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.

The Ragey's 2015: The Rage Quitter Year End Wrap Up.

This years Ragey's will be a tad different because honestly this was a short year for games, and with the X+Y thing I didn't get as many written as I would have liked to. Still though, this year had its series of ups and downs and while all of them might not have gotten site reviews, I still played an awful lot of games. Hopefully I'll have a slew of games to review in January, but  until then, please enjoy.....

The 2015 Ragey's
Maybe I can get Clover Valley to sponsor me, At least they have a 100% happy guarantee

10: The "Professional Esports Becoming a Thing 15 Years Too Late" award for "Game I wish I got to play" goes to....

Silent Hills (PS4)

After a long grieving period, I have come to accept that probably the game that would reinvent the horror genre probably isn't going to ever happen.... But that doesn't mean I don't want it to...  I don't know what the hell Konami is thinking by trying to burn everything they built to ash, but if there is any sign that the series that I love is truly dead for good, this would be that sign (well, that and the new Silent Hill game was a pachinko machine). 

Rest in piece Silent Hills. You had the potential to be something truly special, and now it seems we will never know.

9: The "Konami 2015 Business Strategy" garbage award for "Biggest Disappointment" goes to.....

Dead Rising 3 (PC)

During the big releases of the two major consoles, it became apparent that exclusive titles wear going to be a big selling point, and as you all could tell my lot stood with sony. But Microsoft did have one game I really wanted to play, and that was Capcom's zombie filled ho-down Dead Rising. When I saw that a 3rd installment of the game was going to be released on PC, I excitedly jumped at my chance to download it. And with my shiny wired 360 controller I finally got to sit down to play it.

And then after that first hour, I put it down and never picked it back up again. Maybe I don't give a shit about the new character, or how washed out brown and boring the color scheme is, or maybe the series didn't do enough new to keep my interest. But if I shill for a game I have very excited about and then put it down almost immediately and not go back to it? That wins biggest disappointment. 

8. The "Holly Holm Embarrassingly Knocking Out Rhonda Rousey" award for "Biggest Surprise" goes to.....

Child of Light (3DS)

On the other end of the spectrum, Child of Light was a game I thought was good in the demo, but not enough to buy the game immediately. Two years I waited because I didn't think I wanted to pay 15$ for it. So when I get it for like 3 bucks on steam and realize that I should have paid the 15 for it, that is an incredibly positive sign.

Aside from bad prose in limerick form, this game had an incredibly fun combat system, and absolutely beautiful soundtrack, fun characters, stylish art design, and a reasonably short play time to make this an incredibly worthwhile experience. I didn't think that I would have liked it as much as I did, and the soundtrack of this game is part of my regular work playlist. This game wins my biggest surprise.



7. The "Virtual Reality Movement in Games" award for "Most Overhyped game" this year goes to.....

Metal Gear Solid 5

So ok, probably not going to have the most credible opinion on this one. But because this is the 3rd point in this list where I'm referencing the Konami debacle, I felt the game deserves mention. I liked Metal Gear Solid, Solid 2, and Solid 4. I never got around to 3, and at one point was looking forward to playing 5.

But with each article I read, each story about how Konami was being a dick to Kojima, each post about fans putting stickers with Kojima's name on copies of the game, each parody video about the situation, each restriction the Konami lawyers enforced, I became exhausted. After a while, my interest started to fade. Downloaded that prequel demo chapter thing, and bought the game used instead of new after the holiday. And both of them have just been sitting there.

It's probably the first time I ever have gotten so tired of hearing about a game I wanted to play, that I ended up not wanting to play it anymore. I have it now, but who knows when I'm going to get to it. Hype has never killed my interest before, so I felt that merits my most Overhyped award. Sorry MGSV, I'm sure you're great and I'll get to you sometime.



6. The "Smart-Watch Fad" award for "Flash in the Pan" game of the year.

Dragon Age: Inquisition

Always can appreciate when someone learns from their mistakes, and in the case of Dragon Age: Inquisition, they certainly learned theirs. Taking a step back and re-evaluating the cash grab they made with Dragon Age 2, they rebuilt and remolded DA: Inquisition from the ground up and produced a much more enjoyable experience because of it. Hearing people complain that they were boxed in a small number of maps, DA: Inquisition blows the up the world to an massive scale, with people literally playing the first section so long that it knocked the steam out of them to keep playing. That is a total 180 of philosophy.

