The Witch and the Hundred Knight (PS4): A very Disgaea take on Zelda.

Since I no longer work at Gamestop (thank god), I don't have the luxury of getting to try things before I buy them anymore. I sometimes check redbox to see what they have on hand, but some of the things I spy on aren't available. As luck would have it, some of my my neighboring libraries have much better video game budget than the one I work at and have a pretty new and put to date selection of gamery to pick from.

This one I had seen for a while, but I never jumped on because Nippon Ichi software can be a real hit or miss for any game that isn't Disgaea. Sometimes I've gotten burned on them, sometimes I've found a gem that ended up being underrated. But I'm a sucker for anything kinda anime RPGish so since I had the ability to play this for weeks for free, I took a stab at....

THE WITCH AND THE HUNDRED KNIGHT:(PS4)

(Played in 2016)

In this adventure we are set in the world of Medea, your prototypical fantasy realm that is just on the verge of some technological advancement. In this realm exists a large, but incredibly toxic swampland that is surrounded by forested area. Within this swamp resides Metallia, and arrogant, cocky, and downright mean woman with her robotic servant Arlecchino. 

Metallia is a self proclaimed Swamp Witch and although she is not recognized in any official capacity by the realm's other witches, she is fiercely powerful and practically bursting with magical potential. She has been at war with the forest witch at her borders, but Metallia has one major weakness in that she physically cannot leave her swamp without becoming severely weakened. So to combat this, she summons a small familiar she believes to be the Legendary Hundred Knight (you) to swing the battle in her favor. Despite being smaller and weaker than she believed, she sets him out upon the world to find a series a pillars that will allow her to spread her swamp, and thus her ability extend her reach and power upon the world.

So I'm not gonna lie. Despite being a protagonist? Holy shit Metallia might be one of the villainous characters in a game. Now I know that Nippon Ichi does a pretty good job of weaving a tale despite managing to be pretty tongue and cheek with its story, but it was incredibly hard to get into the role of working for Metallia because she quite literally has zero emotional compass. She lashes out with vulgarity, violence, and unfiltered fury, (a girl after my own heart really.).

But you don't actually ever really play as Metallia. You control the Hundred Knight, You are given the option to give your character a name in the onset of the game, but Metallia promptly ignores it. Throughout the story you get the choice to make a couple of decisions to either agree, disagree, ignore or question something you've been told, but from what I understand there are only a few crucial decisions that can really effect the ending of the game. So in my playthrough of the game, I found myself questioning everything I was told because despite being on Metallia's side, I found her reasoning for things questionable.

The visual novel story elements are in place, as is standard for most NIS titles.
From what I know, we never get this question answered.

So I expected this game to be a JRPG or some kind of tactical RPG because that tends to be Nippon Ichi's entire wheelhouse, but surprisingly it ended up being a top down action adventure game. As cheekily described by article title, The gameplay of this game feels reminiscent of the classic of the traditional Legend of Zelda series or the original Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. Top down, hero center, slash baddies. Generally the objectives are a simple get to the other end of the level. You don't have to do it in one go but the end mission rewards tend to be better if you do. But as you travel you will continually bust open pillars that allow you to return to base and cash in on the XP you've earned to that point.

Now it wouldn't be very Nippon Ichi if they didn't take a relatively simple system and over-complicate it. So generally your weapons follow a kind of rock paper scissors system to them. They vary between slashing weapons, smashing weapons, and magic weapons. Typically these fall swords, hammers, and staves, but the thing to really make a note of while you play is what type of damage the weapons do. For example you might find axes instead of hammers which are still super slow and damaging, but do slashing damage instead of smashing. So if an enemy is completely immune to slashing damage, your shiny new axe amounts to jack shit.

You can equip up to three different weapon sets so you basically get a 5 combo attack based on your varied weapons so you can focus one type of damage, or mix and match if you like. But from my experience most of the baddies of an area usually all have similar damage resistances per area so I found it most effective to set each set to a specific damage type. In addition to this, most items are marked with a 1-5, so as long as you have your weapons placed in numerical order, you will get an increasing damage buff per swing. You are going to be flooded with gear often, so make sure you go through and makes sure you have the best stuff equipped at all times.

