get me wrong, the animations are pretty, colourful, and often pretty badass/hilarious but when you use specials much more often than you would use a regular attack, those animations can take up well over half the battle, and that includes time spent thinking of what to do. Needless to say, after seeing the same move done about a hundred times, it was time to switch them off. Put all of these things together and you can eventually make the aforementioned level grinding fights shorter than the “Battle Start” and “Battle End” messages that glide onto the screen like something out of a bad Powerpoint presentation. Seriously, the main stage you’ll use to level takes on average about six seconds to complete if you have the super awesome, surprisingly easy to obtain, game breaking special, “Big Bang”. It’s a fist technique, but worth the slight power downgrade from the sword you will most undoubted have equipped to anyone who can wield one.

Another thing that makes the game easily accessible, is the growth system that allows you to create a super hero from scratch in less than an hour if you already have a damage dealing behemoth and are just looking for some support. You are able to purchase skills and upgrade them buy spending mana, a kind of currency you get for defeating monsters, and can be transferred to other players by way of clubs (more on that later). Experience is also transferable in this way, although not in the same quantity. You can easily get a character to around level 300 without using them at all, but after that becomes impractical, as the required experience skyrockets as you progress. Characters can also be reincarnated, meaning that they can reset back to level 1, but retain a certain amount of their stats, allowing them to get much stronger. It’s difficult to explain how that aspect all works, and is really something you need to see for yourself, but bottom line is that the more you reincarnate, and the higher the level you are when you do, the more effective it is. By doing this often enough, you can create some truly frightening numbers. Levels go up to 9999, and individual stats can hit millions, my personal best being a 2.6 million attack stat.

When you aren’t endlessly doing the same level trying to create the uber characters needed for some of the challenges the game offers, you’ll most likely be delving into the item world. The item world is a series of randomly generated levels that exist inside each item. By going through them, the item levels up and becomes stronger, a little bit each floor. The number of floors an item has depends on the items rarity. Normal items have 30 floors, Rare items have 60, and Legendary items go all the way to 100, bosses occurring every 10 for each. This process is extremely simple, and can turn a legendary version of the first weapon into something stronger than that carried by the final boss. The strength of enemies in the item world are based on what the item is, and increase with each floor cleared, so powering up better equips is harder than the starter stuff but much more worth it. If the fight becomes too much for you to handle, as you can only return to the HQ to heal every 10 levels, you can exit using an item called the “Mr.Gency Exit” (sound it out to get the joke).

Also back from previous Disgaea titles, is the act of passing bills, and now clubs. In this case, you pass them by way of class votes (I still think the Dark Council from Disgaea 1 was a better idea, but what’re you going to do with a classroom theme?) which require you to get a majority rule based on the level of the voters. Weaker voters will contribute less to the cause, so getting on the stronger voters’ good side would help things along. This can be done by sending them bribes of things they like, each monster type having something they tend to go for (I believe the reapers prefer orbs for example). If all else fails, you can always opt to beat the crap out of anyone who disagreed. If you kill everyone who voted “nay”, then the bill is automatically passed, however this is often hard at the beginning of the game as the voters who are against you are generally a very high level, making it impractical until later on.

The last mechanic I’d like to touch on is throwing. As much as throwing things doesn’t seem to revolutionary, it’s one of those things where if you get the hang of it you can master the game far before you previously would have. Throwing enemies can either get them into position to be trounced by your main attackers, or, by throwing them onto other enemies, can increase their level, giving you the choice of several medium enemies or one hard one. You can also throw your allies, getting them to where they need to be, or out of the way of the super death move that a baddie would love to unleash upon your weaker and injured characters. And of course, there’s the Prinnies, those loveable penguins that are Disgaea’s answer to Moogles. These guys will explode when you throw them, dealing half of their HP as area damage and taking out any other explosives/penguins with them. Never has blowing up animals been so much fun.

Those crazy enough to attempt the post game will eventually unlock the X-Dimension, a much more difficult version of every story map. By beating these levels, you not only get some nice items, but you earn the right to face the Land of Carnage, a sick place where all of the maps are the same, featuring all of the same enemies in all the same locations. The difference besides that it’s run by the awesome penguins I mentioned before? All the enemies are harder. Not harder like I hope your healer knows the good spells, harder like I hope you filled out your will before you stepped off the space ship (apparently this place is faaaaaaar away). The Land of Carnage is the only place that you can obtain the best items in the game, so if you’re in this for the long haul, reaching here is your mid-term goal, and after that….I have no idea. There’s a bunch of trophies, which I do intend to eventually get, but as far as I’m concerned, by this point I’ve seen what the game has to offer.

As much as I don’t want to end on a sour note, I must address one thing that I don’t like about the game, and that is the constant reliance on randomness. Most of the game’s perks can only be unlocked randomly and really takes a lot of skill out of the game. I’d have a lot more of the elusive bronze trophies the game dangles above my head if it was just a matter of overcoming an obstacle instead of being able to overcome it, but having to sit and hope it comes along. It’s strange to find myself exploring the inner workings of a pack of gum, picking off level 6 monsters and thinking, “If only the borderline impossible enemies would randomly show up.” It makes getting to the Land of Carnage an even more impossible feat, as playing the X-Dimension levels require you to collect Illegal Tickets, which can only be obtained by either killing randomly occurring pirates, or randomly by going in randomly occurring portals on random floors of random items. It feels like the game doesn’t want to you get to the hard stuff, as if the programmers only finished about 4/5 of it and decided to try and keep you from coming across the unfinished bits.

The verdict? Rent it. I love this game, I don’t know why, but I do. You on the other hand may hate it, and I don’t see there being a lot of middle ground. So give it a try first and if you like it and plan to see it through, then I definitely recommend a buy, because if you don’t then the rental fees will amount to more than the price tag quickly. I’ve spent 130ish hours on the game, and have potentially many more hours to go to obtain some of the trophies which require obscene accomplishments such as dealing 10 billion damage in either a single move or to one enemy, I'm not sure which. I still prefer the original though, the story is better, the quirky humour is there without trying to be as the newer games were just trying to keep up with it’s predecessor, and overall I just had a better time with it. So if you like Disgaea 3 and have a PS2 kickin’ around, I wholehearted suggest picking up Disgaea, which you can get at about any EB now for 20 bucks.

-AtomicPineapple, August 23, 2009