While it didn't seem to really connect to the Dragon Age canon that was set before it (although it did bring back Morrigan *swoon*), it weaved a tale with some seriously difficult moral choices for me to make as it unfolded. With lots of different character building potential it gave me lots of ways to play the game, and this time produced a very interesting and fun set of characters which blow the last game out of the water.

I just wish the character creation wasn't ass. 

5. The "Full Price Early Access Alpha Build" award for "Worst Value" goes to....

Persona 4: Dancing All Night (Vita)

I hate putting a game I liked in a negative category, but I have to call a spade a spade here.  Persona 4: Dancing All Night is a fantastic game. It continues the Persona 4 canon which I love, let's me revisit some of my favorite characters, and despite having a goofy dancing theme to the game the story still somehow managed to be awesome, harrowing, and interesting. My love for Persona 4 is unshaken here, that much is obvious.

But when the game is only out for a month and has over 70 fucking dollars of DLC, that shit is completely unacceptable in my book. Even to something I love as much as Persona 4. It's just another case of a company withholding completed content to charge me a little more for it later.  Go to hell Atlus, I thought you would above this money grabbing bullshit. I've never felt so betrayed. I want to play all the extra content, but you won't get an extra cent from me for that shit. Fuck you.



4. The "McDonalds Dollar Mozzarella Sticks" award for "Best Value" goes to....

Bloodborne (PS4)

Is anyone really surprised that Bloodborne is my game of the ye... wait.. It's not? How is that possible?! Yes, for the first time since I've started doing this charade, the current "From Software" game is not my game of the year. Believe me, I wanted it to be.

Bloodborne shook up the regular "souls game" rigmarole by picking up the tempo of the fights and removing your ability to block. The game rewarded aggressive gameplay, and managed to continue to punish me for hesitation. The Gothic scene fit in quite nicely and had some excellent monster design. The only problem was the game was kind watered down with skills and equipment which only really allowed for like 2 or 3 build types.

But the recently released "Old Hunters" added a meaty chunk of locations, bosses, items, weapons and armor to an already lengthy experience. It provided more variables and different ways to build the character, and since I've rolled through it with 3 different characters at like 70 hours a piece, That wins best value.... Actually, there is one other that is a better value but we'll get to that in a little. 

3. The "Boom: Butterfly Effect" Honorable mention goes to....

Until Dawn (PS4)

I love that the games landscape is awash with new horror IP, but this one had me worried. The more I saw gameplay and trailers, I was very worried that this would just be another Heavy Rain or Beyond: Two Souls. On one hand, it was. But on the other, it totally wasn't.

Yes it followed the cinematic story style of play I've gotten bored with in the past. But in this one it forced you to make split second decisions often, and many of them had the potential to hurt or kill your characters. The cheesy horror movie story helped this, but rung to me as one of the first proper implementations of this gameplay style. This was fun, playing a sad Ellen Paige getting harassed at a party was not.

While I'd say you won't get much replay value more than 2 plays by yourself, I will say this is a great game to have some friends over and let them make the decisions. Knowing whats gonna happen and seeing what choices your friends make made this an incredibly social game for me. Ended up being the one of the most multiplayer games I've played in a while. Until Dawn was absolutely worth the purchase to me. 

2. The "EVO Grand Finals Controller Malfunction" award for "Worst Game of the Year" goes to.....

Resident Evil: Revelations 2 (PS4)

Capcom, I think it might be time to put this series to bed. It had a great run, but the magic just isn't there anymore. Even getting to finally play again as my favorite character in this series again, Claire, didn't motivate me enough to get through your episodic installment of this game.

Each installment of this story becomes more watered down and less interesting to me. There is no new mainstay baddie that feels like a credible threat to the growing cast of protagonists. Forcing me to control 2 characters who are pretty much useless didn't endear me to the system. Moira and whoever the fuck the little girl was could have been NPCs for as useful as they were. After 2 or 3 chapters I became disenchanted enough to not care how the story turned out, put it down, and never went back.

I'm glad I waited for for this to come down in price, because even the discounted amount wasn't even worth it to me. While we are saying our final goodbyes to Silent Hill, we should move a plot over and say ours to Resident Evil as well. Even the idea of a remake of Resident Evil 2 doesn't have me excited anymore.