But because of the nature of the Hundred Knight's summon, you only get so much time away from Metallia, so every level is timed more or less by this Giga calorie system. How it works is you have a counter on the top of the screen counting down from 100. It decreases faster as you recharge your stamina, use specials, run, or take excessive damage. It constantly depletes to heal you so you have to pay attention to it because if it drops to zero you have significantly reduced stats. There are multiple ways to restore it such as using your bonuses received from smashing baddies to restore it at pillars along the map you uncover, eating food items, or eating baddies on the screen (yes, you can eat enemies).

There is a limited amount of space for the rewards you get, since Hundred Knight isn't the smartest thing in the world, he eats them to keep them safe till he gets back to Metallia. So the loot you collect is stored in his stomach. You only get so much space in your stomach and you lose it even faster if you eat enemies, so when your stomach gets full you have to use a Bowel Dump to get the garbage out of your stomach. (I am not making this up, god I wish I was. -_-)

NIS's knack for hilarious flavor text is prevalent in this game as well.

You also as you play along the game start to gather various familiar summons for you to use in the levels. These vary in use to helping you in battle, destroying obstacles to allow you to continue, triggering far away switches, or utterly decimating bosses. Most of these I found myself not using unless the level required me to use one to proceed. The main exception was the trapper which sometimes net some interesting items of upgrade or sale. It wasn't till the end where I got this massive Tower summon that I could drop two off that fired off homing magic shots. Since magic is the hardest attack attribute to deal damage with, these were game breaking.

There is also a job class system sort of. Hundred knight will unlock about 8 different attack styles or classes that will affect your base stats and also provide different effects. Honestly the one your start off with is your most basic and balanced so I found little reason to switch off of it at any point. You can also set two sub categories for additional boosts at reduced experience, so its always good to have multiple set. I tended to prefer the Ninja class because it basically let me continue to run at incredibly reduced stamina and Gcal depletion. Cap it off with another attack or defense for your 3rd and you have a pretty solid build for most of the game. If it stops working switch them up or go to an older level land grind some of the others.

Ninja and Wonder Knight were staples, The third can fluctuate as needed.

These might have been more effective than I gave credit for, but I rarely used them.

Following its Disgaea lineage, TW&THK also features its own Item world of sorts in some kind of alternate reality rouge-like tower. It features a story of the characters you've met so far but in some form of alternate timeline/reality version of them. It's the only place where you actually get to play as Metallia as some kind of last ditch summon for big damage, but given the item I sacrificed to get in there all of the baddies in there for like 50 floors were completely piss weak. The main reason to go in here is this is the location where you can get materials to upgrade your items and weapons at the shops outside the tower. I literally didn't figure out this out until near the end of the game, and it doesn't really do a whole lot to explain it to you. It would have really come in handy for some of the later stages.

There is also a karma mechanic in the game as well that primarily comes from trying to take over NPCs homes for bonus items. If the karma meter gets too high NPCs will get hostile and try to kill you. They never do much damage, but you can't harm them so you'll need to go back to base to reduce your karma. It's not really a difficult thing to manage so there is little real effect to it that I found.

At the level of difficulty the tower I was in, I never really needed to summon Lia.

That is more or less of the core mechanics of the game. Despite all the additional mechanics this game tends to throw at you, its play tends to be pretty straight forward for the most part and the mild confusion at new controls are worked through relatively quickly. There is one level where you can smash baddies in groups of 6, so grinding for levels never really ended up being a problem, and the game as a meaty play to time to it. For most of its primary functions it has solid mechanics.

Graphically, and this comes as somewhat of a surprise to me, TW&THK is rendered with 3d models which I've found Nippon Ichi to rarely do. They aren't really fantastically rendered models and this was PS3 game so I'm willing to give somewhat of a pass on it, but they still don't look too great. usually though the camera is so far away from the models that you really don't get a sense of the level of detail for them anyways.  Story segments are done in the traditional visual novel style of gameplay this producer has stuck to for most of their games.

Sad this is, this isn't even as close to as bad as this game can get.

Speaking of, MAN some of the story segments of this game can get fucking wordy. Because of the very tongue and cheek nature of the writing, some of it can be pretty hilarious but some of the exposition seems to drag on for what feels like forever. This is exceptionally bad at the onset of new chapters. I have had live streams where if I let the dialogue run until it was completely spoken no joke some of these segments can go up to 30 minutes.