1. The "Woshige Premature Celebration" Award for "Best game of the year" goes to...

Smite (PC/Xbox One)

I wanted to give this best value so Bloodborne could be my game of the year, but I have to call this like it is. For a guy who has been pretty lukewarm to the MOBA genre as a whole, no game has held my attention this year longer than Smite has. 

Some games I play like 3 times through, some games I have a 400+ hour save. Smite has somehow gotten me to play a strictly online multiplayer game, going against all convictions I have, nearly every night for at least two or three hours since I installed it. It's caused me to host my first all day lan party (of which only 2 other people attended but it was good enough for me). And despite not being good at the game, not knowing the difference between an ADC or a Mid Support pusher, and multiple nights of rage fueled profanity, I somehow keep coming back for more. 

Switching from overhead map view to 3rd person makes Smite feel much faster paced and more skillful, the gods from actual religious pantheons scratch my love of mythology nicely, and although it was free play I had no problem plunking down the 30 bucks for all of the characters to be unlocked. I might put down the other games after a while, but I see no signs of me putting down Smite any time soon. Rage Quitter Game of the Year, hands down. 

Can't believe I'm still writing on this thing considering how little traction it gets. Here's to the next year of it.

Dragon Quest Heroes (PS4): An homage of a different color.

I, like everyone else in the united states who owned an NES got their JRPG roots by playing a few franchises. Final Fantasy obviously needs no introduction and it paved the way for me, but there was another then competing title that went by Dragon Quest, or as we knew it in America Dragon Warrior. I really liked this series. I liked it a lot. Specifically Dragon Quest 4.

The problem is the original NES was a fickle mistress, and she would sometimes outright delete your games if she so chose. She chose often. Despite it all I have stuck with the series playing them off and on through its many iterations through the years. So when I heard they were doing a Dynasty Warriors style game featuring this universe I was intrigued. 

It had potential, but it also had some pitfalls. I love the idea of going back to visit some of these characters, but I'm not a huge fan of crossover games as their stories tend to suck. Also, I've never been a huge fan of the Dynasty Warriors series as a whole. Would I be getting a re-skinned copy of that game? Guess we'll find out. 

DRAGON QUEST HEROES:

The World Tree's Woe and the Blight Below (PS4)

The story in this iteration picks up in the Kingdom of Arba. Differing from most Dragon Quest worlds that the nature of this one is peaceful. Humans and monsters lived in harmony with each other and this has been the norm for a significant number of generations.

In Arba we meet our protagonists Aurora and Luceus, a pair of soldiers to the kingdom and clearly a set of longtime friends. Aurora is headstrong and impulsive young girl, Luceus is cautious and tactical and suffers from a horrible case of DBZ hair. They are out and about enjoying a festival with their friend Healix the healslime. As they engage in some cliche character banter the screen cuts to a dark robed figure doing what appears to be a similarly evil ritual. A wave of darkness spreads over the land and every monster it touches then goes berserk and starts attacking people.

Being knights in service to the king, our heroes rush to defend him with Healix in tow. Once they know he's safe they intend to find out why the monsters have gone violent and to see if there is any way to for them to be restored to their normal friendly selves while at the same time coming to the protection of the rest of the world around them.

As somewhat expected from a game that was developed by the same group who made Dynasty Warriors the story to start was pretty much non-existent and basically used was used to give a very brief justification for why it was time to wail on baddies. Pretty much from the word go they let you know that this is not a traditional and proper Dragon Quest title. This game is going to be more in the vein of Hyrule Warriors where you job is to kick ass and kick a lot of it. 

I expected this going into the game, which honestly is probably why I was more receptive to the game. Anyone who was expecting this to be like a proper Dragon Quest is more than likely going to be disappointed. What did surprise me however, is how much care the developers took to make this feel like a proper Dragon Quest game.  Almost every single little nuance to it made me think of the old NES Dragon Warrior titles. Black boxes with iconic white type, still needing to talk to the priest to save, hunting for small medals for top class items and so on. Everything is laid out in a way to homage the Dragon Quest games of old.

Although I will say, for reasons that I do not understand, a number of the monsters names were changed. This for whatever reason threw me completely off kilter and it actually took longer to adjust than I thought they would. I guess some of these changes happened in earlier iterations of the game and I'm just now getting them. Christo becoming Kiryl I can accept, but Liquid Metal Slime? Fuck you, it's a Metal Babble and that's all I will accept is as.

One thing this game can give you that the JRPG usually doesn't is a sense of scale
because now you get to see how big specific monsters are in relation to a human.

The music I feel deserves special recognition for both good and bad reasons. This was one of the many things carefully tailored to be new yet still feel classic. Although none of songs use chiptune, the short play of the notes some makes it feel like it does. a number of the most notable songs from the series make and appearance, and a lot of the 4 catalog specifically. Which is great because Dragon Quest IV was the best.

The problem is the thing that caused the biggest stink in the media, which is just another example of the game company that just doesn't get why people like streaming video game content. So Squenix said you can totally stream the game, you just cant stream the music. What the fuck? I get that there has to be some kind of licencing issue. But I mean what the hell. So instead of trying to figure out what the fuck I was supposed to do to make my game stream-able, I instead just opted not to. Swing and miss there Square.

Terry's abilities allow him to constantly barrage attacks while healing himself
as he does, which makes him a great character to switch to in a pinch.

So my greatest concern going into this game was: "Would this play exactly like Dynasty Warriors?" and by that I mean would I pick a single character, be dropped into in giant map full of baddies, and then trudge through them to get to the one specifically harder enemy at the end. The short answer is no, because it does try to maintain some of its JRPG roots within it so instead of one grand scale battle you fight on a series of maps smaller in scope and usually with objectives.

Although I use the term objectives loosely, since they usually fall under the blanket goals of: "Beat all the enemies", "Defend this place from all the enemies", "Find and Defeat this specific enemy", or "defeat the boss". I appreciate that they took some effort to try to make the questing feel different but it kinda fails on that front since generally the objective is pretty much the same. But hey, there is also sidequesting to do too at least right?

Well sort of. There are tons of quests you can take but almost all of them are just re-defend this position, beat all the enemies, or grind them till they drop a specific item. This last one is exceptionally annoying because sometimes there are not an abundance of a specific monster type around and trying to grind them is hard enough, but then if you need like 5 of a specific RARE drop then you are just up fucked river and can expect to find yourself grinding for hours. Some teammates help with this more than others, so play around with everyone to find who you like best.

Because when I think timeless JRPG franchises, I think Andrew Lloyd-Webber.

I feel they went with a pretty strong line-up of selections for the cast list that spans over the extent of the game. Many of them where characters I knew, most of which I liked, and the ones that I didn't know all that well were still good additions. My problem with it, is it was VERY easy to lock into who stays with the party. For example, Alena is the first non-original character to appear in the game after the new characters have been introduced. And from the moment she introduced, she instantly becomes a party staple, (or she should, if you aren't an idiot).

Alena was known for being a physical powerhouse in Dragon Quest IV and when she appears here that mantle is immediately resumed. She fast moving short range combos, and her multifist smashes for several seconds of continuous damage. Which is them amplified as she can break into clones that widen her range and deal even more hits. If you take the time to build your stats right and boost her strength and defense, and give her abilities that restore MP with critical hits, she basically can't be stopped. She is totally broken.

Build Alena right, and no monster can stand against her nonstop barrage of fists.

There were points in the game where I felt I was just using the Dragon Quest IV cast, but by the end of the game I found the most solid team to be your hero (because you have to), Alena & Terry (for relentless offense), and then either Maya or Bianca (for magic or ranged). It gives you some massively damaging characters, 3 of them have a big area of effect skill, and if you are grinding items, Bianca's "rain of pain"  just mows down enemies like nobody's business.

Speaking of the combat, It is an absolute necessity to TURN OFF EASY MODE. It pitches it as a way to simplify the game so you can play easily and then enjoy the story for what it is. The problem is it turns the game into repeatedly mashing one button, and I won't lie it made me almost stop playing the game because it got repetitive and boring. Turning the game off forced me to learn how to use specific attacks and when to time them. Suddenly the combat became more engaging and skillful, and therefore way more fun to do. Eventually I got to the point where I was railing huge combos and thing switching to a new character on the fly to keep it up and then finishing with a massive Coup De Grace when you max out your tension gauge. It feels bad ass to mow down a massive crowd that way.

A number of Dragon Quest's signature monsters make an appearance in the game.
Some of them just as tough as you remember.

I am going to say something remarkably stupid here: I love the art, but hate the character design. Again, everything in this game goes to the painstaking detail of and old Dragon Quest title and monsters are no exception. Many of the most iconic and notable make an appearance and it always made me happy to see which new one got introduced that I recognized, and the maps are brightly colored and vibrant, which I always appreciate in a game more than a dark washed out pallet.