Another ridiculous thing TW&THK does is for some stupid reason, the game rolls the credits after you complete each individual chapter of the game. Thankfully its skippable, but for the life of me I cannot understand whey the developers felt that I needed to see it between each chapter. Perhaps they felt that this game was going to bomb so they wanted to make sure the credits got seen at least once before the player eventually quit. Or perhaps they felt they did such a great job with that text roll they thought it was the most enjoyable experience of the game. It's completely stupid and I have no idea why they did it this way.

The cast of characters for the most part generally likable. Although admittedly it might take a little warming up to some of them, I don't think there was a character I liked from the moment they were introduced in the game but as I played through a chapter or two I needed up liking them a little more as I understood them. The only character who I really struggled to like through a good portion of the game was Metallia herself because she's such a rotten bitch. For an early spoiler, in the 2nd chapter f the game she does defeat the forest witch, but as she's weakened the forest witch exclaims not to kill her because she is actually Metallia's mother.

Metallia's response to this basically equivalates to a "So fucking what? Who cares?" and places a hex on her. Not just a normal hex though, she felt the best way to curse her mother was to turn her into a mouse, jack up her pheromone production to 11 and the summon 3 large horny rats so her mother can give her "lots of brothers and sisters." God fucking damn, Metallia, jeeze... To be fair, the game does have that moment where it boomerangs and I suddenly wanted Metallia to get her way and fucking kill everyone, and I felt it does an adequate job of explaining her selfish nature. I give Nippon Ichi this, they are always good at weaving a tale.

Remember kids, this is the story's "heroine". Not the villain... maybe.

The hands down biggest complaint I have with this game is that the camera and its controls suck an entire bushel of weewees. The camera spin is incredibly slow, and you can only raise and lower the angle of it so much, so it always feels like the camera is too close to the action and is never really positioned in a way that you can easily see what is coming. On top of that, the fucking environments are always in the fucking way. So if you are going to be exploring a set of forest or a town with really tight alleyways? You get to eat shit. Enjoy looking at the tops of trees or buildings as enemies you can't see wail on you. Its retarded. There should be no reason I can't pan the camera higher up to get a better lay of the land in this style of play.

One last niggling complaint that I have is this game is very unclear about the process of getting the proper endings. There are 3 possible ones. One of them is Meh and its made by a very simple decision near the end of the game, where you basically have deny a mission 3 times to which you get a pretty shitty monologue. I youtube'd that one. The next ending is the "true ending" which might have been one of the shittest unfulfilling things I've ever seen. I was legitimately pissed because while it is an ending epilogue, its a real "Ha ha, fuck you". To get the best experience, you have to get the "bad ending" which is done by finding and defeating 3 optional bosses in levels you have previously gone through. The game does little to indicate this so I ended up missing them completely. There is a surprisingly little amount of online guide for this game.

That being said, after I was done with initial checkout of this game, I looked around to see that it was dropped to 20 bucks new at some stores. This is because its out of print so I had a agent further out into the state get me a copy of the game because I prefer the physical. I enjoyed it that much that I felt I needed to own it so I can finish it at my leisure. I still haven't completed the bad ending yet but I do intend to. I could absolutely sit down with this game for another 20 hours or so, but it is possible to get all 3 endings if you saved in the right places on a single run. It's not a very difficult game.

Every so often, one of these prolific companies that pump out games will release an underrated nugget that is worth playing. I definitely feel that The Witch and the Hundred Knight falls under that category. It's certainly not a game without its flaws and I wouldn't blame anyone who put this game down because of the tone of the narrative or wonkiness of some of the mechanics. It doesn't do anything to break the mold but it was a enjoyable game to play and it did enough to make me feel I needed to own it. From what I've heard there is a sequel in the works so perhaps they can polish this up somewhat. This one is hard to find physically but is still available digitally so if you are looking for something that's a little different yet familiar with a story that doesn't take itself too seriously, I would say its worth a play.

Seriously, Metallia should have killed everyone at Walpurgis. 

Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance - A Contender for Overlord, Plip!

Edit: This review was done months ago, but I've been two flippin' lazy to screen shot images for it. Sorry for the delay.