But I just can't look at these characters and not think Dragon Ball Z. It's 100% the most noticeable with Lucius because he suffers from Goku/Crono hair from the start, but then when you use his tension gauge to hit your Coup De Grace, lo and behold his hair does the dumb spiked up Super Saiyan thing. Because I couldn't take it seriously, Lucius rode the bench the whole game. Lucius sucks.

Stupid. Fuck Lucius on his hair alone. 

I will say that there is a significant amount of fully rendered and voice acted cutscenes which somewhat caught me by surprise because I didn't remember Dynasty Warriors having all that many of them. It was here I noticed they did a very cool thing by giving each of the cast members different accents to sort of represent the differences between then. The main cast of this game are primarily European English, Alena and Kiryl come from land with a Tsar so naturally they a more Russian sounding accent, Maya is a darker skinned character who is dancer (of the seemingly belly variety) so she has a more Indian/Punjabi style accent to go with it, and I'm going to mess this up but I believe that Nera and more specifically Bianca have Irish accents.

I sort of brushed it off at first but as I played through, it really did find it added some originality to all the characters. If I had any complaints about it, it would be that Alena's voice is incredibly high pitched and doofy sounding, she sounds way better in the original Japanese vocals. And King Doric.... ugh, this guys voice. Ok I get that he's supposed to a boisterous and good spirited medieval king but this guy seriously hams it up for every single line he delivers, even when he's supposed to be emoting sadness or grief, he's still loud and boisterous. It's incredibly annoying and even more so when he has a significant amount of lines in the story.

Almost as if she knows she's not dressed for battle, Maya has a series of Area of Effect
dance spells that push enemies away. She was my magical powerhouse on the team.

And while this game has the cliche story arc of "Dark Lord summons Dark Monster, hero of light must fight them" I have to say that I was actually pleasantly surprised with how the story actually unfolded. Mash up games have a pretty common track record for having generally garbage story lines. There are only a few games where they mix characters and the story generally works well.

This is one where everything felt natural together. I think the reason for this is they don't really focus on WHY all these characters from other worlds are here. The characters explain things about the game they came from and reference story points that occur in them, but the overall narrative focuses on things happening in this game and characters respond as if it is their problem as well. It holds together surprisingly well and even manages to tug at the heartstrings at pivotal moments. I was pleasantly surprised with how it all unfolded.

Psaro was a bad ass villain ruining shit for the human race
long before Sephiroth was even grown in a a test tube.

Once you develop a rhythm for the controls, I wouldn't say this is a very difficult game. The majority of the levels don't much change in strategy, so it can be paced by running the maps as you normally would with some occasional side questing. The levels really only started to challenge me near the very end of the game when I would have some protection missions and a very stubborn set of enemies would hunt the target down. It was hard to keep them off of my ward.

There is a New Game+ but honestly by the time I finished the game I was feeling pretty fatigued with it. Perhaps there was extra post game to do but when I finally brought the story to a close I was ready to move onto something different. If there is any one pro-tip I can give you, its save your medals until you can get Alena's best weapon in the medal shop. It will run you about 70 medals but if you do sidequests and kill hordes, it shouldn't take you too long to do. It just makes her even more unstoppable.

Seriously, eat a dick Dragon Quest. This cutscene was so sad for literally no reason.
Poor little happy looking Healslimes should not allowed to be so sad.

There is also a crafting mechanic in the game that I used maybe twice. I didn't use most of them because it seems like the things I was able to craft were only situationally useful, not useful at all, or only had a marginal effect. It just seemed like the resources I was gathering were put to better use outfitting my characters. Which honestly I was probably wasting my time doing it, there are a handful of character specific quests you have to do to finish the game, but ultimately you can roll with the same party for most of it.

I ended up grinding the game for close to 70 something hours so I can certainly say I got my money's worth out of it. If you are fan of Dragon Quest's lore and stories then this is a fun little homage to their entire series. But if you are looking for a game that's a proper Dragon Quest this more than likely is not going to be it. However, It manages to shine well as merging of two different genres of game to put together a competent and enjoyable experience. I liked Dragon Quest: Heroes way more than I thought I would and I can give it a recommendation.

Seriously Alena, You have to ditch that awful hat. 

Persona 4: Dancing All Night (Vita): That's it. I will apparently buy anything this franchise puts out.

When they announced Persona 5, it came with a handful of other announcements that were coming out, a number of them dealing with Persona 4's  universe. One of them, was a very stupid idea I felt didn't need to exist. My friends hassled me about how great it would be though, and I swore to them that I was not going to buy a Vita for a single rhythm game.

Flash forward a few months, I did cave and get a Vita but not for this game. However, of the purchases I made with the system, one of them was Persona 4, which I had already bought twice as is and the one game for the Vita I bought that I didn't already own I haven't started yet. I am fucking weak. Let's get on with this.

PERSONA 4: DANCING ALL NIGHT(Vita)

The story of P4:DAN takes place after the events of I assume Persona 4: Golden after the Investigation Team solved the Inaba murders (but apparently not before that game's epilogue). Yu Narukami is now in a new school but is still with the old gang because the team's resident starlet and idol, Rise Kujikawa, is on her comeback trail to come back to showbiz. Nervous about her return, she convinced her friends to join her on stage as her backup dancers (because why the fuck not?), and the team has been practicing both in studio with her and back home in Inaba.

They will be participating in the "Love Meets Bonds" festival with friend and rival idol Kanami Mishita and her group Kanami's kitchen. However, its been a bumpy road as the festivals website supposedly shows a video of a dead idol dancing at midnight, and those who view it get taken away and never wake again. Sure enough, the other members of Kanami's Kitchen go missing, and the investigation team checks the site to find out. Naturally, the site indeed does something strange and they ensnared by ribbons and pulled into another world.

This world is referred to as the Midnight Stage, and it functions similar to the TV world in some regards but is different otherwise, most namely you can't resort to violence here. The ribbons in this world drain you of your personality and force you to be something you aren't, but the team figures out you can fight back through expression of yourself and your meaning, so since they have been practicing dance, they use this as their weapon to try to save the taken members of Kanami's Kitchen.

What in the blue goddamn fuck??? OK, I get that this is a franchise that stems from a base of JRPGs so obviously story is kind of an important role to its universe, and its a story I love but that was in a 60+ hour RPG. Even the fighting game that hooked me on this series had some incredibly wordy story to all of it, but it's a fighting game and even those sometimes have a bit of a story. But this is a rhythm game, and sans a few exceptions rhythm games almost never have a plot to them. So much like Persona 4 Arena if you venture into the story mode, expect a substantial amount of (well voice acted) text.

So the inherent problem with the story was this: I powered the game up, got through the initial couple of lines to get the premise and by the first playable portion my first thought to travel through my head is "Oh my god, this is fucking stupid." Now let me be clear here: I love this universe, and I love these characters, but it only took one line of "We can show them how we feel with the power of our Dancing!" to make me shudder in sheer douchechillery and almost turn the game off. It's nearly impossible to take this game seriously.

Ugh, it's so painfully uncomfortable.

But if there is one thing Atlus and the Persona 4 dev team knows how to do, it's weave a good story. As stupid as the idea that a professional idol would insist on group of amateurs without a dance background as her back up on her first show back in show business is, as soon as they transport to an alternate world (as they do in Persona) it didn't take me long to get wrapped back up in the story. Interestingly enough, once I can get past the idea that they are fighting by dancing, the narrative is actually still really good.

They introduce a lot of new characters to series, and a handful of old faces poke their head in as well. Smartly, aside from a handful of a small references, they keep the extensive back history relatively out of the plot for the most part. They make a few references to the TV World from the other games, but ultimately they stick to their own story, which means new players who picked up a rhythm game without no prior Persona experience won't be totally lost. A lot of the new characters are fun, and while the main cast deals with the other world, new protagonist Kanami fits the mystery together with Nanako and Dojima in the real world to keep things interesting both sides.

I will say that though, that this is probably the most "bondagey" Persona since I discovered the series in Persona 2. See, the story mode plays in the Japanese visual novel style of story where character stills talk to each other, much like you have seen in many in this series to come before it, but much like Persona 4 Arena they show you a still image to sort of set the scene.

Well, without getting to in depth as to why it's happening, the captured idols will find themselves bound in ribbons. Some of them are more suggestive than others, and one of the idols is like..... really young. Not that I don't appreciate an out of the blue bondage scene (because who doesn't amirite?), some of them felt really out of place.