It's already been well documented but if I was forced to list my favorite franchise of all time, you can bet your ass that the Disgaea franchise would be up there with the best of them. It's been a bit over a year since our last installment of this series (Disgaea D2), and while I had some lukewarm feelings to the necessity of it, I still enjoyed my experience with it.

It's been a number of years since the last numbered installment way back in Disgaea 4, but if you go back to that very vintage review of mine, you can see that I felt it was a return to form, being the that game I have liked the most since the original. This series has been consistent since its inception, but now we have our first shiny PS4 edition of the game. How will it hold up the legacy before it?

DISGAEA 5: ALLIANCE OF VENGEANCE(PS4)

Our tale opens up with us learning that there is a fierce demon emperor by the name of Void Dark, who is assembling a massive army of demons called "The Lost". Like an unstoppable wave, the Lost have been rolling through the Netherworlds either subjugating them to the Lost army or destroying them outright.

Here we find an Overlordess named Seraphina who is currently in the midst of battle with the Lost in the midst of an assassination plan to kill Void Dark. Before her forces start to get overwhelmed, a lone demon named Killia takes a seat in the middle of the battlefield and begins to eat a meal. When the Lost try to attack him, Killia dispatches them with incredible ease.

Serphina quickly becomes enamored with him and tries to use her Balor Gaze overload ability to subjugate him and make him her servant. When it doesn't work, she somehow becomes even more enthralled with him and begins to follow him as they reveal they both are out to defeat Void Dark. They don't know it yet, but this will be the seed that beings to form the Rebel Alliance of Overlords to take the fight to overthrow Void Dark.

It was interesting to see that Disgaea of all series decided to take on a theme of revenge and vengeance for its major plot points considering the very tongue and cheek nature of this franchise. I was concerned that they were going to go full serious with the story. The series always manages to have its serious moments but it manages to do so while still be amusing. Thankfully, as I played through it didn't really take long to show that despite the theme, the cheeky nature of the dialog wasn't going to be absent this time around. 

I kind of have split feelings on the cast this time around at the start of the game. This is usually a contested point in almost every version of Disgaea because there is always some really strong characters, and always some really weak ones. Disgaea 1 had Laharl but it also had Captain Gordon. Disgaea 2 had Rozalyn but it also had Tink, and so forth.

Disgaea 5 however seems to revolve around six major characters. Killia can be considered the hero, but he's kind of the cold stoic emotionless type. He's a deeply conflicted character, but his delivery always feels kind of monotone and flat. Seraphina kind of fills our Etna role, as she's the posh and pampered overlord of the wealthiest Netherworld, who abuses and underpays her prinnies. They are both great characters because they tend to compliment each others nature, I just wish Killia had more range.

Then you guys like Christo, Zeroken, and Red Magnus. Each of them falling into their own kind of anime trope. Christo is the tactician so its hard to know if he can be trusted, Zeroken reminds me of Axel in the way he jumps in like he's bad ass and ends up getting squashed. Then we have Red Magnus, who quite literally yells all of his lines, which is bad enough but when you realize almost all of his dialog is basically just citing the mid 90's version of the Rock from WWE, it becomes cringe worthy. None of them are grossly horrible I guess, but some are more likable than others.

But the best character, hands down, is Usalia. She's basically a bunny demon from the Netherworld TotoBunny, who is cursed to eat the food she hates the most: Curry. If she doesn't she basically turns into a berserker version of a were-bunny and pretty much can shred her opponents to bits. She's out for vengeance because she witnessed both her parents get murdered, but through it all she is a sweetheart to everyone and cute as a button. It was impossible for me to not love Usalia. Even though she is a monster type character which I never use, I had to because she was too great to be riding my bench.

She's a demon bunny who loves curry and blows up a planet with a giant prinny.
How can you NOT love Usalia?

This leads to my problem with the characters, because on top of having 6 major protagonists and 3 major villains, in addition to that every time you beat a Netherworld (read stage/chapter) their respective overlord joins you, basically adding another monster type to your party and taking up another spot. This annoyed me because I already have a list of created characters I made that are barely getting used because I have so many major protagonists to use. I know you can use up to 10 people in a level, but I pretty much never did.

Thankfully, the pocket netherworld (read: home base) as a number of things you can do with them here. A lot of the old mainstays are here like your weapons and items shops, the Item world, this games version of the assembly for the various things you can vote on. The Cheat shop makes a return so you can divvy up the earnings from a stages for level, money, mana, or skill grinding as well as raise the difficulty. But in addition to these things, there are a couple of new tricks to look at here.