The first time it happened, I quirked a brow. This time, it was less subtle and they only
get worse (better?) from there. Although the one of Sumomo is a little rough, she can't be "of age".

The story actually gets really dark as fuck too, this isn't outside the norm for this series but for a game that's focused on lighthearted dancing, it's a very sharp contrast. I mean the story mode starts off with a pretty brutal tragedy, and as Persona 4 likes to do they focus on the characters insecurities and self perception, which is something everyone has to deal with thus making it very relate-able. And that's probably what made the ending that much more satisfying when I finally pushed to the final songs.

And I admit it, the longer the story stretched the more completely enamored I got, pretty much completely forgetting it was a rhythm game until an actual playable section came up. While long winded, if you buy the game, you have to play the story mode. It's a fun followup to end of Persona 4 Golden and lets you catch up with the old gang (and totally affirm where my head canon is taking the story). Honestly they can do this every year and I'll probably love it.

Kanami is mentioned in the other games and the show. but this is the first time we
actually get to see her. I have to say, she wasn't what I was expecting, but still a welcome edition

Christ almighty, 900 words in and I haven't even talked about the game play yet. So looking at the trailers, I was really confused on how the game worked, but once it was in my hands it actually could be simpler. for lack of a better term it is a bit DDRish in nature. you have a series of notes that appear from the middle of the screen and move outwards, when playing you need to use the corresponding directional on that side of the system: Up Left and Down, or Triangle, Circle and Square.

Obviously, hitting notes is easy, so they also have hold notes where you tap at the start and hold it, and then release at the end. No big, like DDR's freeze notes I can handle this. They also have Pair notes where you have to hit two at a time, these are usually marked by a long pink line connecting the two notes. Most of time these aren't too bad but I sometimes get confused if another note is following the same line.

As you can tell, there are a significant number of costumes to unlock.
And yes, I unlocked all the maid costumes first. Eff you. 

The last mechanic is "scratching" where a circle comes outward. if you move an analog it continues your combo and boosts your gauge but they aren't mandatory to do, and thank god because moving the analog while trying to keep the beat was nearly an impossible task for me to do. I would constantly miss other notes trying to move to the analog. Thankfully, you can turn on a feature that allows the shoulder buttons to scratch which felt way more intuitive to me. It's not super comfortable to hold the Vita that way, but I will say that it's pretty much necessary.

While scratching doesn't count against your score if you miss them, it does provide a boost to your gauge at the top of the screen. 5 shadows sit at the top of the screen and if they aren't happy and dancing by the end of the song, you don't clear the stage. Honestly, I have never fully understood where the line is. I've they flashing and jumping around I know I'm doing well, but I've finished stages with all of them white and smiling, which I would consider good. But when the screen fades it says I didn't clear.

This is super frustrating because on easy and normal I am fine, blowing through levels with ease. When I bumped up to hard though is where the game really knuckles down with you, When you miss notes you get big knocks to your not all that clear gauge, and it's very difficult to repair the damage so if your game starts to go south you have to get on a hot streak to bring it back, or restart the level. On the "All Night" difficulty setting missing a small streak of notes can kill you in seconds.

Thankfully, the game has you covered on this front as well. As you play through the game you earn money that you can use in the shop. This can be used on costumes or accessories for your characters, but the real use is the item section where you can get items and books. These affect the game by giving you bigger boosts during parts of the song, let's the off timed "goods" not affect your combo, lets you continue the song if you fail and others. Each of these help, but as you would expect they remove a percentage of the points and money you earn at the end of the stage.

Sorry, Couldn't find any English game play videos.

This is where the books come in, because they add some effects that make it harder and boost your score and money. So I played to the point where I would get Random note orders, Macho speed, and some other effect I can't remember, and even with the helpers set I'm still getting like 275% increase to my earnings. This made clearing out store a breeze. Inside of one power outage in my house and less than a week since its release, I've pretty much all but cleared out the store because you can pull in nearly 100,000 in one go one the All Night setting.

I only have a small number of issues with the game. Some of them are minor, one is major. First off aside from the goofy premise for the story, one of the hardest adjustments when I started the game was that Laura Bailey didn't voice Rise Kujikawa in this one, so there was a bit of shock in adapting to the new voice. At this point the characters are sacred to me so when you change a voice, like every other douchebag probably did I got really upset about it..... for about 2 hours, and by that point I barely noticed the difference anymore. Pretty much the same thing happened when Matt Mercer started voicing Kanji over Troy Baker.