The home base is packed with even more things to do than ever.

Most importantly, you can make "squads" these various squads give a number various effects that can take place in battle, in the netherworld, or through some of the other things you can. Boot camp is great for grinding because it takes a percentage of the experience of the leader, some shops like the Curry shop or the Alchemist only open up when a squad member is there. And then there are odd jobs people can do like the Research Team, where you can send off unused party members to other netherworld to get items, exp, prisoners, and other bonuses. There is like 30 squads and many of them are very useful so you'll want to level them up.

Some of these squads break the game in ways the old Disgaeas didn't. The Assembly squad is one of the best, because if you can max the level of it, everyone in that squad will always vote yes when you try to pass bills for new levels, bosses, abilities and so forth regardless of their stance on the issue. So you just pump like 30+ characters into the group and win bills you have a 1% shot to win by a landslide. In post game, you need the Elite squad, which I'll get into later.

Pro Tip. Putting your strongest character in the Capture squad is a great way catch people.
Using captives to level your squads is a great way to max out the important ones. (Or all of them)

In addition to things like the Item world, they've added a new "Character world" which basically lets you play a Mario Party style board game that if you can navigate to the finish by the end of the level, you can give yourself a permanent boost to some of your abilities which is great for increasing movement, or adding more room for passive abilities. Then you have the Innocent shop, where you can take your subdued innocents from the item world and make them breed and level, making getting that 900lv Statistician to level a grind a breeze.

I honestly could keep going about the various new shops and features you can play with in the pocket netherworld, but that could literally take up a whole review itself. So let's get back to the game. First thing I noted is that this game has an incredibly long campaign. I think before you get to the post game there is like 16 chapters of story each with at least 6 or so maps to fight through. It actually can be pretty daunting because some of these maps are pretty big, and geo panels can be frustrating. But as we all know, the solution to that is grinding for levels.

The character world is a great way to get your character extra stat boosts.
Which I basically spent on movement and nothing else.

And thankfully, this installment of Disgaea knows this more than others, because it seems to be the most grind friendly version of the game. I was late to learn this, but there is a glitch in the game that if you fight an enemy that is level 99, it gives the experience of one that is 300+. So that is a good place to get started until you can unlock the Martial Training levels. These unlock as you progress through the game, and if you can tackle a semi difficult level, you are rewarded a spot that is great for grinding at increased XP and Mana.

Going through these stages in rapid succession with the right combinations of items, innocents, attacks, buffs from the netherworld suddenly doesn't turn the game from a grind to level 9999, but how many times and how fast can you do it. If done properly, there is a martial training stage that is so difficult, if you can clear it it jumps you from level 1 to 9999. This is where the Elite Squad comes into play. When you are in that group, XP is reduced to 25%, but you get an massive increase to your stat growth, and this is where you start building your godlike characters.

Once you start one Hit killing these guys, Grinding is a breeze.

I guess I should talk about the game play at some point. Disgaea 5 stays true to the grid based tactical RPG roots that brought it to the dance, but not without innovation. Much of the mainstay Disgaea battle system goes unchanged from what you might remember. Bring up to 10 characters out and chose your moves and actions before you actually execute them, using your abilities or using team attacks if everyone is in proper proximity to do so.

Tower stacking is of course back and there are a whole new slew of tower moves you can use in battle, but I will be 100% honest because of the grind friendly nature of this one, I didn't use the tower attacks all that much this time around. It is still helpful for giving some of your lower level characters a quick jump, and in the late late late stages of grinding, its probably still a massive help.

In the last installment you were able to mount monsters, apparently this wasn't a very popular feature because they return to the Magi-change system where monsters can become weapons for a humanoid character to use. This of course, promoted my use of Usalia because she turns into fist weapons, which is exactly what Killia uses, so grinding with them increased the productivity twofold. But in addition to that monsters now finally have their own throw.

Even at high level, Enemies and Bosses can be tough to bring down.

Well sort of. They can't pick up and be in the center of a tower like others can, but they get something called Mon-toss, which allows them the basically punch a character to another square on the map. With some monsters boasting a 7 throw, this is a useful way to move some people. But also, if a enemy lands on monster, they are instantly tossed the throw distance in the direction they are facing. so with proper placement, you can move a character nearly across a whole stage before they actually have to take their move action. 

This is handy because it seems like some of the levels are way bigger than some of them need to be, and with some geo effects it forces you to take a long annoyingly linear path to complete them. Some of them forcing you to rely on throwing to even be able to complete a stage sometimes (or so it felt like to me). I thought we had gotten away from that style of play way back in the original Disgaea.

So what didn't I like about Disgaea 5 that I already haven't mentioned. The home base music. The home base music from Disgaea 5 is going to be the song that plays in the elevator that descends me to hell for eons.  I can barely understand what she is singing about. I can't tell if its in English, Engrish, Japanese, or some unholy combination of them. You will most likely be in your pocket netherworld often, so you will hear this song often. For the love of Christ use something a bit more upbeat like Makai Kingdom used or something.

It feels like there are less jobs than normal, but that's ok due the number of
characters the story barfs onto your party. You won't use half of them.

The rest of the music in this game is your pretty typical Disgaea fanfare. Kind of weird sounding future epic style music with some kinda tango-y undertones as I could be describe it. The only song in this game that blew me away is the one for the opening movie, which is also played for one of the final bosses and it makes the fight feel more bad ass. I am always a huge advocate of a proper score complimenting a video game to make its moments more impactful.

And I have bitched about this shit before, but Mugen Souls in all its failures had one really good idea, and that was to slightly animate the stills for emotions and reactions during dialog sequences. it tends to break up the monotony of the still images you see in visual novel style games and cutscenes that have been so prevalent in Disgaea. Almost everything about this game seems more polished up and new, but the visual novel style images make it feel old. It wouldn't have been a drastic change and I think it would have helped.

I hate to continue to beat a dead horse with an adopted red-headed rented step-mule, but this is another example of a DLC ruining what used to be a good thing. All of the old Disgaea's prided themselves on an abundance of post game content and unlockables. Lots of characters to play, bosses to fight, and mini stories to unlock. Now all that shit is withheld because they want to you pay for it with DLC separately or with a 30$ season pass.

And lo and behold, there was glitch for people who got the season pass that unlocked all the DLC at once instead of releasing it overtime like they planned to do. Again showing that the content was created, completed, and locked away on the disc instead of releasing it as part of the package. When will this shit stop? How much more do these companies need to gut their fucking customers out of their money? So now, I won't get to unlock all the old characters because I refuse to be any more for the content that should have been on the disc to begin with.

Characters from all over the NIS universe are available if you are willing to pay for them,
Which I'm not. Fuck you and fuck your DLC.

So by not doing that, the greatly reduces the amount of post game you can play. Now as far as I can tell, you can play 2 post game chapters to unlock bosses, fight a reoccurring minor character, fight Baal, and either play the carnage levels (increased difficulty), or new game plus. In the old versions of the game all the shit that would have been DLC would have all been included as stuff to do. Kiss my fucking ass, NIS.

This one is starting a get a bit long winded so I'll wrap it all up like this. Disgaea is a game series that has always been a model of consistency. It's a game that has been constantly making little tweaks and changes to to the formula to improve things, and have taken things out that didn't work as well. All the while managing to do so without changing how the overall feel of the game has been played. Even a bad Disgaea game is still pretty good game. What it usually hinges on is how good the story and characters are.

And if I can CRTL + B right here, I will say that Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance might possibly be my favorite one since the first, if not overall. When I really got rolling with the story, I found it next to impossible not to love these characters, even with all their flaws. The story managed to get more exciting as it progressed, and all the little annoyances I had with the series (with the exception of DLC) have been polished to a mirror shine or removed completely.

When I finished the campaign story and some of the additional chapters, all I really had left to do was grind my characters beat some extra stages before I could fight Baal. I had other new games to play that I wanted to get to. But I didn't. I continued to grind my way to start boosting my characters, started going through the process of making my godlike characters to stand against Baal. I had to force myself to put it down so I could continue my other games.

It's been a long time since I wanted to just sit and grind with a Disgaea game. Probably not since the first, and that says a lot about how much I enjoyed this one. I felt that Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten was a return to form for this series, and I feel that Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance has some serious potential to be the best in the series. Highly, HIGHLY recommended.