When Naoto "girls" it up, she's actually super cute. No wonder people love her.

The aforementioned scratching issue persistently bugs me. because there is no real fix to this solution. Holding my vita with my fingers on the shoulder buttons is an awkward hold, and it's not very comfortable. But the only other alternative is to use the analog sticks which make sense for the motion of "scratching" but I feel my performance in the game is significantly weaker by trying to shift to the analogs. I don't think I could do it from the hard mode and up.

Something that surprised me was a complete lack of Multiplayer mode. Even if there wasn't some kind of cooperative play, they could have easily put in some kind of vs mode where you could compare the scores. Hell, in the fever times of the songs two of the characters dance on screen at once, so they could have whipped up something to that effect to help in co-op or something. I don't know. It was just surprising to me that the game was totally devoid of multiplayer. Even something like Final Fantasy:Theaterrhythm's battle mode would have been appreciated here.

Don't know when it's happening in the timeline, but I'm calling it right here:
Chie and Yousuke will get married at some point in the Persona Universe.

And despite this series having a fantastic set of music to it, the music selection in the game could be better. The game itself features 29 tracks, but 9 of them are remixes of other songs and some of them have 2 different remixes. Yeah it's cool that Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka remixed a song for this game, but I've already played two different versions of this song already. The game had a very deep soundtrack so it surprised me that more of it wasn't used.

Not only that, but they used "Maze of Life" which was one of my favorite songs from Persona Q. If you were going to borrow songs from other games, why was there not more representation from that? "Light the Fire up in the Night" or "Laser Beam" would have been fantastic additions to this soundtrack and would have given us some different songs to play instead of remixes of ones I've already done. Or to go even further why not grab tracks from other Persona games? This probably won't be a long running spin off, so I would have loved to hear "Mass Destruction" or "Burn My Dread" in the track listing.

I found it odd that although Rise is the only professional idol in the group,
she seemed to take the stage the least out of the whole story mode...

But we know why they aren't in there, don't we? Of course we do. Because if you put the full version of the game out there, you can't land that sweet sweet DLC money now can you? Fuck you, Atlus. Looking on their very own website, By the end of October (remembering this came out on Sept 29th), there will be over SEVENTY FUCKING DOLLARS of DLC content ranging from songs, costumes, characters and accessories. This is completely unacceptable and shame on you for it. You used to be one of the good guys.

Let me ask you something: Say the game came full of all of the content that they were promising but they then slapped the full price of the game on the label, how well do you think this game would do? "Persona 4: Dancing All Night available now for only 120$!!" Maybe, MAYBE a handful of the die-hards would buy a copy but ultimately the sales would be crushed because nobody wants to pay 120 dollars for a game. So why do they feel it's OK to gut the content and charge me more later? It's absolutely insane, and I can't believe that after the Streetfighter X Tekken and Mass Effect debacles that this is still fucking happening, and people keep letting it. It's fucking insane to me.

It's barely been a week and there is already enough DLC for a 3rd of the price
of the full game. Fuck you. I hate this money grabbing bullshit.

When this game was first announced, I thought it was a stupid idea. Shifting a JRPG to a 1v1 fighter didn't feel like much of a stretch to me and I ended up loving it so much that it made me go back to the RPG. But a rhythm game? Why a rhythm game? Well, in retrospect I hold Shoji Meguro on the same tier of  amazing video game composers like Akira Yamaoka, Nobuo Uematsu, and Daiskue Ishiwatari. So once I realized that the soundtracks are really one of the strongest aspects of the series, making a game focused on them didn't seem all that far fetched to me.

And despite the fact that I felt it was a stupid premise for a story and found it unbelievably difficult to swallow the image of some of my all time favorite characters goofily dancing around, Persona 4: Dancing all Night delivered pretty much exactly what I expected it in a rhythm game experience for me. Is it a system seller? Probably not, but it certainly was entertaining and it feels like a game that I will be playing for a while until get a let a level of mastery on the top difficulties. If you are a fan of the Persona series or just rhythm games, this one absolutely satisfies.

I guess it is what it is, I'm sure I will do this dance again when they come out with Persona 4: Cooking Battle, Persona 4: Kart Racing, or Puzlsona 4.....  For the love of god, when will you people realize I NEED HELP? *sob*

I might be the only person in the world who is lukewarm to Nanako.