This game makes me want eat curry, plip.

Disgaea D2 (PS3): An Unnecessary, But Fulfilling Experience.

So a little over two years ago I did a review about Disgaea 4. I was very pleased with it and felt it was a return to form after a bit of a falter in the less than stellar Disgaea 3. But in its intro, I talked about what made the first Disgaea game so great, mainly the primary characters. They were everyone's favorite and regardless of who came after, fans would piss and moan about how they weren't as good as the originals.

The main cast have always poked around other Nippon Ichi titles as bonus characters or side chapters, but otherwise have not really been a part of the main fold. Now, almost ten years after the first Disgaea title Laharl, Etna, and Flonne finally return in a brand new adventure. The question is, can it possibly live up to ten years of expectation?

DISGAEA D2: A BRIGHTER DARKNESS(PS3)

Our story picks up not shortly after the events of the first Disgaea game. Following the canon of the good ending where Laharl opts not to kill Seraph Lamington, and Flonne gets reincarnated as a fallen angel (10 year old spoiler alert). While Laharl has claimed himself to be the undisputed overlord of the Netherworld, there is a great degree of civil unrest about his acquisition of the throne, and ploys and plots to remove him from power.

Specifically from a group of people calling themselves the Krichevskoy Group, an entourage of the the late kings former vassals, who are striving to find a more suitable leader to take the throne, as they feel Laharl isn't nearly mature enough to rule over the Netherworld properly.

The problems are also being compounded by an encroaching infestation of Yuie flowers, which are indigenous to Celestia and cannot grow in the Netherworld. Yet they continue to expand in vast numbers and their presence is starting to affect the Netherworld's atmopshere and thus it's demons in strange ways, and causing the civil unrest to exacerbate. Through it all, Laharl is out to solve these issues and prove that he is the undisputed overlord.

You'll find that NIS's ability for cheeky dialog is as sharp as ever.

So the whole presentation for Disgaea D2 doesn't feel like it's been changed very much from the previous incarnations. The sprites are clean and look very good, but they went back to the to the still frame conversations for the major cutscenes. It was kind of a disappointment because despite all the flaws in Mugen Souls, their conversation cutscene animations were the one good idea that game had, and I would have loved to see it implemented here.

The game follows a pretty similar formula to its predecessors: Chapter start, opening cutscene, shop at castle, gatekeeper to new world, 5 or so stages, end chapter, hilarious Etna preview to next chapter. While it's a tried and true formula, I would have liked to see the dynamics changed up a little bit. It's been the first time we've seen this cast in like 10 years, shoulda came in with a bang.

Tried and True, but improvements to this style of storytelling would have been nice.

There are a couple little subtle changes to the mechanics though. For example, the most brilliant idea was the inclusion of the cheat shop. Basically what this is allows you to make adjustments to the game. Most specifically the difficulty of the monsters. Now grinding has been made simple because you don't need to waste an hour trying to petition the monster council to keep raising the difficulty. Now you can boost it up, grind, bring it back down with easy.

Tower stacking is back in this game and thank god, because there isn't a great number of places to grind for levels. It was exceptionally helpful in bringing the rest of the team up to speed with Laharl, as he will naturally start to out level the rest of the team as you play through the story missions. This also helps with throwing your tower as you can throw at angles instead of in lines.

Another feature that I loved is the ability to promote my existing team without having to transmigrate them. So when I level up my Shogun girl to the point where the new level of her class unlocks, I don't have to transmigrate her to level one or make a whole new character. I can just promote her for 100 mana points. Transmigration is still a good alternative for boosting your characters overall stats, but I didn't devote as much time to this installment than I usually do so promotion was a great option.

Instead of Magi-changing your monster teammates into weapons, you can now mount the monster characters with your humanoids. I'm not overly sure how effective this was since my team generally consists of the humanoids. On few occasions I would mount a character onto one of my Nekomatas, but it basically felt like I was giving up an attack so I wouldn't do it all that often. But for those wondering, yes, you can ride prinnies now. And if you look at the video below, you can see with the right grinding it can be pretty powerful.

Sadly, Etna and Flonne don't have their original voice actresses from the original games but they've had a couple of different ones as the Disgaea franchise has moved along. Thankfully though, Laharl is the same voice we have been getting since the first one, and that is the important voice to have.

I suppose if I had one really big issue with the game, it's with the one thing that shouldn't have an issue: The story. It's been almost 10 years since we last go to see these characters in a starring role, so I have to say I feel a bit let down that the story for the most part really hasn't changed at all. It's still Laharl trying to be the overlord, it's still Etna dealing with her lost memories, it's still Flonne promoting the power of love, and now we have a new Angel Sicily also throwing her name in the hat for the overlord title. While the whole game is brand new, it feels like I've been here before.

Another thing that kinda bugs me is the aforementioned lack of a grinding spot. Usually in this series, the game always has one level that you can repeatedly play over and over that provides the best possible experience output for leveling up your characters. Either story quests or in the cave or ordeals. In D2 the only spot I really had any success with that is 3-4 (see my video), and there is really no great way to do it aside from tower stacking and just raising the difficulty. I've heard Cave of ordeals 6 is the best place to grind, but chances are you won't make it there until after you beat the game. Which is fine I guess but a bit of an aggravation.

Geo Panels are every bit as frustrating as you will remember them. 

And this is a another game where I'm starting to get annoyed with the shift to DLC content. Don't get me wrong, there is a good degree of unlockables as you play through the game. That's one of the best parts of this series is that all the characters from previous titles get little cameos in bonus stages of the games, and a good number of them make appearances here.

But even more of them appear as part of DLC content packs. While (I don't think) these are on disc, it now forces me to shill additional money if I want to unlock Priere from La Pucelle Tactics for my Disgaea D2 team. I hate this. Gone are the days where you are rewarded for putting in excessive effort into a title. Now you have to give even more of your hard earned money for these rewards. It sucks (although I'll probably cave there, because I love Priere.)

Please stop nickle and diming me, NIS. Save that shit for EA and Capcom.
Just charge me the full 60 for the game and put all the extras in it already.

I didn't think any of the new characters were really all that fantastic either. Sicily brings an interesting charm to the game but with Flonne already there, she is kind of redundant. The Archer is now a named character (who I don't even remember) who you get by completing the story. There is a Demon Hunter named Barbara who you fight a few times, but by the time you get he she's grossly under leveled. After the stellar lineup of characters in Disgaea 4 (except for Emizel of course, he was terrible) the team this time around is just a little disappointing. You still get the big 3 but that's all you really get.

So here is thing, Disgaea suffers from that awkward situation that Portal now suffers through. And that's the fact that the first installment just knocked it so far out of the park, every installment to come out after it just fails to meet the same standards that people have set for it, even when the game is good.

It's kinda an unspoken rule that the first Prinny my friends and I make will always be named Jerrod.

Disgaea 2 was a prime example of this. I thought the Adell and Rozalin team were a good double act. They were funny, they had charm, and their story was fun to go through and had a satisfying conclusion. But because they weren't Laharl, Etna, and Flonne people didn't really give them a fair shot. It's a shame because I felt Disagea 2 was really good, but because it wasn't a direct sequel people didn't care for it as much.

But now we have that direct sequel that people have been clamoring for, and it feels like it falls a little short. Don't get me wrong, Disgaea D2 was a lot of fun and I saw it through to the end, and when I have slower gaming moments I will certainly go back to the grind there. But you would think that with a 10 year break between the first game and this one, the story would have a bit more to offer than what we get here. It was a fun experience, it just didn't seem necessary.

The charm is there, and some of the gags are funny. It just felt like we were
 reminiscing the old jokes we knew instead of hearing new ones. 

And that is pretty much where I stand on my review with this game as a whole. From a completely objective and technical standpoint, Disgaea D2: A Brighter Darkness does exactly what it needs to. It's the right length, has lots of fun extras, brings back that nostalgic charm from the first game, gives you tons of replay value, and gives you another spell with characters from so long ago. But yet on the other hand, it feels like it doesn't really need to exist, and it was released simply because people demanded it.

Disgaea D2: A Brighter Darkness was a good time, and the story did get better as it went on. So I would say that if you are a fan of the series as whole, it was worth the 50 bucks. You'll get a good number of hours out of the game and probably have fun playing it, just don't expect it to capture that same magic the first game had, because that was something special.

Now if they'd just make a La Pucelle sequel, I can be truly content.